DOC to send Alaska prisoners to Lower 48

ANCHORAGE — Alaska Department of Corrections Commissioner Nancy Dahlstrom announced on Tuesday that the DOC will be seeking to send up to 750 inmates out of state rather than reopen the Palmer Correctional Facility in Sutton.

“It would have taken at least 12 months to bring online and required an additional 70 correctional officers be hired. Therefore, the Department is confident this request is the most immediate way to address this imminent population increase within DOC,” DOC officials said in a press release.

According to DOC, Alaska prisons are at 97 percent capacity. With the passage of HB49, DOC projects 728 additional inmates that will require incarceration. According to the DOC fact sheet, of the 4,694 inmates housed in Alaska prisons currently, 4,214 are men and 480 are women. However, Dahlstrom said that number had increased to 4,705 inmates in Alaska prisons today. Roughly half of the population remains unsentenced. Alaska prisons have received 250 new inmates since the passage of HB 49, roughly five percent.

“This decision increases the safety inside our institutions by reducing the immediate burden on our correctional system statewide,” reads the press release.

The DOC will issue a Request for Proposals in order to find an Outside company that can house the over 700 inmates. The DOC press release states that the transfer is expected to begin early in 2020. Inmates may volunteer or appeal their transfer out of state and must have seven years remaining on their sentences. The full criteria for transferred inmates is still being developed, but Dahlstrom said that part of the RFP will include monitoring and communication between Alaskan inmates incarcerated out of state and loved ones in the Last Frontier. The RFP will ask for a three year contract housing up to 750 prisoners with evidence based programming equivalent to the Alaska DOC standards. Dahlstrom said that she expects the cost per inmate to be reduced by housing out of state. Dahlstrom said that no decision has yet been made on whether or not to open the Palmer Correctional Center, which has the capacity to house 514 inmates.

“We are having those discussions currently and will continue to have them,” Dahlstrom said. “At the end of this year will see how our inmate population has increased, how the numbers are going, if things keep going up the way they are we will have to make some decisions concerning that.”

Dahlstrom was questioned about the negative impacts of housing Alaskan inmates Outside, a practice that formerly resulted in Alaskan inmates becoming involved in prison gang activity in the Lower 48. Dahlstrom answered by stating that in previous years, the state did not have the amount of supervision which mitigates such criminal behavior, and that it had been addressed in the RFP.

“We continue to to work every day on ways to continue to discourage that behavior,” Dahlstrom said.