The Maverick: Sheriff Eric Higgins challenges the status quo
Early in his law enforcement career, the extent of Eric Higgins’ crime fighting with the Little Rock Police Department was limited to screening local pawn shops. There, he checked inventories against items reported stolen and, when located, returned the merchandise to the rightful owners.
It was not glamorous work — not even that exciting, really — but decades later, he hearkens back to those days as the most instructive to his philosophy as an officer of the law.
“I was returning an item to this gentleman, this Black gentleman,” Higgins said. “I wouldn’t recognize him if I saw him today, but as he’s walking out the door, he turns to me and he says, ‘You know, Detective Higgins, I’m going to have to change the way I think about police officers because of the way you treated me.’
“I didn’t do anything special for him. I just treated him like my mom and dad taught me, to treat people with respect, you know? Treat them how you want to be treated.”
Higgins never forgot that interaction or the ethic that it illustrated throughout 30-plus years of his career on the force. The code shaped the way he reacted to situations on the street and taught him the value of knowing when to listen and what to shrug off from people under duress. It emboldened him on his history-making run for Pulaski County Sheriff against a departmental lifer with strong endorsements and deep pockets. Once in office, it underpinned his leadership with the people he was responsible for, staff and detainees alike.
This year, the 40th anniversary of his first year in uniform, that outlook has also been his bulwark against a storm of criticism for implementing radical new ideas in incarceration, which he is convinced can revolutionize the system, reduce recidivism, and restore hope and dignity to inmates and their families.
It took two centuries for the first Black Pulaski County Sheriff to take office, but Eric Higgins has proven more than worth the wait.
“We need to hold people accountable if they commit a crime, but not everyone needs to be punished for life,” he said. “If you get sentenced, you’re in jail, but that doesn’t mean, you know, bread and water. Inmates are still human beings. Plus, 80 percent of people booked in the county jail are released to the community, so the question is are we better preparing them to come out and not reoffend, or are we letting them leave here dealing with the same trauma and the same issues and the same attitudes that they walked in here with?”
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Louisiana-born Eric Higgins arrived in Little Rock at a young age and settled down with his parents and seven siblings at the junction 28th and State streets in south Little Rock. Growing up, he shared many of the same experiences as his peers of color, from enduring racial epithets from white classmates to developing a healthy distrust of the police.
“It was a good neighborhood where I grew up, but I’d say we didn’t have a positive perception of law enforcement,” he said. “The things you heard from older people made you kind of want to keep your distance. It wasn’t so negative that you couldn’t interact if you had to, but we just looked to have as little interaction with law enforcement as possible.”
Higgins’ parents promoted Catholic education and sent the kids to parochial schools, including Catholic High School for Boys. The youngest of eight, Higgins got plenty of direction from his siblings on how to steer clear of issues.
“In high school, you know, I had older brothers who went there, and they’d let you know what the environment you’re going into was,” he said. “Being a very small minority at school, the Black students all tried to stick together.”
He graduated CHS in 1983, and his decision to become a police officer was about as happenstance as they come. Higgins enrolled at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock to study computer science, but when a certain prerequisite class was full, he filled out his class schedule with a criminal justice class that piqued his interest. Needing a job, he applied to the LRPD on the urging of some of his friends.
“Initially, I wasn’t interested in law enforcement, but I was interested in a decent job,” he said. “I ended up applying and taking the job while I was in school.”
It was not long before Higgins began to see in law enforcement the opportunity to combine his parents’ teachings on respecting the dignity of others, his Catholic education on social justice and his own desire to recast the image of police officers among marginalized populations. Everywhere he looked, the idealistic Higgins saw ways to be a force for change.
“As a cadet, part of my job was working in the city jail, and I still think of a jailer who worked there,” Higgins said. “He was a white gentleman who treated detainees very respectfully. He did things for them. He worked with them. ‘Hey, you guys don’t cause any problems, and I’ll pop some popcorn on Friday and bring in a VHS and let y’all watch a movie.’ He respected the people in there, and he taught me that regardless of somebody’s charge, you can treat people with dignity.”
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Higgins quickly traded his college courses for police work. Though he later went back and earned multiple degrees, the job provided a much larger classroom in human behavior, the nature of authority and the principles of leadership.
