Arkansas lawmakers told escaped murderer should have been in higher security prison

Sen. Tyler Dees (R-Siloam Springs) asks a question during a meeting on Grant Hardin’s escape from the North Central Unit, taken on Aug. 11, 2025. (Ainsley Platt/Arkansas Advocate)

By Ainsley Platt, Arkansas Advocate

An automated inmate classification system incorrectly identified a former police chief and convicted murderer as a medium-risk prisoner for “five to six” years, Arkansas Division of Correction Director Dexter Payne told a legislative panel Monday.

Grant Hardin — a convicted rapist and murderer who was previously a state prison guard and small-town police chief — should have been given a high-risk classification but was not, Payne told the Arkansas Legislative Council’s Charitable, Penal and Correctional Institutions subcommittee.

Hardin, 56, escaped on May 25 from the North Central Unit at Calico Rock. Hardin should have been held in a higher security facility, Payne said. He was transferred to the Varner SuperMax Unit near Gould after his capture on June 6.

“Without an override, he should not have been there” at Calico Rock, Payne said.

Other corrections officials told lawmakers at a previous committee hearing that the North Central Unit housed both some serious felons as well as medium-risk inmates.

Payne said the division’s classification office is supposed to review inmate classifications “at least yearly” to ensure that the system’s risk assessments are accurate.

“The system calculates the score,” Payne said. In order for a prisoner with a score that marked them as a high-security prisoner to stay at a medium security prison like Calico Rock, “the warden, the deputy director or myself would have to override that to keep him there.”

Hardin escaped from Calico Rock while working in the prison kitchen. A kitchen manager allowed him to go to the kitchen’s loading dock unsupervised, a violation of prison policy. Using a marker, Hardin dyed a white prison uniform black to make it look like a guard’s uniform. A tower guard allowed Hardin to walk out of the prison’s back gate without verifying his identity.

His escape prompted a manhunt by local, state and federal law enforcement. Searchers found him hiding in dense woods less than two miles from the prison.

Corrections officials fired the kitchen manager and the guard immediately after the escape, Payne said. He told lawmakers Monday that he stood by those dismissals. Other employees have been suspended or demoted in connection with lapses that led to Hardin’s escape, he said.

Payne said more searches of the back dock and the outdoor areas of the prison would be conducted going forward. The correction division also changed their procedure for opening gates to prevent a similar mistake from happening in the future, he said.

“I think that’s where we failed at this point, at this facility. The back dock area was not searched enough, or they would have probably found that [Hardin] was hiding items out there,” Payne said.

Subcommittee co-chair Rep. Howard Beaty, Jr., R-Crossett criticized Payne and department staff for not taking more responsibility for the prison break.

“When there’s a breakdown or a failure of my employees to execute the instructions and the plans that I have given, some of that responsibility falls on me,” Beaty said.

“I’m the person that’s in front of you today because I am overall responsible,” Payne responded.

When Rep. Justin Gonzales, R-Okolona, asked if someone within the department entered something incorrectly into the system to prompt the inaccurate classification, Payne said they still weren’t sure.

“We don’t know yet how it didn’t calculate the score correctly,” he said.

He said they expected to discover that more inmates were incorrectly classified.

Sen. Ben Gilmore, R-Crossett, was unsatisfied with the remaining unanswered questions about how Hardin escaped in his evaluation of the incident.

“Two things can be true. And those two things are, yeah, people didn’t do their job, but also there should be checks and balances to ensure that people do their job. Where are those checks and balances?” Gilmore said. “I know what the answer is going to be, and respectfully sir, I just don’t think that cuts it for me.”

Gilmore said he was still “boggled” by how Hardin got the markers to dye the uniform, and that there needed to be supervision. Outstanding questions like that, Gilmore added, needed to be answered.

“I have no idea. I don’t think you can even explain that, because you didn’t last time,” Gilmore said.

Hardin was sentenced to 80 years on murder and rape charges. He was convicted of the murder of a man in Gateway in 2017 and received 30 years. He later pled guilty to two counts of rape in 2019 after his DNA was a match in a 20-year-old cold case, and was sentenced to an additional 50 years in prison.

The Arkansas Advocate is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization dedicated to tough, fair daily reporting and investigative journalism that holds public officials accountable and focuses on the relationship between the lives of Arkansans and public policy.