G. David Guntharp

By Rob Moritz
Arkansas News Bureau

LITTLE ROCK – A one-time barber in Walnut Ridge, G. David Guntharp is known to some as “king of the drug courts,” in Arkansas.

“He took it all to a higher level,” says Pulaski County Circuit Judge Mary McGowan, who was running the only drug court in the state 2002 when Guntharp approached her about expanding.

Now there are 41 drug courts across the state and they handle nearly 1,800 offenders a month.

“He’s innovative, he thinks outside of the box,” McGowan says. “He thinks ahead and he tries to make things better, and he’s very much into accountability … He is the king of the drug courts.”

Guntharp says the proliferation of drug courts in the past five years is because of prison overcrowding and the desire by correction officials and lawmakers to develop alternative sentencing programs in an effort to keep people, especially drug offenders, out of prison.

“Because of the cost of the prisons, I think the legislators have finally, and everyone concerned, come to see you just can’t keep locking them up,” Guntharp said in a recent interview with the Arkansas News Bureau. “Something has got to happen because the prison just can’t keep growing as it has over the years. The economy will just not support that. There has to be alternatives to incarceration”.

Drug courts are designed to give the nonviolent drug offenders a second chance. With random drug testing, monitoring, treatment and a variety of other requirements, participants who might otherwise have ended up in prison have the opportunity to become productive, tax-paying citizens.

Guntharp, 67, an avid scuba diver and fitness nut who works out every morning, recently announced plans to retire as director of the state Department of Community Correction.

“I leave with some mixed emotions,” he says.

Mary Parker, vice chairman of the state Department of Correction, who has known Guntharp both professionally and as a student — she was one of his professors while he was working on a masters degree in criminal justice at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock — said he will be difficult to replace.

“If I could talk him out of it I would,” says Parker. “He’s done a wonderful job for the state of Arkansas and you could not ask for a better director.”

McGowan agrees, saying his professionalism enabled him to communicate and work well with circuit judges across the state, as well as legislators, parole officers and even offenders.

“When he told me he is going to retire I was saddened and unhappy,” McGowan said. “I don’t know of anybody who can fill his shoes.”

Guntharp said he dedicated himself during three decades with the department to finding new and innovative programs to help drug offenders break their habits and the cycle that lands them back behind bars.

Using the old Punishment Centers to illustrate a point, Guntharp said recently that the old stereotypes and ideas on how to deal with drug offenders needed to be changed.

“If you look at how the Punishment Centers were set up, they were short term, a sentence of up to two years, and they said, ‘we’ll put them on street in colorful uniforms and we’ll embarrass them and just send them home and they won’t come back any more,’” he said. “The problem is, it just doesn’t work that way, with the drug culture coming on … you don’t change people’s behavior by just trying to embarrass them once they get addicted to drugs or alcohol.”

Under his direction, the centers were renamed Therapeutic Community Centers and the number of parolees has risen from about 5,000 to more than 20,000.

And along with adding 40 new drug courts, he has overseen the implementation of a variety of new programs, including a technical violator program, sex offender program, special needs program, rural housing for offenders in the Delta, day reporting centers and a transitional living facility.

“He has been the father of the drug court,” said Sen. Bill Pritchard, R-Elkins. “We haven’t always agreed, but he has always been willing to sit down and try to make it work where the people that need the help can get it.”

Guntharp was a a 25-year-old barber in Walnut Ridge when he decided to try his hand at college. He enrolled at Arkansas State University, where his wife was completing her master’s degree in education.

While in college, he worked as a juvenile probation officer in Lawrence County. He graduated with business degree in 1973 and landed a job across the state in Fort Smith as a probation and parole supervisor.

Two years later, he got his first taste of alternative sentencing as a supervisor in community services. His job was to provide alternative services programs for youth offenders.

He later spent time as an administrator of probation and parole in Pine Bluff, an assistant director of the Department of Correction in various capacities and for five years was warden of the Tucker Unit of the state Department of Correction.

“I think that’s why it ended up being such a good fit,” Guntharp says. “I got a lot of experience. I had the opportunity to make contact with a lot of people and then even as director of probation and parole it still kept me involved in the community, kept me involved with halfway houses, so I had a lot of training and background setting up halfway houses and looking at different kinds of alternatives at that time, so when this opportunity came it really ended up being just a perfect fit.”