Prison opponents came prepared to dissect prison site selection
Rich Shumate, Columnist – Arkansas Advocate
Gov. Sarah Sanders’ quest to build a 3,000-bed prison in Franklin County has been so beset with shifting explanations, tactical missteps and public relations blunders that it’s hard to imagine administration officials could do anything to make matters worse.
Until they did.
In a decision both mystifying and arrogant in equal measure, the governor’s office decided not to send any of her senior staff to defend the prison project at a hearing held last week by the legislature’s Joint Performance Review Committee — including Joe Profiri, the prison guru Sanders brought from Arizona as her first corrections secretary and who parachuted into a role as senior adviser in her office when he was fired by the Board of Corrections.
After opponents of the Franklin County prison spent more than an hour offering a detailed and devastating critique of the prison site selection process, two lower-level Sanders administration officials were sent to twist in the wind, at times struggling to answer questions they said were “not in our lane” or “not our role” and occasionally making admissions that were less than helpful to the governor’s cause.
Profiri was not just a no-show; the governor’s office didn’t even respond to lawmakers’ invitation for him to testify, according to the committee’s co-chair, Sen. Terry Rice, R-Waldron, who tried unsuccessfully to get his colleagues to issue a subpoena: “I think it is a slap at this body not to even answer us and say he cannot be here.”
Noting that he had seen Profiri in the Capitol earlier in the day, prison critic Sen. Bryan King, R-Green Forest, was even more biting: “It looks like we’ve got a better chance to get Jeffrey Epstein here to talk about child sex trafficking than we do Mr. Profiri, who’s paid almost a quarter million dollars a year in salary and benefits.” (Profiri’s salary is $189,210.94, according to the state’s transparency website.)
Clearly perturbed, Rep. Jim Wooten, R-Beebe, suggested that “we need to let them know over there [in the governor’s office] … that he is either going to come over here, or we’re going to take his pay away.”
Profiri’s murky role in the Franklin County prison was highlighted later in the hearing when two Board of Corrections members who voted to fire him — Benny Magness and Lee Watson — testified that he had stopped communicating with them, although administration staffers working the project appear to be relying on information he provided.
“We don’t give [Profiri] anything to do,” Watson said. “We have almost no communication with him and have had no communication.”
Whoever made the tactical mistake to have Profiri skip the hearing ensured that news coverage would focus on his absence. For Sanders, it was a lost opportunity to defend the centerpiece of her incarceration-forward criminal justice strategy and try to quiet rising skepticism among legislators.
“I’m trying to figure out a way to vote for the appropriation, and all I do is get further and further and further away,” said Sen. Jimmy Hickey, R-Texarkana, after he tried and failed to get a cost estimate for water infrastructure upgrades required for the site.
Watson and Magness also pointed out the irony that the governor’s inability to move the project forward — because of a controversy of her own making that she’s making worse — is getting in the way of her stated goal of increasing prison beds to alleviate a backlog of state prisoners in county jails.
Indeed, administration officials admitted at the hearing that no effort is currently being made to find an alternate site, calling into question whether any new prison will be up and running before Sanders leaves office.
The two administration officials who testified at the hearing — Anne Laidlaw, director of the Division of Building Authority, and Shelby Johnson, a geographer who heads the geographic information services office — did not take the opportunity to present a detailed response to the presentation by prison opponents, but they did answer legislators’ questions.
While both were involved in the site selection process, they were clearly less equipped to speak to details that went beyond their narrow remit, as Profiri presumably would have been. And Laidlaw and Johnson continued to insist, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary, that the Franklin County site is viable and the process used to select it was sound.
At times, that required suppression of incredulity.
Johnson told Wooten the Franklin County location met the site selection criteria for water infrastructure because an 8-inch water pipeline nearby could be extended to the site, based on information from the Arkansas Department of Health. But he conceded that he didn’t know if Fort Smith or Ozark had enough water to put in the main (both have said they don’t), and that wells on the property were drilled after it was selected as the prison site.
“It wasn’t my role to approve the site. We were making a recommendation for the site,” Johnson said.
Making their argument against the prison, Gravel & Grit founders Adam Watson and Natalie Cadena from the Franklin County and River Valley Coalition pointed out that the chosen site did not meet many of the criteria set out before the search began. That prompted Johnson to explain that those criteria were merely a tool to narrow the search and did not necessarily preclude sites that didn’t meet them.
Watson also accused administration officials of “watering down” the criteria to fit the parcel of land they decided to purchase, which he said was “the opposite of due diligence.” Laidlaw and Johnson insisted they were not pressured by anyone to try to make the site work.
But just as they couldn’t speak to macro-level details about the prison project, they also can’t speak to what pressure might have been applied higher up the food chain. Indeed, the assertion that the site selection wasn’t being reverse engineered would have been more credible had it come from Profiri or perhaps one of Sanders’ cabinet secretaries.
During her testimony, Laidlaw also mentioned working with the Department of Corrections in planning the project, which drew this rather pointed clarification from Magness: “When she said she was talking to DOC, I can only assume that she was talking to [Profiri] because he wasn’t including us in all those conversations or those decisions.”
Rice said he and his committee co-chair, Rep. Bruce Cozart, R-Hot Springs, called the hearing for the sake of “transparency,” after opponents of the prison submitted a formal complaint with more than 1,200 signatures, reflecting the level of concern in Franklin County.
By not taking the hearing seriously or sending officials equipped to answer legitimate issues raised by the well-sourced, factual presentation from opponents, the Sanders administration once again showed its disregard for both public sentiment and legislators who dare to ask impertinent questions.
Meanwhile, nearly a year had gone by since the governor sprang her prison site on the unsuspecting residents of Franklin County, and she’s no closer to turning the first shovel of dirt.
The Arkansas Advocate is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization dedicated to tough, fair daily reporting and investigative journalism that holds public officials accountable and focuses on the relationship between the lives of Arkansans and public policy.
