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Amy Sherrill, FOIArkansas Project

Despite an Arkansas Supreme Court ruling that jail bookings are public records, jailers refused to show them to 29 Arkansans participating in a statewide survey on Aug. 23.

“I don’t think the people in my jail would want you or anyone else to know they’re in there,” Crittenden County Sheriff Dick Busby told surveyor David McGough when he asked to see a list of who was in the jail.

Busby, claiming the request was “ridiculous,” said his jail log was not a public record.

The FOIArkansas Project sent 75 people to the state’s 75 counties to survey four offices — the county jail, the county unit of the state Health Department, a school district, and a city — to test compliance with the state’s Freedom of Information Act.

Five daily newspapers and Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock participated in the project. Participating newspapers were the Log Cabin Democrat at Conway, the Pine Bluff Commercial, the Southwest Times Record in Fort Smith, The Jonesboro Sun, and The Morning News of Northwest Arkansas.

At the jails, 61 percent complied with the FOIA during an initial visit. Municipal offices complied with 86 percent of initial requests, and school districts with 72 percent. State Health Department offices had the lowest response rate with 51 percent.

Surveyors went to either the county jail or to the facility where county prisoners are held for each county. In some cases, county prisoners are held in state-run institutions. Although there is a jail in Desha county, prisoners are no longer held there, so it was not counted in statistics. In Yell County, prisoners are held in two lockups, one in Dardanelle and one in Danville.

The surveyors asked to see a list of who was in jail. The list, or “jail log,” is a document a citizen might request to determine, for example, whether a family member was incarcerated.

The Arkansas Supreme Court ruled in 1991 in a Pine Bluff case and in the following year in a Craighead County case that the jail log, arrest records and shift sheets of a police department are subject to disclosure under the FOIA and that those records must be available for reasonable inspection by the public during hours of operation. Jail records must be available 24 hours a day if the jails operate those hours.

Responses to surveyors’ requests for jail logs ranged from “I can’t just show that to anybody,” to “You need to talk to the prosecuting attorney.”

A dozen sheriffs or their jailers said the document was not public record.

Those jails are in Chicot, Crittenden, Cross, Faulkner, Garland, Jefferson, Marion, Mississippi, Perry, Poinsett, Phillips and Sebastian counties. However, during second visits on the same day to Jefferson and Perry counties, surveyors were given access to the logs.

Officials at some jails were extremely helpful, especially those in Little River, Hot Spring, Woodruff, Calhoun, Lafayette and Jackson counties.

A jailer in Lafayette County explained to the surveyor how to read the log. The jail log in Little River was kept in a public area. In Jackson County, the log was kept on the counter near the receptionist’s desk; access to it was provided upon request.

Although access to the records was granted in Perry and Newton counties, surveyors underwent extensive questioning.

In an interview after the survey, Newton County Sheriff Mark Rupp said he likes to find out a person’s identity, especially when they’re asking about prisoners. He also runs a warrant check on them, he said.

Rupp said his office would be happy to supply the public with information unless it is part of an ongoing investigation.

“To be honest, we felt she (the surveyor) had an attitude,” Rupp said. “Usually when someone is inquiring ... we kind of like to know who they are. It’s almost like standard procedure to run a wants and warrant check. We run a check to see what’s going on.” He said he wonders about “Joe Stranger” coming in and asking questions.

“You don’t want people freely walking in and walking out,” Rupp said.

Surveyor Abby Burnett said she felt intimidated while she was copying names from the log. Three men — including the sheriff — were standing behind the counter, and two deputies were standing in the doorway, all staring at her.

“No one’s having a conversation,” she said of the silence. “They’re all watching this happen.”

When she finished, the sheriff said to a deputy, “Get her name and her date of birth.”

A clerk and a deputy at the Perry County jail were in the process of letting surveyor Lauralee Wilcox McCool see the jail log when Sheriff Ray Byrd stopped the process.

‘’When I told Sheriff Byrd what I wanted he said the information was confidential,’’ McCool recalled. ‘’The clerk said he thought it was covered under the FOIA.

“Get the prosecutor on the phone,”’ the sheriff bellowed. The surveyor said she thought the sheriff intended to scare her away.

Attempts to reach the prosecutor and another attorney were unsuccessful. McCool was told she could file a written request and the sheriff would talk to his attorney about it. McCool went to her car to get a sheet of paper for the written request; when she returned, she asked the sheriff if he had talked to the prosecutor.

“Yeah, he said he didn’t like it any more than I did, but there was nothing we could do,” the sheriff told her.

The sheriff then handed her the copy.

Byrd said later that he knew who McCool was 15 minutes after she left because he ran her driver’s license and called the local police in Greenbrier, who told him McCool was an employee at the Log Cabin Democrat in Conway. McCool was working as an intern in the news department at the time. Byrd called the newspaper and left a message: “Tell her Sheriff Byrd called.”

Byrd said in an interview later that the sheriff’s office didn’t have time for such surveys, but added, “She got what she came after.”

Phillips, Marion and Garland counties showed complete ignorance of the law.

Surveyor Dana J. Callaway reported that Phillips County sheriff’s deputy T.L. Green and another deputy whose name she did not get told her the document was government property and not open to the public. They asked her name and she told them it was Dana; they then told her if it was important she could come back when the sheriff was there.

The deputies followed her to the Helena mayor’s office, where she was seeking another document as part of the survey, and confronted her when she came out. They asked her if her name was Dana or Essie Callaway. Essie is Dana’s mother; the car is registered in Essie Callaway’s name.

Upon her return to the sheriff’s office, Phillips County Sheriff Kenneth Winfrey said, “I don’t know if you are going to make a hit list on somebody in the jail. If you don’t have a legitimate reason why you want to see it, then you can’t.”

In an interview later, Winfrey said the surveyor was rude, obnoxious and “less than polite, to say the least.” He added that the surveyor would not give a reason why she wanted the log.

“I told them ‘you cannot have access, you got to give me a legitimate reason,’” he said.

“I have no problem with the Freedom of Information Act,” Winfrey said. “But by the same token, why wouldn’t anybody want to give me a reason?”

The law does not require anyone asking for a public document to provide a reason. In a training class before the survey, participants were told that if asked for a reason to tell officials they just wanted to see it, and if pressed, to quote the law.

Marion County Sheriff Carl McBee asked surveyor Jeff Niese that if he was in jail “would you want me to tell anybody who asked that you were in there?”

Niese told the sheriff that he thought the records were public.

“If you want to fill out an FOI request, you can do that. We’ll let the attorney general decide,” the sheriff said.

Although the sheriff and his staff were polite, Niese was told the document was not public record.

McBee said in a phone interview after the survey that the surveyor who came to his jail was evasive about why he wanted the jail log and that “set off an alarm” in him.

“The way he acted didn’t set right with me,” McBee said. “I didn’t know if he was some kind of kook.”

McBee and his staff did not comply with the FOIA on Aug. 23, but he said later that he would allow citizens to view it.

“I’m well aware the log is public record,” he said.

Garland County Sheriff Larry Selig was not present in the lobby when surveyor Mac Murphy showed up at his jail. Murphy asked for the log from a woman in the reception area. She went into an office, returned, and said the sheriff said the log was a controlled document, not public information and “you cannot see it.”

Selig was contacted later by a reporter about the survey.

“I don’t know if that’s FOI or not as to who’s in jail,” Selig said. “You got people in there who might be innocent. I don’t know what you’re getting at; I’ll have to check with my attorney.”