Sarah Sanders Arkansas

Sarah Sanders Said Arkansas's Violent Crime Was 'No Mistake' and Signed a Law to Fix It. Three Years Later, Arkansas Ranks 46th of 50 for Safety.

In 2023, Gov. Sarah Sanders signed a law keeping violent offenders locked up longer and said Arkansas's crime rate was 'no mistake.' A new WalletHub report ranks Arkansas the fifth-least-safe state in the country, and FBI data still puts it 47th for violent crime.

MAGA Report Cards · Oct 10, 2026

Sarah Sanders Said Arkansas's Violent Crime Was 'No Mistake' and Signed a Law to Fix It. Three Years Later, Arkansas Ranks 46th of 50 for Safety. — Photo: WalletHub, via Arkansas Times

Arkansas is the fifth-least-safe state in America, according to a new report from WalletHub. Out of 50 states, Arkansas came in 46th.

Three years ago, Sarah Sanders said she knew how to fix that. In April 2023, she stood at Arkansas State Police headquarters, signed her crime bills into law, and said the state's violent crime had a cause. "It's no mistake that Arkansas has one of the highest violent crime rates in America," she said. Violent offenders were getting out too soon, she argued, and her answer was to keep them behind bars longer.

Three years later, Arkansas still has one of the highest violent crime rates in America. Now it has a report card to prove it.

Bad at almost everything that keeps you safe

WalletHub scored every state in five areas: safety at home and in your neighborhood, money safety, road safety, workplace safety, and how ready the state is for a disaster.

Arkansas ranked 33rd or worse in every one of them. Its best showing was disaster readiness, at 33rd. Its worst was the one people think of first — safety at home and in their neighborhood — at 44th.

Dig into the numbers underneath and it gets worse. Arkansas ranked near the very bottom of the country for:

Deaths on the road, measured per 100 million miles driven — 47th
Assaults, per person — 47th
People killed on the job, per worker — 46th

Arkansas didn't crack the top five in a single category. The bottom five states, from WalletHub's list, are Arkansas, Florida, Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. The top five are Vermont, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire and Connecticut.

It's not just one report

You could wave off one ranking. You can't wave off all of them, and they all say the same thing.

U.S. News & World Report ranked Arkansas 45th in its "Best States" list — and second to last for crime and corrections.
The FBI's 2024 numbers put Arkansas 47th in the country for violent crime overall, 42nd for murders, 49th for rapes and 47th for aggravated assaults, as the Arkansas Times reported.
WalletHub's study of cities last year ranked Little Rock 164th out of 182. The state capital tied for last in road deaths per person and assaults per person.

And just last month, WalletHub ranked Arkansas the 48th happiest state in the nation. The Arkansas Times suggested the safety numbers could help explain that.

This is also part of why CNBC's 10 worst states to live in this year are all run by Republicans — Arkansas among them, ranking near the bottom for crime. Sanders has run Arkansas since 2023.

Her plan: lock people up longer

When Sanders signed the Protect Arkansas Act on April 11, 2023, it was part of her criminal justice package. Here's what it does:

People convicted of crimes like murder, rape, human trafficking and child sex abuse have to serve 100% of their sentences. That started January 1, 2024.
People convicted of lesser violent crimes have to serve at least 85%. That started in 2025.

The problem is where to put them. Arkansas prisons were already full. So the other half of her plan was a brand-new 3,000-bed prison, which she first said would cost $470 million, plus about $31 million a year to run.

The prisons are packed, and it's going to get worse

The Arkansas Advocate ran a series on what that law is doing to the state's prisons. Here's what it found:

Almost every state prison was at or above 100% full, according to the Department of Corrections.
As of December 9, 2025, 1,852 people were sitting in county jails waiting for a state prison bed to open up.
Arkansas's prison population had already grown 32.8% since 2012.
The Protect Arkansas Act will likely add 2,902 more people to the prisons by 2040, according to the state's longtime prison population forecaster. Its full effect won't be felt until after 2036.

Those people waiting in county jails aren't getting the classes and treatment they need. That's not a critic talking — it's Republican Sen. Ben Gilmore, the law's lead sponsor. "We have people that are quite literally sitting there not getting the help that they need, not getting the programming that they need," he told the Advocate.

Sarah Moore, who leads the Arkansas Justice Reform Coalition, said the law was "shooting from the hip," because there is little evidence that longer sentences stop crime. State Sen. Clarke Tucker, a Little Rock Democrat, put it plainly:

"We can't build our way out of this problem. We don't have high crime and high incarceration rates because Arkansans are inherently violent. We have high crime and high incarceration rates because there's some other problems that we need to solve as a society, including our own policies on who goes to prison for how long."

The prison she couldn't build

Sanders's answer to all those full cells was a mega-prison in Franklin County. It went badly.

Her administration bought 815 acres for $2.9 million with no public discussion, and emails later showed officials had hidden the purchase. An early estimate put the cost at $1.2 billion, more than two and a half times what she had told the public. Her own Republican state Senate voted down the money five times. Then she backed primary challengers against the Republicans who stopped her, and lost every Senate primary she got into. By April 2026, the Department of Corrections said the project had been "on hold for several months now with no new developments on the DOC side."

She has also spent almost three years trying to take control of the prison system away from the independent board that runs it — and the courts keep telling her no. When she lost, she packed the board with loyalists and had them agree she was right. A judge threw that deal out too.

So three years in, here is the scorecard on her crime plan: a law that keeps filling prisons that are already over capacity, a prison that doesn't exist, a land deal that's sitting empty, and a fight with her own prison board that she keeps losing in court. Meanwhile, Arkansans are still near the bottom of the country for violent crime, road deaths and people killed at work.

The bottom line

In 2023, Sarah Sanders said Arkansas's high violent crime rate was "no mistake" and signed a law to lock violent offenders up longer. Three years later, WalletHub ranks Arkansas the fifth-least-safe state in America, the FBI's 2024 numbers put it 47th for violent crime, and late last year 1,852 people were stuck in county jails waiting for prison beds that her stalled mega-prison was supposed to provide.