After a few years of loitering in courtrooms as a reporter, after being able to see inside a few correctional institutions, to sense the dreary, concrete block sameness and the numbing, noisy claustrophobia, prison, at least for me, is a huge deterrent.
Perhaps the worst would be the loss of control; the tiniest minutiae of your life decided by someone else. You are a number on a list, taking up space, something to be accounted for in a ledger.
What if you were helpless? What would happen if you were mentally ill? What if those responsible for taking care of you were not adequately trained or did not care? What if you were 20-year-old Davon Mosley?
Mosley was one of about 5,100 people confined in state facilities in Alaska. He also was bipolar and schizophrenic, held for days in solitary confinement without family contact before he died at the Anchorage Jail on April 4 last year.
Sen. Lesil McGuire, Senate Judiciary Committee chair, is pursuing the case as part of a Corrections and criminal justice reform initiative aimed at ensuring the state gets the biggest bang for its criminal justice buck.
She says Mosley ended up in the jail after a family member called for a welfare check out of concern Mosley was having a mental breakdown. He had been at the Alaska Psychiatric Institute a month earlier. Another family member reportedly took his medications to the jail almost immediately, but authorities refused to give them to him -- prohibited by Department of Corrections policy.
"What happened in the system?" McGuire asked. "Where did the breakdown come that it took eight days, and he dies on tape and he's having an obvious mental breakdown? He's had food thrown at him ... he is taken out and abused systematically; he had marks all over his body. It was just an awful, awful thing."
The official cause of death? Bleeding ulcers. Corrections officials refused to release jail cell surveillance video taken prior to his death. The family sued and the video was given to its attorneys, but remains confidential under a settlement agreement. Alaska Dispatch News reports the mother of Mosley's children, Vernesia Gordon, as saying the family received $625,000.
Gordon told the paper the video shows Mosley apparently in the grips of psychosis and worsening physical illness, and "he was pepper sprayed." He became unable to open a carton of milk.
McGuire rightly is trying to retrieve the video for her committee, subpoenaing it from a lawyer who represented the family -- and who is, it turns out, a law partner of McGuire's husband.
The broadly written subpoena ran into trouble almost immediately because of worries it would jeopardize other, pending cases, and concerns about McGuire's relationship to the law firm. Senate President Kevin Meyer first approved, then rescinded it, but McGuire said she will try again with a more narrowly focused subpoena.
"It's an egregious case," McGuire said. "This was an awful case that didn't have to end that way."
In Alaska, there have been several deaths in correctional facilities -- a number of them "suspicious," she said. "We have jails for a reason and certainly people who are outliers in our society need to be brought in and corrected, but the issue is that it should not be a death sentence. We do not have the death penalty in Alaska. My main concern is the mentally ill."
It probably should be. There are few encouraging statistics about Alaska's turnstile correctional system. About 70 percent of those held are mentally ill -- the highest percentage of any state -- and the number actually could be higher. The Pew Charitable Trust says one in 36 adult Alaskans -- more than 14,000 -- are "under correctional control" in jails, prisons, halfway houses, probation and parole.
Two of three released Alaska prisoners will return to jail within the first three years; most in the first six months. The number of prisoners is growing at about 3 percent a year, and jails and prisons are running at capacity. In the past 10 years, Corrections spending has increased by half.
Of course, there are commissions and questions and hearings and legitimate concerns. Gov. Bill Walker last week said his administration will review the state Corrections Department policies and safety measures.
And then there is Davon Mosley's death.
Alaska is morally and legally responsible for people like him, people who are in custody. McGuire is on the right track is pursuing details of his death. And more power to her.
Whatever happened to Mosley certainly could happen to anybody unfortunate enough to find themselves locked up.
Anybody.
Paul Jenkins is editor of the AnchorageDailyPlanet.com, a division of Porcaro Communications.
The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)alaskadispatch.com.