Letter from a Former Washington County Public Defender

Washington County Quorum Court Members,

I am asking you to reject the expansion of the Community Rebuilding Initiative. I was a public defender in Washington County for four years. I left that position just a few weeks ago. Over the course of those four years, I met with more than 1,000 people detained in the Washington County jail. I have sent dozens of clients to the Community Alternative Program. I had clients enter the CRI program. I am very familiar with the programs, their practical effects, and the people they serve. I also care deeply that my former clients and others in the jail get the services they need. This email is long, but there are not many people who can offer the insight I have, so I urge you to consider it.

Why it's a bad idea to expand the program:

1.  A lack of transparency.

Here are some things we don't know enough about to warrant spending more tax dollars on this program (the grant the county is applying for only covers some facilities fees, after all):

a.      Is the treatment being provided evidence based?

b.      What modalities are they using?

c.       What are the qualifications of every provider? Are we supporting licensed clinical therapists with our tax dollars or are we supporting spiritual gurus?

d.      What is the recidivism rate of folks who complete the CAP program? What about the CRI? We can expect the CRI to have similar results based on the commonalities between CAP and the CRI. In my anecdotal experience with the number of clients I had who went to CAP and ended up back in jail, the long term success rate of the methods and treatments they use is not impressive.

With all the public funding that goes to the Returning Home team, we have essentially created a group of public employees without the formal classification. Therefore, they evade the accountability, transparency, and regulation of public service roles. This is problematic.

2.      The prosecutor’s office does not favor the program.

It would violate client confidentiality for me to give you specific names, but there are people in the CRI program currently with 20+ year Arkansas Department of Corrections plea offers from the prosecutor’s office. To be clear, the prosecutor’s office has said that they do not believe participating in that program is mitigating and will not factor it into a person’s plea offer. This alone should tell you the faith they have in its effectiveness.

It makes no sense for one group of county officials to say that some people are safe to be in a minimum security setting with no jail bars (which is what the quorum court and jail are saying when placing faith in CRI staff to identify people who can safely be placed in the CRI) while another branch of county government (the prosecutor’s office) is saying that some of those people actually need to be in a formal prison setting for many years. Those things cannot be squared.

3.      These facilities are jails. The community rejected more jail beds.

Justice Evelyn Rios Stafford said that this program is not a “jail in the traditional sense” due to the lack of jail doors and cells. Have you ever been somewhere you cannot leave for weeks, months, years? It is a jail. To look at it in any other way is degrading to the people whose liberty has been revoked. If you asked the program participants whether they were in jail, they would tell you yes. If you asked them if they’d rather be in the CRI than sleeping next to leaking sewage in the WCDC, they’d tell you yes (who wouldn’t?). If you asked them if they would rather be free than in the CRI, they will tell you yes. There is no such thing as a carceral based anti-carceral program. Taking down the cell doors does not negate that people cannot leave, cannot call or see their loved ones whenever they want and for free, cannot shop for their own groceries, cannot hold their children, etc. People heal best outside of confinement.

4.      A well supported pre-trial services program could accomplish the goals of the CRI without keeping people locked up (and likely for less money).

I don’t need to share much about this as I believe everyone on the court has heard a lot about pre-trial services and knows that we have several partners in the community—including the detention center—who are on board with pre-trial services. Unlike the CRI, we know for sure that pretrial services are effective. At this point, funding the CRI program and not pretrial services is an intentional choice to prioritize keeping people detained. 

5.      The program perpetuates the myth of a “good” kind of detainee.

A safe, clean detention environment with adequate, evidence-based programming to meet the mental health and education needs of detained people should be the norm for every detained person, not the “special” ones with non-violent and non-sex based allegations pending against them. Creating a program that cherry picks specific “types” of detained people for services while the rest go without the care and resources they need is harmful. The fact that it’s a point of praise for this program that it gets non-violent offenders off of a cold floor and into a cot is not something to be proud of. 

6. Our current detention facilities are in disarray. 

The county has not demonstrated that it can take good care of the detention facilities it does have. The jail is not in good shape. When your child repeatedly breaks their toys, you don’t continue to give them buckets of new, expensive toys and just hope for the best. You wait to see whether they demonstrate that they can properly care for what they have.

I know it looks good to win awards. I urge you to take awards given to 3 month old programs that have not published any results regarding efficacy with a grain of salt. This is not the progress it looks like.

The mental wellness and health of detained people (many of whom I know well at this point) matters a lot to me, and it should matter to everyone. But this does not get us there in the way it looks like at first glance. I do not support my tax dollars funding this program.

I urge the QC to put the brakes on the CRI program, at minimum until we have more information on program quality and rates of recidivism. We all know how hard it is to take money away once it’s been given. It would be deeply embarrassing to get 18 months down the road and have info confirming that the program doesn’t actually help to keep people out of jail after we’ve spent several million dollars on it.

Thank you for your time and consideration,

Lexi Acello

Resident of Washington County