SPRINGDALE -- The solution to rising prison costs and overcrowded jails isn't to build more prisons, but to stop building them, a circuit judge told the Northwest Arkansas Senior Democrats on Tuesday.
The U.S. prison population has increased from about 350,000 in 1972 to 2.3 million now with no benefit to public well-being and at a huge, growing cost to the public, Pulaski County Circuit Judge Wendell Griffen of Little Rock told the group.
He added mass incarceration has become a civil rights issue, where anyone with an arrest record is legally discriminated against in housing and in looking for work. He blamed the inmate increase on arrests for nonviolent drug crimes.
Both John Threet, a circuit judge in Washington County, and newly sworn-in 4th Judicial District prosecutor Matt Durrett attended the speech at the Western Sizzlin' restaurant in Springdale. Both said after the talk addressing the problem isn't as simple as making fewer arrests for illegal drug possession.
"If you look at most of those arrests for nonviolent offenders, it's mostly more serious offenders who have violated the terms of their probation, not just for using drugs," Durrett said.
The state went the direction Griffen wants during former Gov. Mike Beebe's administration and is still coping with the backlash, Threet said. The state passed Act 570 of 2011, which put a greater emphasis on supervised probation and parole instead of incarceration. In May 2013, a parolee was charged with kidnapping, robbing and killing a Fayetteville teen in Little Rock within 32 hours after he was released from jail.
The political pressures on prosecutors and judges to incarcerate is powerful, Griffen told the group during his talk.
"No prosecutor runs for office without being afraid of being called soft on crime," he said.
Judges, who also run for office, face the same issue, he said. Support for alternatives such as treatment for drug addiction has to come from the public first, he said.
The costs of not coming up with alternatives to prison are unsustainable, Griffen said. The direct cost of relieving prison and jail overcrowding would be $100 million if the Arkansas Department of Correction' recommendation is adopted by the Legislature and new prison space is built, he said. Housing the current prison population is costing $23,000 per prisoner per year.
"You should tell your friends who say we can't afford to pay for health care for working people that everybody in prison is covered," Griffen said. "We're paying for health care for people who aren't productive."
If everyone in an Arkansas prison who was there for a nonviolent crime was out and working for minimum wage for 40 hours a week, they'd collectively earn $2.5 million a week, Griffen said.
Griffen's criticism of incarceration for drug offenses was bipartisan. The "War on Drugs" started during the administration of former President Richard Nixon, a Republican, but exploded during the administration of former President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, he said.
Threet said Griffen's approach would be much tougher to implement than it sounds.
"Who should you release, and who should you keep? If we knew that, we'd have something like that movie, 'Minority Report,' in which you knew who was going to commit a crime before they did it," he said.
Doug Thompson may be reached at [email protected] or @nwadoug.
NW News on 01/21/2015