“What I found was [that] a uniform changed people’s behavior, both in the person wearing it and in how the public receives you,” he said. “Sometimes the problem in law enforcement is we have a mentality of it’s us against them, you know? The police are the good guys, and the criminals are the bad guys. If you’re not careful, that becomes the police against the community because you’re only getting calls to negative things, and you can become jaded to where that negativity comes to represent the community itself.
“I wanted to have a career in law enforcement that changed people’s perception of police in how we treat people and how we did the job. As law enforcement, we’re part of the community. We’re empowered by the community. There are people out here that are doing bad stuff, and we need to find them, and we need to arrest them. We are here to do that job, but we have to do it with understanding and in partnership with the community, and therefore, we always have to be working on our relationship with the community.”
Higgins relished the feeling he was changing long-held attitudes toward cops, but he also realized one officer can only do so much. He set his sights on climbing the ranks to have a wider impact by helping change behaviors department-wide.
“For me, it all started with my faith and my belief that we’re all human beings, we’re all equal, and we all need to be treated respectfully regardless of the circumstances,” he said. “God put it in my heart that if I can have an impact at the bottom of the ladder, what can I do if I increase my area of influence?”
Higgins would make assistant chief, a role he held for the last decade of his career with LRPD, and even threw his hat into the ring for chief of police. When that went to someone else, he decided to call it a career and retired in 2014. Members of his church quickly pounced, recruiting him for a faith-based reentry program, Exodus.Life, which serves inmates nearing release. Higgins liked the idea of equipping those who were about to get out with the tools to stay out and successfully rebuild their lives, but what really impacted him was how much he learned from the people he was there to help.
“When I started volunteering with the reentry program, I listened to the students and what they needed, the peer support that they needed,” he said. “Sometimes, we address crime as this obscure blob out there. We have to fight crime. Well, it’s an individual who commits the crime, an individual that chooses or is influenced by circumstances. There’s a lot of factors that go into a person going down the road of committing a crime or engaging in criminal activity. There’s a tremendous need for these individuals to have access to other people who can support them, understand their situation and encourage them to better themselves, as well.
“Educating someone who has been incarcerated is not just saying, ‘Go to work. Don’t do crime.’ It’s showing them where the resources are in the community. There are a lot of resources available, but the expectation is that everybody knows where they’re at and has the ability to get there to access them. That’s not the case.”
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Higgins was so impacted by his volunteerism that when people approached him about coming out of retirement to run for sheriff, his first bid for elected office, he was intrigued by the possibility to create a reentry program within the county jail. Job experience and good intentions aside, however, he looked like cannon fodder against an opponent who boasted 20 years in the county sheriff’s office, had the endorsement of the outgoing sheriff and a war chest that far exceeded Higgins’. His historic win was one of the major upsets in recent Arkansas elections.
True to his word, he developed a framework for a comprehensive reentry program, CSI Academy, which puts inmates through a 12-week curriculum that addresses financial literacy, parenting skills and life skills training, as well as providing additional support with addiction issues and job training. Grants have been written, partnerships with colleges and employers have been made, and the program continues to grow.
In 2022, Higgins cruised through his reelection bid with no more of a mandate than to keep on keepin’ on with what he started. Instead, he implemented a new program that made the world sit up and take notice. Higgins identified a unit in the county jail on 23-hour lockdown, opened the cell doors and removed the guards. The radical social experiment was designed to help detainees develop a system of self-enforced rules and the interpersonal skills needed to function in community with others.
“Society is not an obscure blob; it’s individuals, and individuals make decisions about our system of government, about what we do and what we invest in,” he said. “Can we take a typical unit and help them realize that if you go beyond yourself and think beyond yourself and think about the community and the benefit of the community, will you realize that you personally can have a positive impact on the things that occur in your community?
“I wanted to show that if we raise the expectation of people, they will meet it, even these 43 guys who are forced to live together. They didn’t make arrangements to come to jail together, you know? They all just happened to be here. People come into a jail, and they’re fearful. All their guards are up. What I wanted for these individuals was to see that they could rise above that and create a community.”
