Governor Beebe announced the recommendations of the Arkansas Working Group on Sentencing and Corrections, a panel that is working to find savings in one of the fastest growing parts of the state budget – prisons.

The state’s prison population has doubled in the past 20 years, and costs are rising even faster – from $45 million then to $349 million today. That will only get bigger as the state adds more than 100 people to the prison system each month.

The working group says its proposals would reduce the population by 3,200 inmates and save Arkansas taxpayers $875 million through 2020. Among the recommendations are concentrating prison space on violent and career criminals. Drug users would see more probation, and electronic supervision would increase.

The proposals were created in conjunction with the Pew Center on the States, which has helped other states reduce their expanding prison expenditures.

It seems like common sense stuff to me, but anything can be demagogued, and this no doubt will be. Law and order types, or just people wanting attention, will point out individual examples of supposedly nonviolent offenders on parole who committed violent crimes. I’m sure we’ll hear the name “Wayne Dumond.”

But there is only so much government we can afford. And we can’t afford to keep locking up more and more not exactly hardened criminals. Nor, frankly, should we want to.

Beebe was candid in his remarks, which I have posted on YouTube. Here’s what he had to say.

“This is a (pause) … People want honesty? People want transparency? People want their government not to lie to them? … This is the honest, laydown truth. You can like it or you can not like it, but it’s the truth. If you don’t like these solutions, you’d better have different ones because if you don’t, someone’s going to have one for you. I’m not taking any money away from education to pay for this prison stuff. I’m not kicking anybody out of a nursing home with my vote to pay for this stuff. All this rhetoric, well we’ve got fraud and abuse and we can save money. You bet. If you show it to me, we’ll save it. You find me some fraud, let’s arrest them. You want to save $100 million with abuse, show it to me where it is, let’s take it and put it wherever it needs to be. But let’s be honest and be specific.”

Beebe expressed confidence that this package, or something along its lines, would pass.

The full report can be viewed here.

There was a free screening of the new documentary, “Independent for Governor” at the Clinton Library today. Fillmmaker Huixia Lu collected about 80 hours of footage during Rod Bryan’s 2006 independent campaign for governor.

It’s an interesting movie, but at two hours it’s about 45 minutes long. It has some interesting moments that illuminate the perils of running for office as an independent. Bryan rides his bicycle to local campaign stops and drives a beat-up Mercedes fueled by vegetable oil to longer ones. His wife calms him and herself when they miss a bus. He plays with his kids. And he offers lots of opinions about issues others are ignoring.

A running point of contention through much of the first part of the movie is the exclusion of Bryan and Green Party candidate Jim Lendall from the debates. Time and again, Bryan is forced to watch from the sidelines as Democrat Mike Beebe and Republican Asa Hutchinson grab the limelight. When Bryan and Lendall finally do debate for AETN, the major party candidates have other plans. Bryan and Lendall get a (small) statewide audience and appear before an almost vacant auditorium, which Bryan later told me was “embarrassed to be an Arkansan.”

Bryan later answered questions from the audience and said he might run again.

“You can’t go on Mark Pryor’s website or Blanche Lincoln’s website and really have any real dialogue, you know. Look at Mike Ross, I mean, the guy, if he actually runs for governor in 2014, I might be crazy enough to try to do this again.”

Video is below.

I caught up with Bryan afterwards and asked him a few questions about running as an independent. He said he had been approached to run for lieutenant governor as a Green Party candidate this year but decided against it, but he wasn’t ruling out a future run. If he does, he’s willing to play a little less of the maverick.

You can learn more about the movie here.

More in my Arkansas News Bureau column next week.

My Arkansas New Bureau column this week is about the need to rethink our education system, particularly in light of the continuing economic slowdown. Arkansas – and the rest of the country, frankly – is stuck in a mindset where education begins in kindergarten and ends for most of us at 18 or, if we go to college, 22 or 23. But that’s not the way the work world works now. Adults now need to update their skills – in fact, often retrain themselves. Unfortunately, in Arkansas, adult education is relegated to second-class status.

Roby Brock with Talk Business talked with Arkansas Insurance Commissioner Jay Bradford this morning and posted the results on his website here.

Bradford said the state is moving forward with planning for health care reform as it was passed by Congress even though it obviously will be changed in many ways before it is implemented. He said today’s district court ruling that the law is unconstitutional hasn’t changed that.

My column for Stephens Media this week discusses yet another government deficit: the difference between the damage the natural gas industry is causing rural highways and the amount it is paying to fix those highways.

The Highway Department estimates the industry already has caused $455 million in damage but is paying only $30 million a year as part of the severance tax agreement that was supposed to repair those roads. You can read the column here.

Good news: The Oil and Gas Commission voted yesterday to require drillers to disclose the contents of their fracking fluid, which is the stuff they pump into the ground to make the natural gas come up. It’s mostly water, but it does include (until now unknown) chemicals. Arkansans have a right to know.

I’m not anti-drilling, but it needs to be done responsibly.