Former Arkansas prison system leader says state has infrastructure to address overcrowding

Former Arkansas Corrections Secretary Joe Profiri, left, listens as Gov.Sarah Huckabee Sanders talks about criminal justice legislation during a news conference at the State Capitol on March 28, 2023. Photo by John Sykes/Arkansas Advocate

By AINSLEY PLATT | Arkansas Advocate

Joe Profiri, who was fired two years ago as the head of the state’s corrections department over a dispute with the state Board of Corrections, told lawmakers Tuesday that Arkansas already has the policy infrastructure in place to address persistent overcrowding in its prisons.

Profiri, now a senior adviser to Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, appeared before the House and Senate judiciary committees as they held the latest in a series of hearings to discuss prison overcrowding.

Arkansas’ growing prison population is driven in large part by high rates of recidivism, according to experts and department data.

It marked Profiri’s first appearance before legislators since 2025. Profiri faced criticism from some lawmakers for not appearing at a hearing last year to discuss Sanders’ proposal for a 3,000-bed prison in Franklin County that the governor has since put on hold.

“What it comes back to is based on the scale (of Arkansas’ community corrections system), maybe we need a larger capacity to actually show success,” Profiri said.

The former corrections secretary told lawmakers that the corrections system may need to be “rightsized,” citing the more than 80,000 people who are on some kind of supervision. He said the pieces were in place, but scaling was necessary. 

“You and this body have done an excellent job with legislation over the last, almost four years, in putting all the elements in place,” Profiri said. “At this point it’s largely about executing.”

The prison system needs to become rehabilitative instead of punitive, he said.

Lawmakers have held several meetings since September discussing Arkansas’ prison population, which has grown consistently since the COVID-19 pandemic but has long outstripped the state’s ability to house everyone sentenced. That’s led to a growing county jail backup, where people who have been convicted await an open state prison bed.

The jail backup and prison bed shortage has been the source of clashes between Sanders and the Board of Corrections. Her efforts to open more beds in 2023 while Profiri was still corrections secretary ultimately contributed to the board suspending then firing him, and was the focus of an ongoing legal battle over who controlled the state’s top prison officials. Former Board Chairman Benny Magness said at the time that the prison system was severely understaffed and couldn’t safely open the extra beds Sanders asked for.

Later efforts by Sanders and her allies in the Legislature to approve $750 million in funding for the Franklin County prison project met stiff opposition from a bipartisan coalition in the Senate and from the local community, leaving the project in limbo.

The Joint Performance Review Committee requested Profiri testify during a hearing last year on the prison project and how the site for it was selected — but he didn’t show, frustrating several Republican legislators. The absence led to a failed legislative effort this year to eliminate his advisory position in the governor’s office.