House lawmakers view prison stats

Data gathered by the Pew Charitable Trusts is aimed at guiding Alaska’s legislators in making policy changes that could lead to reducing state prison populations. The state House committee heard the numbers Monday morning.

Download Audio

At about the same time that  Governor Walker released the state corrections report at his Anchorage office, the House Finance Committee listened to Pew senior associate Terry Schuster outline the data behind Alaska’s increase in prison population.

Schuster said the number of inmates has grown by 27 percent in the past decade, and unless policy changes are made, prison populations are likely to grow another 27 percent by 2024.  Schuster says the reasons behind the growth can be traced to past policies:[

“One of the things that stands out to us, or the criminal justice commission, is when they look at statutory changes in the past ten years, one of those major changes has been increases in sentence length. So for felony offenders, presumptive sentence lengths have gone significantly up in just the last ten years, and we are seeing it in the data in terms of people staying in prison longer, so the population goes up. ”

Schuster told the committee that tough anti -crime policies of the nineteen nineties reduced the amount of crime, but escalated prison populations. Now, about half of Alaska’s prison inmates are sentenced offenders, the other half is split roughly between pre-trial inmates and supervision violators. He told the committee that pre-trial inmates account for 81 percent of the growth in inmate populations at the present time, but not because more arrests are being made.

“It was caused by longer lengths of stay during the pre trial period. Ten years ago, they were staying an average of six days pre-trial, today they are staying an average of nine days. Over 11,000 people last year came in on non-violent misdemeanor charges. So if you have a three day increase in length of stay and multiply it by thousands of people, it adds up to a lot of prison beds the state was not using ten years ago.”

Schuster says prison stays have increased across the board, due to legislative, judicial and parole board decisions. He says prison costs are the second fastest growing budget item in most states, behind Medicaid.

Pew has been working with the Alaska Criminal Justice Commission for several months, in line with a national movement toward justice reform.

“And the idea, generally, is that states will pass measures into statute to try to focus their prison beds on the most serious and violent offenders, and then take some portion of the savings that they achieve and invest them into alternatives to prison and treatment and strengthening probation things that are aimed at getting better public safety outcomes for less money. ”

The data compiled by Pew is taken from the state corrections department. It will be included in a report to be released December  10th by the Alaska Criminal Justice Commission.