This article was produced as a collaboration between Arkansas Advocate and the Investigative Reporting Lab at Yale.
Johnny Crocker is not afraid of conflict. After two decades in the U.S. Army — most of them spent in the Special Forces — the Franklin County sheriff is used to combat.
But when he walked into his first Arkansas Sheriffs’ Association conference, he confronted a different kind of battlefield: a sea of vendors, all vying for sheriffs’ favor.
To Crocker, it felt like a trade show masquerading as a professional gathering.
“If you want to have a vendor conference, have a vendor conference,” Crocker said. “If you’re going to call it a sheriffs’ conference, then let’s just have sheriffs there.”
But there the vendors were, setting up booths and handing out promotional items including stickers and pens. Representatives from companies that provide commissary, technology and communication services in jails and prisons dined with sheriffs at sponsored meals on tables displaying company placards.
At a training known as “New Sheriff School” that Crocker attended in 2022, a law enforcement software company called Justice Solutions paid $1,300 to sponsor the training and an additional $6,800 for “New Sheriffs School Dinner” at the upscale Little Rock restaurant Cache, according to a lobbyist activity report filed with the Arkansas Secretary of State.
“I don’t want to be the guy that’s bought and paid for by a company — they’re going to want something in return,” Crocker said. “I’m not interested in a pony show where they’re trying to buy you while you’re there.”
Crocker’s unease with the close relationships between sheriffs’ groups and for-profit correctional service providers has only deepened as he’s taken a public stand against Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ proposal to build a 3,000-bed prison in his rural county.
The plan has sparked fierce backlash in Franklin County, a solidly Republican area of around 17,000 people. It has also triggered a broader conversation about the state’s spending priorities, given the prison’s $825 million potential price tag, as estimated by the state-contracted consulting firm Vanir Construction Management. Vanir Construction Management is being paid $16.5 million for its consulting services on the new prison.
The plan to build the new facility follows the passage of the Sanders-advocated Protect Arkansas Act, which is expected to increase the state prison population over time. The law eliminated parole and early release for people convicted of certain crimes.
“I’d rather see our taxpayer dollars spent wisely,” Crocker said. “Let’s look at the mental facilities: a permanent place where people can get permanent care, full-time care.”
Crocker has emerged as a strong voice among a growing number of sheriffs, lawmakers and advocates questioning the state’s investment priorities. They are beginning to articulate a different vision for public safety: one that directs the state’s resources not toward bigger prisons, but toward the infrastructure that might keep people out of them in the first place. Two lawmakers opposed to the prison project survived their first major challenge, defeating candidates backed by Sanders attempting to unseat them in the March primary election.
This shift comes as Arkansas reckons with jail deaths, an extensive network of private health care contractors in jails and prisons and a persistent lack of transparency surrounding what happens inside these facilities. But Crocker and other critics are knocking up against powerful economic forces, including the Arkansas Sheriffs’ Association itself, as companies work to expand and preserve their profits.
Profiting from incarceration
A prison on the scale that Sanders has proposed could generate massive profits for private correctional service companies, as well as for the state itself.
When Franklin County Detention Center housed 90 people, it generated between $12,000 and $15,000 per month in county profits from commissary services alone, according to Crocker.
A 3,000-person prison, Crocker estimated, would accrue around half a million dollars a month in profit to the company that gets the contract for the commissary and the communications, including phone calls and emails for incarcerated people.
These profits are not lost on the private companies that provide services for prisons and jails. Filed activity reports accessible online indicate they invest heavily to lobby the officials who decide whom to contract and how to spend government dollars.
Many of these companies donate thousands of dollars each year to the Arkansas Sheriffs’ Association. Association members oversee a county jail’s operations — including health care, telecommunications and other services for incarcerated people. The sheriff’s office budget, including county jail operations, is usually the largest expense for each county, according to the Arkansas Association of Counties.
The Sheriffs’ Association, a tax-exempt nonprofit organization, collected more than $650,000 in 2024 in contributions from citizens and private companies, according to tax filings. Beyond these official donations, there are many other kinds of contributions that firms hoping to win contracts can provide: merchandise, dinners, business trips. Crocker puts it bluntly: “The Sheriffs’ Association is bought and paid for by prison companies.”
“The Arkansas Sheriffs’ Association does not set policy priorities on any basis other than what the Sheriffs of Arkansas determine is needed to ensure a protected and secure public,” Scott Bradley, executive director of the association, wrote in an email. He cited a Sheriffs’ Association resolution from July 2025 in support of the new prison. “The suggestion that the Sheriffs’ Association supports the construction of a prison at the behest of outside influence is completely unfounded.”
