Arkansas currently has more than 17,000 of its just over 3 million people locked up in state prisons around the state, with overcrowding having reached such levels that Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders recently announced plans to build a 3,000-bed state prison in Franklin County to add to the Arkansas Department of Corrections’ capacity of approximately 16,000 inmates.
According to the Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research and advocacy organization, Arkansas’ current rate of incarceration per 100,000 population ranks at No. 3 in the nation.
As of 2022, according to PPI figures, Arkansas had 912 people per 100,000 population sitting behind bars in state and federal prisons, county jails, youth facilities and mental health facilities for a total of nearly 24,000 people serving time for convictions, waiting for prison bed space, sitting in pretrial detention or involuntarily remanded to youth lockups or mental facilities. By that measure, Arkansas ranks third in the nation behind only Louisiana (1,067 per 100,000) and Mississippi (1,020 per 100,000), and just ahead of Oklahoma (905 per 100,000).
In 1978, the total population of Arkansas was 2.25 million people, according to U.S. Census data and according to PPI, the state prison population was 2,654, which represents .12% of the state’s total population. By 2022, the total state population had grown to 3.046 million (averaging 18,090 persons annually), a growth rate of 35.4%, while the state prison population had grown to 17,625 inmates (averaging 340 persons annually), a growth rate of 564% and representative of .58% of the state’s total population, an almost five-fold increase in state prison inmates as a percentage of total population.
Another PPI measure says that in Arkansas, approximately 2.9% of the total state population — 91,000 people — are either locked up in state, federal or county facilities, or are under supervision serving terms of probation or parole.
Protect Arkansas Act
Passed in 2023, Act 659, the “Protect Arkansas Act,” includes a major restructuring of how the parole system operates by requiring people convicted after Jan. 1, 2024, of 18 specific offenses — including capital murder, first-degree murder, Class Y felony kidnapping, aggravated robbery, rape, trafficking of persons, several child sexual abuse crimes and other crimes — must serve 100% of their sentence before being eligible for release. People convicted of another 45 specific offenses designated as “restricted release” felonies — including second-degree murder, manslaughter, negligent homicide, and other crimes — must serve 85% of their sentence before being considered eligible for release.
Those convicted of all other felonies must serve either 25% or 50% of their sentences before gaining parole eligibility under the law and all inmates must work for and obtain “earned release credits” to be considered parole eligible. The Arkansas Sentencing Commission has estimated the new law could result in an annual increase of 1,465 state inmates by 2033.
DecARcerate
Founded in 2015, DecARcerate is a grassroots coalition that works to educate citizens and lawmakers on the harms it says mass incarceration causes inmates, their families, their communities and the state as a whole.
Zachary Crow, a Little Rock activist and director of DecARcerate, expressed fears the prison population in Arkansas is likely to explode due to legislation that puts parole out of reach for many offenders and subjects others to much longer stays in prison before reaching parole eligibility.
“The Protect Arkansas Act is really rooted in that same language of parole not working, the parole system being broken,” he said. “It feels like that same conversation has been happening among the legislature for a long time.”
A symbol of the harms of mass incarceration and oversentencing is embodied in a drifter who robbed a Fort Smith restaurant in 1981 of less than $300 while armed with a water gun, and spent the next 40 years in prison for the crime despite pleas for his release from lawmakers, attorneys, prison officials and others for his clemency petitions to be considered.
Rolf Kaestel
In 1981, Rolf Detlev Kaestel joined those numbers of state prison inmates after he was convicted of robbing a Fort Smith taco stand of $264 using a toy pistol. Convicted along with two other men and two women, Kaestel was sentenced to life in prison as a habitual offender due to a previous robbery conviction in New Mexico and two felony convictions in Alabama. In December 2021, after serving 40 years behind bars, 21 of those in Utah as part of a prisoner exchange program, Kaestel was released after he was granted clemency by then Gov. Asa Hutchinson. He was 70 years old.
Earlier this year, on Feb. 5, Kaestel died at the age of 72 from cirrhosis and liver cancer.
On Dec. 14, the third anniversary of his release from prison, DecARcerate held a memorial service for Kaestel at the state Capitol building to honor his life and legacy on what would have been his third anniversary of freedom.
