904 per 100,000 nearly triple U.S. rate
BY JACOB QUINN SANDERS
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
La. vows to reverse the state’s reputation as world’s incarceration capital
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Arkansas had the second-highest rate of parolees to adult population in the country in 2007 nearly triple the national average, according to a federal government analysis released this week.
With 904 parolees for every 100,000 Arkansas adults, the state ranked behind only the District of Columbia in an annual report from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics that showed that 360 of every 100,000 Americans were on parole.
“Arkansas usually doesn’t rank at the top in much of anything, so in that sense this is a surprise,” Arkansas Department of Correction spokesman George Brewer said, adding that he had not yet seen the report. “Of course, this might be a good time to ask if being at the top is a good thing.” At the same time, the rate at which Arkansas parolees went back to prison - 10.5 for every 100,000 adults in the state - ranked 30th in the report, well below the national average of 15.5.
That ranking is perhaps misleading, the director of Arkansas’ Department of Community Correction, G. David Guntharp, said.
While other states include new crimes and technical parole violations together because both lead to prison, programs in Guntharp’s department treat parole violations regarding drugs and alcohol in particular as separate from new crimes, he said. Those programs for violators rarely lead to incarceration and instead focus on treatment, he said, an uncommon approach for a state.
Adam Gelb, Atlanta-based director of the Public Safety Performance Project at the Pew Center on the States, said to be careful in linking the rate of parolees to the rate at which they return to prison.
“Those numbers could very well exist independent of one another,” he said. “One doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the other.” Should further study establish a relationship, he said, the policy implications could make for interesting discussion. A finding that people released from prison - early or otherwise - are not particularly likely to commit new crimes could lead to changes in sentencing rules, he said, offering one example.
Early release from prison resonates in Arkansas, Guntharp said, citing the Emergency Powers Act, under which officials create prison space by freeing certain inmates as many as 90 days before they are eligible for release. But with an early release of three months or less and the small share of the inmate population involved, that likely has “little or no impact” on the comparatively high rate of parolees in Arkansas, Guntharp said.
“I’m not sure there’s any one reason the number we have is the number we have,” he said.
Brewer said it was difficult to compare one state to another without considering things such as the average length of the parole and prison capacity. The Bureau of Justice Statistics does not break out such information on a state-by-state basis. He wondered whether a change in Arkansas law several years ago mandating that the length of time an offender spent on parole match the full length of his sentence - rather than half - bumped Arkansas up in the rankings.
“Even at that point,” he said, “every state does something at least a little different than other states. It’s hard to compare it too closely.” If there is a correlation of the rate of parolees and the rate they return to prison, Guntharp said, the lower recidivism rate speaks well of the efforts the Department of Community Correction made in the last eight years.
Offenders who do not commit new crimes but instead violate the technical terms of their parole used to go back to prison, Guntharp said. Instead, more than 5,000 since March 2005 have gone into a program called “Omega,” 60-day intensive drug and alcohol treatment followed by counseling sessions coordinated with parole officers in the field, Guntharp said.
Of those who passed through Omega, 1,026 later returned to prison, a number that, at about 20 percent of those ever in the program, Guntharp said he considers a success.
“You’re never going to get the number down to zero,” Guntharp said. “Some people that you have, you’d have to almost beat their butt to get them to listen to you. Some people are just going to go out and commit another crime. But the majority are people we feel we can help.” The department has also targeted parolees successful in returning to civilian life who avoid trouble and warning signs and placed them on inactive supervision with annual evaluations. So combined with adding staff over time, Guntharp said, even though the number of parolees on active and inactive supervision combined grew in Arkansas from 5,986 in 1997 to 19,421 this July, the average active caseload for each parole officer shrank from 960 several years ago to 104 today.
“What we’ve been doing, the reason we’ve been successful, is we’ve gotten the offender more involved in his own rehabilitation and given incentives along the way that he can meet,” Guntharp said. “That ranking you’re talking about isn’t real pretty, but we feel we’ve been making the public safer with what we’re doing.”
Copyright 2008 Little Rock Newspapers, Inc.