SB 91 must be repealed and replaced to restore public confidence

As a State House candidate from South Anchorage, self-described as fiscally conservative and socially progressive, I've been catching a great deal of grief for stating firmly and without any reticence that I believe Senate Bill 91 should be repealed and replaced.

One of the principal reasons the bill was created was to decrease the costs of Alaska's criminal justice system. That was a stated goal in the creation of the Alaska Criminal Justice Commission and in the bill's sponsor statement, and it was the dominant discussion as the bill made its way through the Legislature.

To be fair, our system is expensive, and it has terrible outcomes. We have more prisoners, they stay in prison longer, and many of them are going back in once they get out. On top of that, Alaska's pretrial population makes up a quarter of the prison population. So, people who haven't been convicted are sitting in jail. That's particularly terrible for people who are ultimately found not guilty.

[How SB 91 has changed Alaska's justice system]

Also, to be fair, SB 91 may be successful in a stated purpose (saving the state money), but Alaskans won't like how it does it. The omnibus crime bill will save the state money by essentially decriminalizing – or abandoning meaningful consequences for – many crimes. People can steal, stalk people, sell drugs and do all kinds of terrible things to their friends, family and neighbors and be given a citation instead of going to prison. This doesn't drive down crime, it simply shifts the cost of the crime to friends, family, neighbors, small business owners, nonprofits, and communities. It's that simple.

The bill is supported by numbers put forward by an out-of-state firm called the Justice Reinvestment Initiative, which has helped a lot of other states implement similar (but not apples-to-apples) initiatives. The results of these programs are mixed. If you're told that the system put forward by SB 91 is successful somewhere else, listen with skepticism – it should be clear that there is no place where this exact system exists; Alaska is the only state to have instituted so many of the recommendations made by the JRI.

It's also important to note that true believers in justice reinvestment programs, like Susan B. Tucker and Eric Cadora, visionaries in justice reinvestment, aren't fans of the Justice Reinvestment Initiative because they view it as a bastardization of the concept. The original justice reinvestment concept was, at its core, about finding community-level solutions to community problems. It was focused on finding out what drives criminal behavior, then redirecting the money formerly used to incarcerate people into fixing whatever enabled the criminal behavior in the community.

[People in Anchorage are fed up with crime. Did SB 91 make it worse?]

That's not what SB 91 does at all. SB 91 is focused on savings first and reinvestment peripherally. We're not taking the total "savings" from incarcerating people and developing comprehensive, community-driven programs to strengthen the webs of support under those people likely to commit crimes and most in need of our support. Very little reinvestment is being done at all. We're basically just giving them a stern talking-to and sending them out into whatever situations led them to make their previous bad decisions.

In fact, we're weakening those webs of support by perpetuating petty crime and developing a sense of divisiveness within our communities, which leads to less neighborliness, less trust between fellow community members, and more likelihood that people needing support will slip through the cracks. On Nextdoor and Facebook, people are talking about SB 91, posting pictures of people in their neighborhoods whom they believe don't belong, and warning neighbors about "suspicious characters." That is the antithesis of community building. We are developing neighborhood-by-neighborhood xenophobia.

So why are so many progressive folks defending SB 91? Well, the population in our prisons is not reflective, by demographic breakdown, of the population of our communities, and many find this troubling. This is a problem that we absolutely need to deal with, and we need to deal with it immediately. But we don't do that by decriminalizing crime. We do that by better engaging our diverse communities and applying their wisdom, knowledge, and resources to create community-level fixes that considers them. We do that by developing bottom-up solutions that address issues that drive or enable crime. We invest in aggressive opioid addiction support programs. We find ways to ensure Alaska's youth have strong connections to the community and positive role models. We make our education system the best in the country. We fix the economy so that a positive future is a given, rather than a hope. We need to find solutions to issues like moving people through pretrial quickly or keeping rural Alaskans close to their families and communities even if they commit crimes, so their communities can be a part of driving down recidivism and helping them to create a better life.

So, yes, I believe that we should repeal and replace SB 91. The bill was rolled out during an opioid crisis, a fiscal crisis, rising unemployment rates, and after years of cuts to our police force in Anchorage (which Mayor Berkowitz has gone a good way to restore).

We have the real problem of crime in our communities. Alaskans don't feel safe in their daily lives or heard by their representatives. SB 91 is contributing to that situation both from public perception and a practical perspective (by hamstringing law enforcement, prosecution, and corrections).

We need to restore public safety as a priority and, in doing so, we'll restore the public's confidence. Conservatives and progressives share the vision of criminal justice reform, but what we're arguing about is our ability fund necessary programs – an impossibility under our current fiscal situation.

So why is a progressive Alaskan supporting the repeal of a bill that was pushed hard by progressive groups? Because I believe that, at its core, this bill is not about creating true equity; it's about saving money and creating a fictional equality of outcomes through the manipulation of statistics. At the core of our progressive values is social equity, and that doesn't happen by shifting government's responsibility for public safety to Alaskans.

Amber Lee is a candidate for House District 28 in Anchorage. She is a longtime resident of Bear Valley, owns a consulting firm and is the mother of two boys who attend Bear Valley Elementary.

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