$1.88M to add 30 Arkansas parole, probation officers in '20 budget proposal

A pot of about $1.88 million to create 30 new positions for parole and probation officers -- for which Democrats pressed strongly, but unsuccessfully, during the spring fiscal session -- was included Wednesday in Gov. Asa Hutchinson's proposed budget for the next fiscal year.

The governor laid out his proposed $5.75 billion budget for fiscal 2020 to lawmakers on Wednesday, and the extra money for parole and probation officers appeared to take some Democrats by surprise. The budget will be considered in the regular legislative session starting Jan. 14.

A dispute over staffing levels at the Department of Community Correction, which oversees parole and probation, led to agency director Sheila Sharp being fired in July, according to her account of her dismissal. The governor's office did not dispute her account.

The governor's office has said that the Department of Community Correction can increase its number of officers by filling vacant positions.

In the agency's budget request made earlier this year to the governor, Sharp had sought funding to hire as many as 99 new officers, despite Hutchinson's order that no agency heads seek to increase staff without prior approval. Weeks after her request, the Board of Correction voted to remove Sharp.

Sharp's request for 99 officers would have cost around $13.4 million over two years. Instead, the governor's budget included a little over a third of that amount, $3.6 million, over two years, according to the agency.

"We are very satisfied. I think the governor was very astute of the need that we have," said interim Community Correction Director Kevin Murphy, who took over the agency.

Murphy said the cost of the new officers in fiscal 2020, $1.88 million, was more than the projected $1.77 million estimate for fiscal 2021 because of added start-up costs, such as uniforms and guns, associated with hiring.

Corrections officials, pointing to a 2016 task force report commissioned by the governor, have argued for more parole and probation officers over the past two years to cut down on a caseload of more than 120 offenders per officer, double the rate in other states.

To lower the rate, the state would need to hire about 100 additional officers, the report found.

During the 2018 fiscal session, Democrats led by state Sen. Will Bond, D-Little Rock, took up the cause of hiring 30 more probation and parole officers, but they failed to get the money added to this fiscal year's budget. Instead, the Department of Community Correction was given the spending authority to hire the officers, though no money was budgeted for the agency to do so.

The money included in the governor's budget will go toward hiring those 30 authorized positions, according to the Department of Finance and Administration.

"We appreciate the progress but the caseloads are still too high," Bond said. "When you have high caseloads, you can't offer the same help or monitoring."

The agency's current 489 parole and probation officers have an average caseload of 98 offenders each, Murphy said Wednesday. With 30 more officers, he said, that caseload could fall to 90 per officer.

Part of the agency's reported caseload decrease has to do with how officials calculate caseloads. Murphy told lawmakers in August -- when the reported caseload was 147 per officer -- that the averages would drop as the agency stopped counting "inactive" offenders, such as those in jail, in its tabulations.

Murphy said Wednesday that the agency is also looking to reclassify some other positions in the department in order to add more officers. For example, the agency's spokesman, Dina Tyler, said she gave up having an assistant so that the position could be used to hire an officer.

The Department of Community Correction oversees about 60,000 offenders on probation and parole. The agency's proposed budget for fiscal 2020, $126.1 million, is about $4.5 million more than it's authorized to spend in the current fiscal year.

Metro on 11/15/2018