An Arkansas state law allowing renters to be imprisoned for failure to pay rent resulted in charges against more than 1,200 tenants in 2012 according to a report issued by Human Rights Watch (HRW). Under the state’s “failure to vacate” law, a landlord can use the power of local prosecutors to enforce rental agreements.
The report, titled “Pay the Rent or Face Arrest: Abusive Impacts of Arkansas’s Criminal Evictions Law”, speculates far more people may be impacted by the law because the “vast majority of tenants scramble to move out when faced with a 10-day notice to vacate rather than face trial-and with good reason.”
According to the Arkansas Times, a non-legislative study group recommended significant changes to the state’s laws that were “significantly out of balance” with respect to the treatment of landlords and tenants.
The state commission who studied the law, as well as the HRW report, notes that the treatment of cases brought under the laws are significantly tilted in favor of landlords without providing tenants with basic housing rights afforded tenants in other states. Arkansas does not require landlords to maintain property in a habitable condition or to make repairs to property with dangerous conditions.
In fact, the state laws are frequently used by landlords to intimidate tenants into moving out when those tenants have brought complaints about housing conditions to local inspectors, a practice known as retaliatory eviction that is banned in every state except Arkansas.
Based on the state commission findings, legislators in Arkansas are considering as many as 15 changes to the landlord-tenant laws in the state. As of the writing of this article, none of these changes have been introduced in the Legislature in Arkansas.