The idea was groundbreaking enough on its own to have caused controversy had it unfolded in private, but instead, it played out to the world via an eight-part Netflix documentary series, Unlocked: A Jail Experiment, that was released earlier this year. Afterward, Higgins found himself on the hot seat with county administrators and state legislators alike. Some of the criticism was levied at the experiment itself, while much of the outcry was over him allegedly greenlighting the documentary without the requisite approval. Others accused him of grandstanding, exploiting inmates’ experiences and shining an unfavorable light on Arkansas in the process.
Throughout the controversy, Higgins remained staunchly unmoved. The unit portrayed in the series was not the first in the jail to have undergone the experiment, and Higgins said he was very clear with producers as to what elements of prison life were off-limits to minimize sensationalism.
“My goal was to transform the facility, and that’s what we’ve done. We’ve created that community,” he said. “I didn’t reach out to Netflix or the production company to do this. The production company reached out to me. When we met, I explained what my goals were. I wasn’t interested in doing a show; I was trying to impact people’s lives.
“Did we have drama? Yeah. We still have drama periodically now. This was a way to capture some things, to document what we’re doing, and if anyone saw it, I also wanted to humanize people in jail.”
Higgins’ move was not without its supporters. The Little Rock NAACP called his actions “very progressive and one worthy of being noted by the entire law enforcement community throughout this nation.” There is also the undeniable detail that Higgins’ calculated gambit appears to have been validated; despite a couple of inmate-requested tweaks, the cell doors to the unit remain unlocked today.
Asked if he would do it over again or agree to a second season of the documentary were it offered, Higgins responded in the affirmative. He has also forged ahead in the next phases of reform, pushing hard for more mental health services in the jails, the latest bold step he said is needed to reform an archaic, punitive system.
“I have a 1,210-bed facility. I average 1,300 people in here,” he said. “I’ve got probably 50 people waiting for mental health treatment, a hundred and something waiting for evaluations. This boils down to attitudes and priorities. Do we as county government or city government want to invest money in someone who’s in jail, who is suffering from addiction, mental health issues, trauma? Do we want to help them or not? What’s the value of people in jail?
“I think it goes back to humanizing people, to seeing that even though they’re charged with a crime, 99 percent of them aren’t evil people. Then maybe we can invest resources in them so that they’re not out creating another victim in our community and we’re not paying for them, down the road, to spend 15, 20 years in prison. I am trying to move toward reducing recidivism in this jail and thereby reducing crime in our community. The ultimate goal is changing people’s lives.”
ERIC HIGGINS ON CORRECTING BEHAVIOR
“People in authority need to seek to address underlying issues, but they must also act to correct undesirable behavior. Consider the old broken window syndrome: There’s an abandoned house. Kids break a window out. Nobody does anything, so they break another window out. Nobody does anything. They kick the door in and vandalize the place — nobody says anything. Then it’s, ‘Hey, let’s go in there and drink. Let’s go in there and do other illicit activity.’ Pretty soon, it impacts the neighborhood. The approach that cities or counties or managers or CEOs have to take is to be proactive in addressing the underlying issues before they lead to more destructive behavior.”
ERIC HIGGINS ON WITHSTANDING CRITICISM
“My best advice is to believe in what you’re called to do. Look at what you are wanting to do, and ask yourself, ‘What’s the purpose behind it? Am I trying to do this to benefit me, or am I trying to do something bigger than myself?’ If you’re trying to do something that’s bigger than you, make sure the impact on the community, on society or a group, is a positive impact. With that, you can walk through that process with your eyes wide open, regardless of the negative feedback that comes your way.”
ERIC HIGGINS ON HANDLING CONFLICT
“You go to a disturbance call, and they’re arguing, and they’re cussing, and you show up, and they want to cuss you out. The first thing a lot of people want to do is respond to being cussed out, and that’s a mistake. If you can remain calm and try to deescalate by showing respect for people, trying to ask questions and find out what’s going on, you’re able to drill down and find out what the real issue is that caused this whole situation to get out of hand in the first place. I found that the more positive the response I had to the community, even among people who were going to jail, nine times out of 10, they would cooperate.”
ERIC HIGGINS ON DECISION MAKING
“It’s important to have wise counsel around you, not just a bunch of bobbleheads — you know, yes people. Surrounding yourself with people who you know will tell you the truth from the beginning is important. You can’t wait until that big decision to ask people to give their honest opinion because if they don’t trust you, then they won’t risk being ridiculed for disagreeing with you.”
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