Explainer: How a New Law in Arkansas Tackles Crime, Recidivism, and Community Supervision Challenges

Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, center, signed a package of bipartisan criminal justice legislation into law.

In April 2025, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed a package of bipartisan criminal justice legislation into law, which is designed to increase public safety and improve community supervision. The legislation passed nearly unanimously. 

The changes are the result of Arkansas’s Justice Reinvestment Initiative, which the state embarked on in 2023 with intensive technical support from experts at The Council of State Governments (CSG) Justice Center and support from the Bureau of Justice Assistance, a component of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs. Here’s what you need to know: 

Why is this legislation needed?

Arkansas’s criminal justice system is grappling with a number of pressures that are straining the system. The state is facing high recidivism and incarceration rates, which are not only costly but have created capacity issues in the state’s prisons and jails. Despite this expensive reliance on incarceration, the state had not seen significant public safety benefits; Arkansas’s violent crime rate is among the highest in the country. Given these challenges, Arkansans are eager for new approaches to effectively meet public safety goals. 

 Three key challenges were identified in Arkansas: 

• Arkansas relies heavily on an under-resourced community supervision system. Over 75 percent of the nearly 91,000 people under the department of corrections’ (DOC) control are supervised in the community rather than in custody. High caseloads, inconsistent use of evidence-based practices, and limited resources constrain the impact that supervision officers can have. 

• Supervision failures lead to costly prison stays. Between 2014 and 2023, 48 percent of supervision cases were closed due to revocations or new sentences to prison. During the same period, 72 percent of prison admissions were for people revoked from supervision. As of July 2024, the Arkansas prison population was higher than it had been in 10 years, despite having experienced significant decreases during the pandemic. 

• Untreated substance use and mental health issues are driving recidivism. After controlling for other factors, people on probation with a history of a mental health referral are 1.8 times more likely to recidivate than people with no such history. Similarly, all else being equal, people released from prison with a history of a drug conviction are 1.4 times more likely to recidivate than people without drug convictions.  

What will the legislation do?

Act 670 will improve supervision and ensure consistency, transparency, and increased adherence to evidence-based best practices across the system.  

• The legislation creates a single evidence-based practices and quality assurance unit within the DOC. This will ensure that staff are implementing practices with fidelity, programs are evaluated to ensure quality and effectiveness, and supervision delivery is informed by data. 

• Supervision officers’ career progression will be tied to their ability to deliver evidence-based interventions shown to motivate sustained behavior changes. 

• The bill has a provision to develop judicial trainings on evidence-based best practices, including for a new risk assessment tool being used statewide. 

• In alignment with what research has shown about how to best promote and sustain behavior change, the legislation requires strengthening the existing incentives and sanctions grid to include meaningful, attainable incentives and guidance on how to effectively use them. 

• The bill will help ensure that conditions of supervision are best suited to impact recidivism by requiring that all supervision conditions be narrowly tailored to the individual criminogenic risks and needs of the defendant. Another bill provision automates a process for giving defendants credit against their fines for time spent incarcerated. 

• The legislation will also require the state’s sentencing commission to establish standard timeframes for how long suspensions or probation should last. 

• By adding reporting requirements and strengthening the procedure by which private treatment facilities can be disqualified from being DOC partners, this bill will ensure that facilities are offering high-quality, evidence-based care. 

• A provision in the legislation creates a pilot program to add more pre-sentence officers to prepare pre-sentence reports, so judges and others will have better information when making decisions before sentencing. 

 The bill also creates several opportunities to build on the work that the state’s Community Correction Centers (CCCs) are doing. CCCs operate as modified therapeutic communities and represent the highest potential for behavior change within incarceration. The bill does the following: 

• Includes a provision mandating the DOC to maximize the number of CCC beds. 

• Expands the number of people who are eligible for CCC placement by reducing the disqualification period for prior convictions from a lifetime ban to a five-year period.  

• Requires written explanations when eligible defendants are denied transfer to a CCC. 

How was the legislation developed?

In August 2023, Arkansas state leaders began using a Justice Reinvestment approach to address the state’s criminal justice system challenges with intensive technical assistance from the CSG Justice Center. 

 The Legislative Recidivism Reduction Task Force, a bipartisan group of stakeholders from across the state’s criminal justice system, worked with CSG Justice Center staff to review analyses and develop options for system improvements. These options were incorporated into Act 670.