A new state office aims to reduce crime and save money. The Pretrial Division stipulated by the criminal justice reform bill passed last year by the Alaska legislature, will assist people who are jailed but have yet to go to trial.
In Fairbanks on Wednesday, Pretrial Director Geri Fox explained the division’s mission, emphasizing that currently in Alaska, more than 60 percent of people charged with a crime, spend nearly 2 months in jail before trial.
”By that point, you’ve lost your job. You’ve lost your house. You may have lost your relationships. Your ID is now somewhere, in a storage unit or gone altogether,” Fox said. “So we release a person who was probably eligible to release anyway. They were just trying to come up with money. And now they come out in a worse situation. What we find out is that increases your risk to do more bad things.”
Fox said division offices in Fairbanks and Anchorage will instead allow eligible, non-violent individuals to get out of jail under the supervision of pretrial officers.
”Have an appointment. Maybe have a drug or alcohol test,” Fox said. “And the reason we do it by appointment is because the last thing we want to do is to have people congregating together who are struggling, right? So let’s keep those individuals separate. Let’s keep them in pro social settings. Let’s have positive interactions. And make sure the community has some degree of confidence that they’re being monitored.”
Alaska Department of Corrections Commissioner Dean Williams said, though new to Alaska, the system has proven effective in other states.
”The biggest growth in the prison population of the state, like most other states in the nation, has been in this pretrial population,” Williams said. “So if you do this right, which every other state has had a similar model, you get two measured results. One you get better results in terms of safety and court appearances. And the second thing is you save money because you reduce your hard bed costs.”
Eight pre-trial officers will begin piloting the program in Fairbanks in September. The state’s Fox emphasized it will serve people from many northern communities, who are jailed in Fairbanks, noting she plans to reach out to Alaska Native villages.
“In order to make this useful in their communities, something that they want in their communities, so that’s a conversation that I’ll be having over the course of the summer,” Fox said.
The state anticipates official operations of the new pre-trial facility by year’s end. An Anchorage office is on a similar time line.
Dan Bross is a reporter at KUAC in Fairbanks.
