Program to help reduce prison overcrowding brings HOPE

By ROB MORITZ 

Arkansas News Bureau 

LITTLE ROCK — A program targeting ex-convicts most likely to violate their parole or probation is being considered in Arkansas as another tool for officials to use in tackling chronic prison overcrowding. 

J.D. Gingrich, director of the state Administrative Office of the Courts, said last week that several circuit judges across the state have already expressed interest in participating in the  program fashioned after Hawaii’s Opportunity Probation and Enforcement (HOPE) program, which started in the Pacific island state in 2004. 

Gingrich also said there is an on-going attempt to bring Hawaii Circuit Judge Steven Alm, who developed the program, to Arkansas later this year to discuss the program and its success. 

“This has worked in Hawaii and this has been picked up by the U.S. Department of Justice,” Gingrich told a legislative panel, adding that the Justice Department has grant funds available to states interested in creating such courts and Arkansas has applied. 

Gingrich told the members of the House and Senate judiciary committees that the HOPE program is similar to Arkansas’ drugs courts, but different because punishment for violations is swift. 

Drug courts focus on intensive counseling and supervision for first-time nonviolent offenders. The defendants who successfully complete the program have criminal charges against them dropped. 

In the HOPE program, the defendants are considered high-risk for violating their parole or probation and if they fail to attend a court date or any court-ordered meeting, or fail a drug test, they are immediately sent to jail for a short period of time, he said. 

“There are immediate sanctions if you mess up, however you mess up,” he said. 

The program appears to have been successful, the PEW Center on States said in a 2010 brief. 

The brief said researchers at Pepperdine University in California found that HOPE probationers were 55 percent less likely to be arrested for a new crime, 72 percent less likely to use drugs, 61 percent less likely to skip appointments with their supervisory officer and 53 percent less likely to have their probation revoked. 

The program was included in a series of recommendations made by a working group of lawmakers, judges and law enforcement officials, along with the Pew Center, last year to Gov. Mike Beebe and the Legislature on ways to reduce Arkansas’ burgeoning prison population. 

A study by the Center’s Public Safety Performance project found that the state’s prison population has doubled in the past 20 years to more than 16,000 and that housing ever more inmates could cost the state $1.1 billion over the next decade. 

The study recommended reforms and new guidelines that could save the state about $875 million over the same period. 

Many of the reforms were approved by the Legislature and signed into law by the governor as Act 570 of 2011, including creation of as many as five pilot HOPE programs across the state. 

Funding of the pilot programs has yet to be finalized, but state Sen. Jim Luker, D-Wynne, who participated last year on the working group that developed the recommendations, said there are options. 

Luker said there is some money in the state Department of Community Corrections budget, and some of the funding will most likely come from a $10 hike in the monthly fee offenders on parole, probation or in alternative sentencing programs pay. 

Stacy Hall, spokesman for the governor, said last week that Beebe also plans to use some of the one-time General Improvement Fund money he received at the end of the fiscal year to cover the costs of the pilot programs. 

Hall said a final decision on how much would be used is expected within the next two weeks. 

“The program Hawaii has received a great deal of attention and a great deal of recognition as having been effective,” Luker said, adding he hopes the pilot programs become a reality. 

The Hawaii circuit judge who created the program wrote in a 2010 article for the National Association of Trial Defense Lawyers’ magazine The Champion that one characteristic of the program is random drug testing, rather than notifying defendants ahead of time. 

“At the start, probationers are randomly tested at least once a week, sometimes two days in a row, six times a month,” Alm wrote. “They may also be tested when they see their (parole officer.) Successful results reward the offender with less-frequent testing.” 

Alm wrote that failing the drug test, a probation appointment or any other treatment recommendation made by the judge “leads to the immediate issuance of an arrest warrant served by law enforcement officer.” 

Alm emphasized the importance that the judge overseeing the HOPE program have a good relationship with local law enforcement, and that there is always jail space available so the defendants can be receive their punishment quickly. 

“Reworking the system to allow for swift and certain, but proportionate, punishments was not easy,” Alm wrote. “It took a willingness by all of the players in the criminal justice system to operate differently and work faster.” 

Due process is still provided, but virtually no hearings are contested and no witness testimony needed, he said. 

“Why? I believe it is partly because the probationers know they are facing days or weeks in jail rather than years in prison, and partly because the hearing concerns a single violation (of recent occurrence) that is fresh in everyone’s mind,” Alm said.