The Texarkana Gazette reports that another 48 inmates from the Arkansas Department of Corrections are being sent to a Texas county jail that already holds 288 ADC prisoners on contract.
Those 288 beds were part of Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s plan in February to address Arkansas’s ongoing slow-burn crisis in prison overcrowding.
With our own county jails filled to the brim with ADC inmates, commissioners at the Bowie County Correctional Center in New Boston, Texas agreed to take more of the prisoners. The Texarkana Gazette says:
The county will be paid about $40 per day per inmate. This comes to about $57,600 monthly.
At present, 288 ADC inmates are already being housed inside the BCCC—a lockup that has a total of 748 beds. This contract inked earlier in the year is worth about $500,000 to the county this year.
The per day figure we heard this spring was $36 per day, although $40 is still lower than ADC pays Arkansas county jails to keep its overflow inmates.
As Lindsey Millar wrote for the Times last month, the state’s prison population (and associated costs) have grown to an unmanageable level in the past couple of years, mostly due to changes in parole rules. Shipping prisoners to Texas is a short term solution.