FAYETTEVILLE — The inmate population at the Northwest Arkansas Community Correction Center is down to about 15, according to Correction Board Chairman Benny Magness.

The facility will be returned to Washington County once those women are relocated or released, he said.

“We’re still having to find beds for those inmates,” Magness said. “Some of them may be close to their release date and could be released. The others will be transferred to another unit.

“It won’t be much longer,” Magness said.

The Community Correction Center is housed in the former Washington County Jail at 114 College Ave. The building was leased to the Corrections Department for $1 per year for use as a women’s unit after the County Detention Center on Clydesdale Drive opened in 2005.

Washington County Judge Patrick Deakins sent a letter to the Corrections Department in March giving notice the county would be terminating the lease. Deakins said the county needed to either renegotiate the lease for an amount that would cover the cost to the county of holding prisoners who have been sentenced to terms in the state prison system or take over the facility for county use.

The state reimburses counties at a rate of $40 per day for housing its inmates, and many counties’ daily costs are greater than that, according to reports compiled by the Association of Arkansas Counties and verified by the state Division of Legislative Audit. The daily cost to Washington County of housing state inmates was put at $94.68 in the most recent report that included the county, based on 2020 information.

Deakins said in an email to the state in April the lease payments should make up the difference between the state reimbursement of $40 per day and the county’s cost of $94.58. The cost to the state for 2023 would have been more than $3 million, according to a formula that calculates that cost multiplied by the number of state inmate bed days in the Detention Center.

Magness said the Corrections Department did not have the money to pay a higher lease payment in its budget and said any such funding would be a matter for the state Legislature.

The Arkansas Community Correction centers are licensed treatment facilities, which provide a wide range of education, training, counseling and treatment services to eligible inmates, according to information from the Corrections Department. The centers house inmates who were sentenced for nonviolent and nonsexual offenses.

Magness said the department has expanded its West Memphis unit to provide space for inmates transferred from Fayetteville. The Northwest Arkansas unit had a capacity of 114 inmates, and the West Memphis unit, housed in a former hospital building, is listed as having a capacity of 350 inmates.

Both Magness and Deakins said there were never any substantive talks about renegotiating the lease. Magness said he visited Deakins and other Washington County officials once, but the brief meeting was mainly a discussion of the unit’s history and place in the prison system. Deakins said he had one other brief meeting with state officials, but there was never an offer or counter offer from the state.

‘ABSOLUTELY IRREPLACEABLE’

The programs at the Northwest Arkansas Unit grew over the years with the help of several hundred community volunteers.

Lowell Grisham is a former rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Fayetteville who worked with the church to offer programs to women in the community center since shortly after it opened. Grisham called the closing of the facility a tragedy that was unnecessarily shutting down the most effective rehabilitation program in the state prison system.

“We’ve lost the healthiest correctional facility in the state of Arkansas,” Grisham said. “In my opinion, this was a stupid decision.”

“This facility did something unique in this state and did it exquisitely well,” Grisham said. “It provided healthy, restorative incarceration. Those women left so much better than when they came there. It is absolutely irreplaceable. So much of the community was involved with the center, and that didn’t happen anywhere else in the state.”

FACILITY’S FUTURE UNCERTAIN

Deakins said the county has inspected the building and is currently replacing the roof. He said other work that will be needed has been noted, but no plans have been developed since the future use of the old jail is yet to be determined.

Deakins said he doesn’t envision the county simply using the building for “the traditional lock ’em up all day” jail space, but as a facility that would provide more options for a range of programs. He said he wants to have people with expertise in corrections, with the legal system, in mental health and substance abuse treatment work with county officials in repurposing the facility.

“What we’re doing in traditional incarceration isn’t working,” Deakins said. “There are some people who need to be incarcerated, no question, and we’re going to need more space to house those people. But there are others who, while they may have committed crimes, just locking them up isn’t the best solution.”

“I don’t think the general public has the appetite to support building a facility that’s just an expansion of what we have now,” Deakins said.

Sheriff Jay Cantrell said his staff and other county officials have done some preliminary planning on what will be needed to make the transition, but much will depend on the use of the facility. He said the county also has to find some way to hire staff to operate the old jail in whatever configuration it may be reopened.

When the county moved out of the old jail, according to the final state inspection report done in 2004, the detention staff included 82 officers and supervisors to oversee 240 inmates. Cantrell said a smaller inmate population will still probably require 30 to 40 detention officers. The county Detention Center currently has 31 vacancies for detention officers, Cantrell said, and he is planning to ask for higher pay as part of an effort to attract new employees and retain them. Cantrell said a base pay of $50,000 to $60,000 per year is typical in areas of the county comparable to Northwest Arkansas.

“We need five people to cover one 24-hour shift,” Cantrell said. “There are eight shifts in a week. That means with vacation, training and other demands, we would probably need around 40 people to monitor the inmates.”

Cantrell said he has hired some of the former employees of the Community Correction Center and hopes to hire more.

ADVOCATING FOR OTHER USES

Sarah Moore with the Arkansas Justice Reform Coalition said the closing of the community center will have an “unfortunate” impact on the community by ending a valuable service. Moore also pointed out the effectiveness of the facility and its place in the community.

“It’s sort of ironic that the county judge is causing the unit with the lowest recidivism rate to close,” Moore said. “The community embraced and enveloped them. They got healing.”

Moore said she would advocate for the county to consider other uses for the building, saying other areas have repurposed old correctional facilities for programs to deal with issues like housing and food insecurity.

“We need to think about these opportunities that exist here in Northwest Arkansas and Washington County,” she said. “We don’t need to be stuck in a very myopic view.”

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