Planning is better than 20/20 hindsight

We’ve received a barrage of calls lately from the Goose Creek Correctional Center from people who are inmates there and want to talk to us about what it’s like to live in the state’s newest prison.

Calls like this are new for us and somewhat disorienting. Are there real stories here of things wrong with the prison or is this just what it’s like to live next to 1,299 inmates? Do other papers in prison towns get these calls, too?

The prison-related stories appear to be a new beat for us, a storyline that is new to our pages, but unlikely to leave. It’s certainly not something we anticipated when we watched Goose Creek, and at times we championed its arrival.

We get the feeling, though, that we’re not alone in our surprise at some of the unanticipated social fallout.

After a recent prisoner re-entry conference on prisons and housing, we highlighted one fact in the lead sentence of our story: 38 percent of Alaska’s prisoners now reside within the borders of the Mat-Su Borough.

On further reflection, we wonder if a different statistic isn’t even more eye-opening: 30 percent of those prisoners are likely to move their families here to be near them.

Take 30 percent of the 1,299 prisoners, then multiply the number you get by 2.4 (the average number of children per family) and you’ll get an estimate that roughly 1,200 more children who will be living here and they will all need an education. We’re also just starting to understand that children of incarcerated parents are dealing with anger, uncertainty and other life circumstances most of us can’t begin to appreciate.

These new neighbors also represent 389.7 new households that will predominantly be people who will need to take advantage of other social services here. We don’t mean to generalize rather to point out the reality that it’s hard to start a new life in a new place when half of your family’s earning potential is locked behind the walls of a prison. Finding affordable housing for these new neighbors will be difficult because the Valley hasn’t given serious consideration to how much low-income housing we will need to build to accommodate those folks. Whatever the size of our current homeless population, this change is the equivalent of putting it on steroids.

To be clear, we’re not saying the prison is a bad neighbor, that former prisoners are bad, or that we regret Goose Creek’s construction.

The corrections department is doing its best to be a good neighbor, and the state is working on the problem, as evidenced by a Joint Judiciary Committee meeting in Fairbanks next week to tackle rising prison costs. The committee will discuss things like new ways to address non-violent drug crimes, often cited as the main source of the rise in prison populations.

But this housing problem and the likely concomitant strain on our social services is bothersome. Perhaps we were all blinded by the promise of 360 good-paying state jobs the prison offered.

If so, we hope the lessons learned by omitting this step of the planning process will help to inform our decisions as we weigh the merits of the next big project.