Alaska Native people make up less than 20% of Alaska’s population, but they represent more than 40% of the state’s prison population. And when they’re released, Alaska Native people have a 60% chance of ending up back in prison, the highest rate of all racial and ethnic groups in the state, according to the Alaska Department of Corrections.
As part of a crime bill the state Legislature passed two years ago, the Department of Corrections contracted with the Alaska Federation of Natives to conduct a study looking at ways to reduce the number of Alaska Native people in the state’s prisons.
AFN Director of Government Relations Kendra Kloster was part of the team that put the study together. Kloster told Alaska Public Media’s Wesley Early that many issues surrounding Alaska Native incarceration can be attributed to historical traumas the population has faced in the state.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Kendra Kloster: I think what's important here to first set the stage in thinking about this is Alaska Native people had a restorative justice system where we were addressing and uplifting our youth and having our youth and elders together and growing up, and we had such a strong system in which there was support. When you come through colonization, you have a Western system that was built so much differently than the way our Alaska Native people lived. And so now that we have this system, we are building something that was not meant for us and not in a restorative justice way. And there were a number of things through colonization, in addition to changing our justice system, but also bringing on a number of different traumas. You can bring in situations such as boarding schools, where they separated children, they took children out of the homes and put them in boarding schools, which has just profound impacts on those individuals, but on our communities as well. You have a long history of trauma since contact that has been embedded into our communities, and those are traumas that are still living on today. And I think that that does have a lot of impacts on what our current system is looking at. And so when we're looking at saying that we have these high rates, there's a number of things that need to be looked at and understood.
Wesley Early: You mentioned that one of the recommendations the study puts forward is the expansion of restorative justice programs. How do those programs work differently from more Western justice systems, and why do you think they'd produce better outcomes?
KK: I'm gonna give kind of an example to help highlight this. Let's say our youth have… we'll call it a youthful indiscretion, and they go out and do vandalism. In a Western system, you're looking at more of we're going to a court appearance, you're going to have something on your record. You're going to be put down a path that is not really looking toward restoring individuals and really just understanding what happened. So in our restorative kind of justice programs, and through a tribal court, you would see these youth come into a circle with our elders, with our aunties, with our uncles. They will love you up in a very stern kind of way. They're going to say, you know, ‘we love you. You messed up, though. And what you're going to do now is you're going to go back to those individuals, and you're going to do something to make them whole, and you're going to understand what that is.’ Maybe that's going in and fixing what they vandalized. Maybe that's going in and fishing for that family. You're going to hold some personal accountability to yourself and to the community and understanding that. That is a restorative justice system, where we're understanding, we're uplifting our youth, we are taking them and making them part of the solution to fix what went wrong. I think in our current Western system, they're going to go down a path, like I had said earlier, where you're going to go face a court, or you're going to have something on your record, and it's just putting them down a path that is not done in a really good, holistic type of way.
WE: So a part of the study talks about the importance of keeping people in their communities, especially when it comes to things like parole requirements. Why do you think staying close to home matters so much for addressing recidivism rates?
KK: Through the study, when we did interviews and surveys, we talked with individuals, this was something that came up pretty often. Let's say, if you're from a rural community and you're in an urban hub, you go into a correctional system and you come out and you have parole and probation requirements that are keeping you in the city. However, maybe your home base is where you're going to have a better chance. You might have a home there. You have family support, but yet these probation and parole requirements are not allowing you to go home, and you have to stay within that city. And if you don't have that support system, you could end up homeless, you could end up re-back in the system because you don't have that support system. And so that had come up pretty often. And so that was one of the recommendations is can we look at the probation and parole violations. What needs to change in there, and how are we supporting those individuals?
WE: So in what ways do you think that the state can address some of these recommendations in more immediate terms, and then in the longer term?
KK: Looking at the longer term, it's really looking at the preventative measures, and a lot of that is going to be putting effort into education, prenatal care, supporting parents. There is a lot of studies, not just ours, that we looked at. We did a literature review to see what other studies have said. And from 20, 30 years ago, they're saying the same thing. This isn't new information. We really need to be making sure that we're supporting parents, that we're supporting kids from the very early ages. And I also want to say cultural programs play such an important role in our lives, especially for Native people. We are connected to land. We're connected to our hunting and to our fishing. This is part of our wellness. This is part of who we are in our spirituality. This is something that we've talked a lot about within other organizations, and even following up on the study. How are we building that into our correctional facilities, giving people that are there that connection to their culture, because that is part of the healing process, and it's being missed.
