Repairs at Arkansas Prison Wastewater Plant Keep Getting Delayed
An aging wastewater plant that serves two of Arkansas’s largest prisons regularly runs afoul of its federal water permit, having exceeded the amount of discharge that it’s allowed to release for over a decade.
In 2022, the state Department of Corrections (DOC) was levied with a consent administrative order from Arkansas’s environmental agency that set a 2024 deadline to complete repairs at the facility. The DOC missed that deadline—and despite receiving an extension to 2027, efforts to repair or replace the plant remain at the early planning stages, according to public records obtained by the Arkansas Advocate.
The plant, which treats wastewater for a population of around 4,000 prisoners at the Cummins and Verner Units in Lincoln County, was designed to handle 800,000 gallons of wastewater per day. But in a 2021 assessment, occurring while the plant faced 12 months of pollution violations, that figure was found to be an average of 1.2 million gallons per day. As a result of the excess flow, the plant was discharging wastewater that wasn’t fully treated, placing the downstream environment at risk.
Even as the 2024 deadline approached, the DOC was unable to decide if it was more efficient to build a new, larger plant or expand the existing one, which is 50 years old and has not received any significant upgrades in the last 25 years. In 2021, a DOC engineering consultant said the department would build a replacement plant that could process 3.25 million gallons of wastewater. This plan was ultimately shelved in favor of improving the current plant’s capacity to 2 million gallons per day—an amount that even the DOC’s own wastewater expert has said is too little. Current estimates from the DOC suggest the plant might not be in compliance until at least 2028.
In late November 2025, the Arkansas Board of Corrections voted in favor of spending nearly $2 million on a small fix: replacing the bar screens at the front of the plant to block solid objects from entering the treatment stages. The vote came just weeks after the Arkansas Advocate’s reporting, but it still falls short of the total amount of funds that will be needed. And as the story of a water pipe leak at the Montana State Prison reported elsewhere in this issue highlights, putting off structural repairs can quickly lead to a public health crisis. [See: PLN, Dec. 2025, p. 54.]
As a digital subscriber to Prison Legal News, you can access full text and downloads for this and other premium content.
Already a subscriber? Login