For seven months, the Alaska Criminal Justice Commission, or ACJC, performed research to support their twenty-one issued policy recommendations, some of which are now in effect as part of Senate Bill 91.
Suzanne DiPietro is the Executive Director of the Alaska Judicial Council. She hosted a session last week during the Kawerak Regional and Rural Providers Conference in Nome to explain some of the features of Senate Bill 91 and the ACJC’s recommendations.
DiPietro says a goal of this bill is to reduce the prison population and save 380 million dollars over ten years. $211 million is in direct savings, which leaves a remaining $169 million.
DiPietro explained, “169 million is averted growth, and that is that idea: that, if the prison population had continued to increase substantially, then we would have had to either build a new facility or start paying more money to send people out of state.”
A portion of those savings combined with anticipated revenue from marijuana tax receipts will be re-invested to reduce recidivism, among other things. Recidivism is a term referring to prisoners who have served their time and have been released, but relapse and end up back in prison after a period of time. According to DiPietro, two-thirds of those released from prison come back to prison.
One way Senate Bill 91 (SB91) seeks to reduce recidivism is by improving prisoners’ re-entry process.
“Really what that is, is just this idea that, when a person first emerges from incarceration, literally they have their belongings in their hands and they just walked out of the facility, what are we going to do to make sure they take a step in the right direction and not the wrong direction,” said DiPietro.
In order to help them take a step in the right direction, re-entry coalitions will be formed to offer necessary services to newly released inmates. This would include multiple organizations working together, such as the Department of Corrections Community Probation’s department.
Besides reducing recidivism, SB 91 addresses multiple reforms in Alaska’s justice system. “The main items are prevention, and victim services, and treatment and re-entry support,” remarked DiPietro.
What could be seen as a method of prevention is the bill’s stipulation that prison beds be used for more high-risk offenders rather than nonviolent misdemeanor offenders. This part won’t go into effect until July of next year, although DiPietro says current well-documented studies are in favor of not mixing these two types of offenders.
“And the reason for that is that the sort of bad behaviors or troubled behaviors of the high-risk, high-needs offenders are emulated or rub off on the low-risk offenders. So, really, you want to keep those two types of populations separate.”
The United States is currently experiencing an opioid epidemic, and in order to address that issue within Alaska, Senate Bill 91 is now delineating between drug crimes based on the quantity in possession: essentially, separating the drug dealers and the drug users.
DiPietro explained, “so the possessors of the smaller amounts will have a lesser penalty… whereas the larger dealers, the more commercial dealers, they would be charged with felonies.”
DiPietro admits that, currently, it is difficult to find treatment facilities in western Alaska, but this bill does allow for some of the re-investment money to be used to increase the amount of treatment available.
As of the beginning of July, simple possession of all controlled substances is now a “Class A” misdemeanor, and the maximum sentence that can be imposed is thirty days, with some exceptions.
