As Alaska lawmakers reckon with a tight state budget and rising costs in the Department of Corrections, some are floating an uncomfortable idea: once again sending Alaska inmates out of state.
Over the last ten years, lawmakers have boosted the Department of Corrections’ budget by 70%, and even that hasn’t been enough.
Each of the past five years, the department has had to ask lawmakers for millions more — or tens of millions more — to make ends meet. This year, the department is requesting $24 million to cover unexpected costs in the current budget.
The department’s commissioner, Jen Winkelman, told the Senate Finance Committee earlier this month that she looked every day for ways to rearrange operations to avoid budget shortfalls or overruns. Health care for inmates and overtime to make up for short staffing are the two largest cost drivers, Winkelman said.
“It is consistently … a perfect storm,” Winkelman said.
Lawmakers went as far as to close one housing unit at the Spring Creek Correctional Center in Seward last year in an effort to save money. But sometimes, Winkelman said, big expenses come up unexpectedly.
“Approximately two weeks ago, we had a large fight on the yard — 48 inmates involved in a fight,” Winkelman told a House committee on Tuesday. “Quick napkin math, we believe it to be just under $200,000 that that cost us.”
Five people were injured in the fight, and all are recovering, a department spokesperson said. But Winkelman said the cost-cutting move to close part of the prison may have played a role and ultimately resulted in a large unexpected cost.
“Those are just those anecdotal examples of the population and the complexity when we start overpopulating one area, what happens as a result due to the population we serve,” she said.
The spiraling costs have some lawmakers floating a return to a practice Alaska abandoned more than a decade ago: sending prisoners out of state to save money.
“We can't keep going the direction we've been going the last few years,” said Sitka Republican Sen. Bert Stedman, a co-chair of the Finance Committee. “The operating budget is extremely strained with those items, and that's what's driving this discussion.”
Wasilla state Sen. Rob Yundt, a Republican in the minority, filed Senate Bill 126 last year, which if passed would direct the Department of Corrections to explore the idea to see if it saves money.
“Oftentimes we get to run legislation that we're excited about,” Yundt said at a hearing on Tuesday. “There is none of that here.”
In the 1990s and 2000s, the state contracted with private prisons in Colorado and Arizona. By 2005, about a third of Alaska’s prisoners were held out of state in private facilities, according to news reports at the time.
One of those prisoners was Adam Barger, who spent more than a decade in out-of-state prisons after his conviction in Alaska in the 1990s. He returned in 2013 after the state opened the $240 million Goose Creek Correctional Center in the Mat-Su borough in an effort to bring Alaska’s prisoners home.
When he was transferred back, guards told him how much more difficult it was to manage prisoners who had been sent to Outside facilities than those who had not, Barger told lawmakers during public testimony on the bill.
“We were more violent, had gang affiliations, drug addictions, behavioral problems, and were more resistant to authority than those who had never been sent out of state,” Barger said. “Then, we were released back into the community.”
Some, like Barger, managed to leave the justice system behind them, he said. Barger said he earned a master’s degree and now lives in Arizona.
“For many, though, they were apt to get out and return to incarceration, often in conjunction with another charge,” Barger said. “They went back to their communities and created more victims because the behavioral issues they developed out of state had not been addressed or resolved prior to their release.”
Barger asked lawmakers to oppose Yundt’s bill.
Yundt’s bill would mandate that Alaska prisoners be kept separate from those from other states. It would also limit the prisoners that could be sent out of state to those with at least seven years left in their prison term, and Yundt said he’d like to see inmates brought back to Alaska as their release date approaches.
Sen. Löki Tobin, an Anchorage Democrat in the majority, said she sees other ways to reduce costs in the state’s prison system — like granting parole for people who are elderly, disabled or unlikely to reoffend.
Tobin said Alaska grants parole far less often than other states, and she blames the state’s parole board for keeping too many people behind bars.
“They're engaging in double jeopardy,” Tobin said. “Folks who are up for discretionary parole, who are excellent candidates to re enter into their community safely with support, are being recommitted to incarceration.”
The parole board chair said last year that state law places strict limits on the board’s ability to grant parole.
The policy director of the Alaska chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, Mike Garvey, said that sending prisoners out of state would cut them off from family and friends in Alaska and make them more likely to reoffend.
“Moving prisoners out of state jeopardizes the constitutional rights of prisoners in Alaska, as well as presents public safety concerns,” Garvey said. “Alaska's Constitution guarantees prisoners the right to rehabilitation, to due process, the right to counsel and the right to adequate medical care.”
Yundt said he was sympathetic to Barger and Garver’s concerns.
“I was once a young child that would travel to see family members as well on a Sunday, and so that's not a great situation for anyone to be in,” he said. “I wish we weren't in the situation, but here we are.”
Democratic Juneau Sen. Jesse Kiehl, a member of the powerful Finance Committee, said he understands the cost concerns, but he’s skeptical.
“I will just express a little concern about the notion of shipping Alaskans to warehouses outside,” Kiehl said. “We've done that in the past. The cleanup has been both expensive and ugly, and I don't know that that's a long term cost we want to bear.”
To realize any savings, Winkelman said, the department would likely need to close a facility. And that brings with it a whole host of thorny questions about jobs, local economies and public safety.
But with few options to control rising costs, and a governor resistant to standalone efforts to raise revenue, it may be a choice they’re forced to make, said Sen. Lyman Hoffman, a Bethel Democrat who co-chairs the Finance Committee.
“We have a limited budget. If we are not able to pass revenue measures, we have to look at doing something,” he said. “So this is an idea that is on the plate.”