In 2019, the Arkansas Ethics Commission issued Public Letters of Caution to four correctional service contracting companies: Tech Friends Inc., City Tele Coin Co., Justice Solutions and Correct Solutions LLC. In a settlement signed by the companies, they admitted to violating state laws requiring lobbyists to register with the state and report activities.
Arkansas law defines lobbying as communicating directly or soliciting others to communicate with any public servant to influence legislative or administrative action, including matters proposed before a quorum court like budgets. Lobbyists must register their activities with the state if they spend $400 or more in a calendar quarter on lobbying activities.
The commission’s investigation found that the correctional contracting companies had failed to disclose thousands of dollars spent on sheriffs’ fishing tournaments, all-inclusive meals and steak dinners. None of the cited companies responded to requests for comment.
But it is not always easy to track where a company’s lobbying funds flow. Uncovering a company’s lobbying efforts often requires identifying the individual lobbyist or firm it contracted with at a given time and then tallying their reported expenses, a process that can be tedious and opaque. Many of these private companies file “no activity” for years at a time or have no officially registered lobbyists.
Nevertheless, lobbyist activity reports can shed some light on the scale of correctional service companies’ frequent gifts to the Sheriffs’ Association and to individual sheriffs.
The jail health care company TK Health (formerly Turn Key Health Clinics LLC) services 18 county jails across Arkansas and, in the past five years, has had more than a dozen people die under its care in the state, according to death data obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request from the Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration. TK Health employs two former presidents of the Arkansas Sheriffs’ Association, Danny Hickman of Boone County and Shane Jones of Pope County as “client liaisons” who work to market its services. Jones resigned from his job as Pope County Sheriff 18 months before his term ended, citing “an incredible opportunity, one that may never in my lifetime come again” in a public announcement posted in May 2025. Jones did not respond to a request for comment.
In 2021, Hickman spent more than $3,500 on 14 private meals, often at steakhouses, with sheriffs and jail administrators, according to lobbyist disclosures. One “Dinner Meeting” at a local steakhouse with sheriff office staff from Craighead, Mississippi and Cross counties totaled more than $1,300.
The same year, Hickman treated the sheriffs from Boone and Pope counties, as well as the Pope County judge, to a “Jailer’s Conference Client Appreciation Dinner,” according to lobbyist activity reports. County judges serve administrative duties including managing county funds and presiding over the quorum court. Lobbyist activity reports also reveal that in 2020, Hickman sent smoked bacon to Pulaski County Sheriff Eric Higgins.
When the Advocate and the Lab requested information about his county jail’s health care provider, Pulaski County Sheriff Eric Higgins initially said he had no files pertaining to their health care contract. The county, however, released 24 responsive documents after a written FOIA request was sent to its procurement department. The documents showed Pulaski County paid TK Health about $6 million for health care services. Higgins did not respond to requests for comment.
Hickman’s most recent reports from 2022 and 2023 reported no lobbying activity. But social media posts suggest he is a continued presence at sheriffs’ events and conferences. Facebook posts show Hickman dining with sheriffs at a table sponsored by TK Health in November 2022 and distributing TK Health materials in December 2022. In a January 2025 Facebook post, he posed with a Pope County jail administrator holding a crossbow, unopened in its box.
“Danny Hickman isn’t a lobbyist,” Kenna Griffin, communications director for TK Health, wrote in an email. She added that he has served as a “client liaison” since 2016, a position that requires him to “attend area networking events on our behalf, and market the benefits of working with us.”
“Danny registered as a lobbyist for us at one point out of an abundance of caution,” Griffin wrote. “He never had anything to declare.” Hickman is not registered as a lobbyist, but he filed lobbyist activity reports on behalf of TK Health to the state from 2020 through 2023. Reports from 2020 and 2021 reflected thousands of dollars spent on sheriffs. Hickman did not respond to a request for comment.
Other correctional service companies have reported similar expenses. A lobbyist working on behalf of Justice Solutions reported spending more than $600 in 2023 on dinners for three sheriffs and their wives.
“These systems are about money, and they are a system of control,” said Sarah Moore, executive director of the Arkansas Justice Reform Coalition. “There’s a huge lobby effort. When you look at the private prison industry, they sell on locking up and on human lives being a part of a certain system.”
