Arkansas Prisons | DOC | Prison Inmate Search

Clicking on any of the Arkansas facilities below will direct you to an information page with Inmate Search, Visitation, Mail, Phone, Email, Most Wanted and FAQ for families and friends.

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Arkansas Division of Correction - Prisons & Inmate Search

Arkansas State Prisons and Juvenile Facilities

Adults sentenced to prison in Arkansas serve their time in units run by the Arkansas Division of Correction (ADC). It is part of the cabinet-level Arkansas Department of Corrections, which was formed in a 2019 state government reorganization and also oversees the Division of Community Correction (parole, probation and community correction centers). The roots go back to 1838, when the legislature set aside $20,000 to build a state penitentiary in Little Rock. The Arkansas Department of Correction itself was created by Act 50 of 1967.

About 20,000 people were in state custody in August 2025, and by August 2026 the system was running at roughly 109% of its listed bed capacity. Because prisons are full, hundreds of people sentenced to ADC wait in county jails for a bed, a backlog sheriffs put at around 1,900 in 2025. State projections expect the population to keep growing after the 2025 Protect Arkansas Act lengthened many sentences.

Arkansas prison units

Arkansas calls its prisons “units.” Most sit in the Delta and the Pine Bluff area, with a few in the north and west:

Cummins Unit (Lincoln County), the oldest working prison farm in the state and the site of the execution chamber
Varner Unit and its Supermax (Lincoln County), which holds men on death row
Tucker Unit and the Maximum Security Unit (Tucker)
East Arkansas Regional Unit (Brickeys) and Delta Regional Unit (Dermott)
Ouachita River Unit (Malvern), the men’s intake center
McPherson Unit (Newport), the main prison for women
Grimes Unit (Newport), North Central Unit (Calico Rock) and Wrightsville Unit
Pine Bluff Unit, Barbara Ester Unit and Randall L. Williams Correctional Center (Pine Bluff)
Benton Unit, J. Aaron Hawkins Sr. Center (Wrightsville) and Texarkana Regional Correction Center
Work release centers in Mississippi County and Springdale

First stop after sentencing

Men leave the county jail for the Ouachita River Unit in Malvern, where they go through medical and mental health screening, testing and classification before being assigned to a permanent unit. Women are received at the McPherson Unit in Newport. With the jail backlog, that transfer can take months.

Looking up an Arkansas inmate

The ADC Inmate Search lets you look up a person by name or ADC number and filter by county, facility or gender. Results show the unit where the person is housed. Keep the ADC number for letters, deposits and visitor forms.

A troubled history and a stalled new prison

Arkansas’s prison farms were once among the most notorious in the country. For decades Cummins and Tucker relied on armed inmate “trusties” to guard other prisoners, and the “Tucker telephone,” a hand-cranked device used to shock prisoners, became a symbol of abuse. Reform superintendent Tom Murton’s account of that era inspired the 1980 film Brubaker, and the conditions led to the 1978 U.S. Supreme Court case Hutto v. Finney.

Today the debate is over crowding. In 2024 Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders proposed a 3,000-bed prison on 815 acres near Charleston in Franklin County, with an estimated cost of $825 million. Local opposition, water supply problems and a $750 million spending bill that failed five times in the Senate in 2025 have stalled it. In August 2026 Corrections Secretary Lindsay Wallace told lawmakers the project had not been canceled but had no funding; legislators hope to settle on a plan before the January 2027 session.

The death penalty in Arkansas

Arkansas has the death penalty. As of April 2026, 23 men were under a death sentence. Men on death row live at the Varner Supermax, and the state’s female death row is at the McPherson Unit. Executions take place at the neighboring Cummins Unit. Arkansas has executed 31 people since 1976, including four in eight days in April 2017 as a lethal injection drug neared its expiration date. Kenneth Williams, executed April 27, 2017, is the most recent. Arkansas is also the only state to carry out three executions on a single night since 1976, which it did in 1994 and 1997. In March 2025 it became the fifth state to authorize nitrogen hypoxia alongside lethal injection.

Arkansas juvenile facilities

Young people a juvenile judge commits to the state are the responsibility of the Division of Youth Services (DYS) in the Arkansas Department of Human Services, not the prison system. Committed youth are first taken to the DYS admissions unit at the Arkansas Juvenile Assessment and Treatment Center near Alexander. DYS then places them in residential treatment centers in Alexander, Mansfield, Dermott and Harrisburg (the Harrisburg center serves girls). The centers are run under contract by a private provider, Rite of Passage. The state has closed smaller lockups such as Colt and moved more youth into community programs. Before a court decides a case, youth are held in county-run juvenile detention centers. Juvenile records are confidential, so families should call DYS or their child’s case manager directly.

To search for an inmate or juvenile, or to learn how to visit, call, write or send money to someone in the Arkansas Division of Correction or Division of Youth Services, choose a facility from the list below.