Amidst the hullabaloo and fiasco features of this year's illusive budget compromise, important public policy issues that are the normal work of a state Legislature get lost. One of these, and there are many, also has a huge budget impact: A muted scream for redefinition and reshaping of our criminal justice system. Known improvements approaching national consensus, (even adopted in Texas), are neglected. Improvements that can save Alaskans hundreds of millions of dollars each decade as well as salvaging tens of thousands of damaged people and families are lost or postponed. America is wildly over-imprisoning, and Alaska is no exception.
Many readers are already familiar with the statistical reality. Americans lock up a far larger percentage of our population than any other country including all the countries we think of as nasty dictatorships and, in particular, several times more than the European countries we think of as sources of our civilization. The largest piece of this contrast results from our preference for locking people up far longer for the same offenses. We also devote a huge piece of our GDP to this process, now boosted by engaging private enterprise in lockup building and management. And we still haven't stopped growing.
Alaska is no exception to the American rule. A few years ago, a Judicial Council study found that judges were sentencing blacks to longer sentences for the same offenses as whites (still common throughout the United States -- same issue applies to Hispanics). What did the judges do? They jumped the sentences of whites to the same level.
Dutifully following the prevailing folly of the last four decades, in which Americans increased the incarceration rate by 500 percent, Alaskans also set up a system of mandatory minimums including repeat offense multipliers, taking the judges out of the system even more, shifting the power to the prosecutors who pick charges, piling on definitional shadings of the same conduct, to force pleas and maximize sentences. Yes, it's a mess, and the mess is growing along with social costs and budget increases.
At the moment, Alaska seems to be stuck with rule by a poorly informed minority of its citizens who think that all government is bad and all ought to go including medical and pension services for the poor and elderly. The role of government, they aver, is to provide roads, police and fire, period. OK, if that is the ideology, how about thinning out some of the corrections empire?
There are many approaches to this problem and others may be more acceptable or work better than this proposal. But let's start with the proposition that prison population will not be permitted to grow -- period. Every week, that another 200 go in (or whatever that number is), 200 go out. That means that the state Parole Board (probably the appropriate agency) must be empowered to reduce sentences.
Step two, all sentences with still over a year to be served are cut by 10 percent.
Step three, the board shall seek recommendations from prison authorities and others regarding reducing sentences of everyone still with a year or more to serve, to cut 20 percent off the time still to serve with a mandatory target of further reduced sentences for half of the incarcerated population.
Anyone let out may commit another crime, whether a year earlier or a year later. So the length of the sentence does little to affect that. Of course a percentage of released prisoners will repeat. The deck is stacked against them even higher than before they committed the crime.
That's another problem. How do we reduce recidivism? Let's commit to a study on this issue with recommendations. The classic American position on crime is that it is committed by those infected with sin. That's why we have prisons called "penitentiaries." Anyone who has spent time around the criminal justice system knows it is far more complicated than that. We badly need a refocus towards crime prevention and related mental illness issues. Imprisonment, in its present form, is just a sad bit at the end of a story long in the making.
John Havelock says he regrets that in prior public roles as Alaska attorney general and University of Alaska justice professor, he didn't do as much as he could have to address these issues.
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