In 1999, Kaestel was interviewed by filmmaker Kelly Duda for the documentary “Factor 8: The Arkansas Prison Blood Scandal,” which was released in 2005 and drew worldwide attention to a scandal in which the Corrections Department was implicated in a scheme regarding blood collections from inmates tainted with hepatitis B and HIV being sold throughout the U.S. and overseas. Not long after that interview, Kaestel was transferred from Arkansas to Utah, where he served the remainder of his sentence until his 2021 commutation.
Described as a model prisoner, Kaestel earned three associate degrees and numerous college credits, worked in the prison infirmary, wrote for the Long Line Writer prison newspaper, stayed busy as a paralegal and represented himself in numerous appeals, according to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas.
His case became a catalyst for prison reform conversations throughout the state.
Kelly Duda
Duda, who was born and raised in Arkansas and is now living in Los Angeles, told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that Kaestel’s sentence is indicative of how “tough on crime” initiatives have resulted in disproportionate sentences that have helped fuel mass incarceration across the country.
Duda said that jurors were not told during Kaestel’s four-day trial in 1981 that he would never be eligible for parole unless the governor intervened with a grant of clemency, and said despite a 1993 recommendation by the Arkansas Parole Board, now known as the Post-Prison Transfer Board, Kaestel’s pleas for clemency were either refused or never acted on by three former governors — Jim Guy Tucker, Mike Huckabee and Mike Beebe — before he was granted clemency by Hutchinson, who had himself denied Kaestel’s clemency petition in 2016.
On Dec. 14, 2021, Kaestel finally walked free from the prison in Utah and Duda, who met him at the front gate, drove him back to Arkansas where Kaestel worked as a paralegal for the James Law Firm until his death in February.
Duda said when Kaestel was released, he was put on parole until Dec. 20, 2034, when he would have been 84 years old.
“Why?” Duda asked. “He had already served his time, yet the system wanted more from him. … In Rolf’s case, parole and probation was just an extension of his incarceration, and I know he wasn’t the only one.”
Dennis Schluterman
Dennis Schluterman was 17 and working at Senor Bob’s Taco Hut when Kaestel and another man entered the restaurant and robbed it on Feb. 15, 1981. Reached by phone last week, Schluterman said he only learned of the life sentence more than a decade later when he received a letter from Kaestel apologizing for the robbery.
“I thought surely not,” he said. “Even the aggravated (robbery) charge, there was no aggravated involved. He came in there calm and collected, he just pulled his coat back and in a calm voice said, ‘You see that?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘You know what that means?’ I just grabbed a sack, put the money in the sack, gave it to them and they walked out. … If I would have known what kind of raw deal he was going to get — man, I would have given him some tacos to go and plenty of time to get the hell out of there.”
Vivian Flowers
Vivian Flowers, a five-term Democratic state representative from Pine Bluff who is slated to be sworn in Jan. 1 as Pine Bluff’s mayor, spoke at Kaestel’s memorial on Dec. 14. Flowers had joined other public officials in lobbying for his release.
Flowers said she also fears the Protect Arkansas Act will only lead to further prison overcrowding.
“Oversentencing creates a situation where we have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars, or really billions when you consider ongoing administrative costs, and all it does is cost us more money — but it doesn’t change crime,” she said. “There’s data out there that tells us what just and fair sentencing looks like. What we’re doing is not either.”
Kaleem Nazeem
Kaleem Nazeem, who works as a movement builder with DecARcerate, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life without parole in prison as a juvenile and spent 28 years in custody until his release in 2018 following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2012 Miller v. Alabama ruling, which allowed for the resentencing of individuals sentenced to life as juveniles.
“I think the way to be tough on crime is to present new information to individuals who truly need something to offset their thinking patterns,” he said. “On a personal level, when I first went in I was 17-years-old and I really didn’t have any information in the way of changing my mindset.”
Nazeem said most inmates wind up in prison due to some sort of dysfunction in their lives, which he said is oftentimes never addressed. Individualized assessments and treatment plans, he said, could be more effective at curbing recidivism than simply locking people away for longer and longer periods.
“There are solutions we should be looking at instead of just building more prisons,” Nazeem said. “If we look at the past 25 or 30 years, the prison system in Arkansas has been expanding — but there’s still been no solution to the overcrowding problem. … We need to explore different solutions.”
This story has been updated. It was originally published at 2:16 p.m. under the headline “Advocacy group says Protect Arkansas law mandating stiffer sentencing will exacerbate overcrowding.”
This post was originally published on this site be sure to check out more of their content.