Critics argue that every county and state dollar spent on jail or prison contracting is a dollar not spent on other community needs, including mental health care. Spending money this way, they say, moves already limited mental health care budgets out of communities and into jails.
“It’s dumbfounding when we keep hearing about adding more jail and prison beds, because to me then it tells me the resources are there and they are available,” Moore said, “we’re just unwilling to appropriately respond to parts of our population.”
Even Republican state Sen. Bryan King, a self-proclaimed “proponent of locking people up,” who represents a portion of Franklin County, said there should be deeper investments in mental health care.
“We decide three things: who gets, who gives and who profits,” King said. “A lot of times it’s who’s profiting that’s driving what the policy is instead of what we should really do.”
Investing in mental health care
To Crocker, the answer as to why there is such a small statewide appetite for mental health investments is simple: “There’s no money in it.” Mental health care investments often result in public dollars saved rather than the private profits that come from jails and prisons.
Arkansas has taken some steps toward addressing mental health needs and diverting people in crisis from the criminal justice system. Act 423, which became law in 2017, piloted four Crisis Stabilization Units, which serve as alternatives to jails and emergency rooms for people in mental health crisis. Each unit had 16 beds.
Democratic state Sen. Clarke Tucker, who worked on the pilot legislation, said funding was set aside for a fifth unit, potentially in Union County, but that unit never materialized.
“We’re moving in the wrong direction,” Tucker said, noting that of the four units once in operation, only two remain open. The other units have closed, citing staffing shortages and lack of resources. By contrast, neighboring Mississippi and Oklahoma both have 14 similarly structured units in operation.
We’re moving in the wrong direction.
– State Sen. Clarke Tucker
Shortages in community mental health care workers can also be explained by funding. Many social workers cannot afford to provide care to those on Medicaid because of insufficient reimbursement structures, Tucker said, and others move to communities where they feel they can make enough money to make back the cost of their degrees.
In April 2025, Act 733 became law with the goal of speeding up mental health assessments for those in county jails, reducing the maximum timeframe for completing competency evaluations to six months from 10. It also stipulates that Arkansas’ Department of Human Services, not individual counties, will pay for psychotropic medications for detained people who are found unfit to stand trial.
But the law also gives judges more discretion to throw out attorneys’ requests for mental health evaluations. And it came with no additional funding for mental health programs or the competency evaluations themselves.
“Lack of sufficient qualified providers to provide the care, as well as beds, has been a chronic issue,” said Holly Dickson, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas, “exacerbated in part by what the state is willing or able to pay.”
Dickson acknowledged the recent $30 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds allocated for mental health and substance abuse programs in Arkansas. But that is a one-off cash infusion, she said, not the sustained budgetary priority she believes is needed to address the problem. “We have to have the infrastructure,” Dickson said. “We have to have the qualified professionals.”
Advocates point to a laundry list of programs and infrastructure in which they hope to see state investment, including wraparound services for people released from jail, expanded mobile crisis coverage and student loan repayment programs for health care providers.
“When we think about public safety and public health, we don’t think about that additional umbrella: basic needs being met,” Moore of the Arkansas Justice Reform Coalition said, pointing to how factors like poverty impact incarceration. Without investing in social services more broadly, she said, Arkansans are putting “a tiny bandaid on a gouging, gaping, bleeding wound.”
Johanna Thomas, director of the School of Social Work at the University of Arkansas, has spent much of her career showing how investments in social services can save local governments money.
She’s now working with the Arkansas Department of Human Services to pilot a $10 million Crisis Hub and Crisis Continuum program that will link existing providers and behavioral health initiatives across the state.
“At the end of the day, we want to keep people out of those high-priced resources,” Thomas said, “whether it’s an emergency room, a police station, a jail.”
Her first goal is piloting a more robust crisis line in seven regions of the state. An analysis in Arizona revealed that 80% of crisis line calls across the course of a year could be resolved over the phone without deploying more costly resources. Arkansas has one of the nation’s lowest answer rates for 988, the mental health crisis line — more than a quarter of calls are not picked up.
Thomas noted that incarceration is not only costly but also contracts local economies by preventing incarcerated people from contributing to their communities. According to a recent report by the Brennan Center for Justice, involvement with the criminal justice system lowers post-release earnings and pulls billions out of local economies.
Until mental health resources are strengthened, Crocker said he will continue to try his best to help the people in his custody.
“These people who are in jail; they’re not bad people,” he said. “They need long-term care. The state should invest in people and not invest in companies. We can do better as a people, as human beings.”