Featured image: Dirt work is underway near the former White River Juvenile Detention Center on County Yard Road in Batesville. The new White River Correctional Center, an $13.3 million expansion and renovation of the former detention center into a facility for certain adult male parole violators, is scheduled to open in April 2024.
With a growing number of Arkansas inmates occupying beds in county jails due to limited space at state facilities, work will soon begin to expand the former juvenile detention center in Batesville in an effort to help ease the crowding.
The Arkansas Board of Corrections, the Arkansas Department of Corrections, and the Division of Community Correction will break ground next week on a $13.3 million expansion of the center in Batesville.
According to a release from the Department of Corrections, the White River Correctional Center will house adult male offenders who have violated parole and received a 90-day sanction to the center as a result. The expanded and renovated facility is projected to decrease the growing number of inmates backed up in county jails while awaiting bed space at a state facility, the department said.
The project will add 128 new beds to existing bedspace. When completed in April 2024, the 36,130-square-foot facility will hold 162 parolees. The White River Center will be Community Corrections’ seventh community-based correctional facility. Only one of them, the Omega Supervision Sanction Center in Malvern, is designated for parole violators.
The Department of Corrections says the center will focus its evidence-based programming on preparing parolees to be more successful in reentering society.
The groundbreaking ceremony will be held Tuesday, April 25, at 10 a.m. The center is located at 105 County Yard Rd. Immediately following the ceremony, the Board of Corrections will hold its regular meeting at the University of Arkansas Community College at Batesville, located at 205 White Dr., in Batesville.
In July 2021, then-Independence County Judge Robert Griffin said his staff reached out to the Arkansas Department of Corrections about the facility. Griffin said discussions with the state to use the facility began in mid-2020. The former White River Regional Juvenile Detention Center stopped taking inmates in 2019. (Click here and here for information on this story.)
The Independence County Quorum Court approved the sale of the juvenile detention center to the Arkansas Department of Corrections in August 2021.
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