State adjusts for prison

KNIK — As the Goose Creek Correctional Center has come online, a couple of significant changes have taken place.

First, the state Department of Corrections said it intends to shutter the nearby Point MacKenzie Correctional Farm. And secondly, the facility has come to house a significant number of inmates who are still awaiting trial.

DOC reports that the farm is being absorbed into the year-old prison. Inmates on the farm will be housed at Goose Creek. They’ll still operate the farm, but they won’t live there. Instead they will be bused to the farm to work. DOC says it requested the move at the start of this year’s budget process.

“It’s in the governor’s budget. We plan to move the inmates that are currently living at the farm to Goose Creek, but the farm is still going to work like a regular farm,” DOC spokeswoman Kaci Schroeder said.

Founded in 1993 as the brainchild of then-legislator Ramona Barnes, the correctional farm housed minimum-security inmates in a farm setting, teaching them trades and skills they could use when they were released.

“Since inception, the farm camp has expanded to accommodate 112 male offenders, 64 of which live in ATCO modular trailers, 19 of which live in a newly constructed dormitory (built by offenders) and 29 of which live in remodeled dormitory-type (originally, split-level farm) houses,” according to the farm’s website.

The farm raises chickens, turkeys, pigs and cows, and grows vegetables and grains. Schroeder said that since Goose Creek came online — the largest prison in the state — it has absorbed most of the farm’s produce.

Anything left would go to Palmer Correctional Center in Sutton, she said.

As for pre-trial inmates, generally those are housed in jails like the Anchorage Jail or the Mat-Su Pre-Trial Facility in Palmer.

“I don’t think like when we started breaking ground that that was (the plan),” Schroeder said. “I do know that … became a pretty solid plan last January.”

The possibility of housing pre-trial inmates has been on the Mat-Su Borough’s radar since 2011 when it applied for a grant for its planned ferry system. One of the reasons stated for the ferry was to shuttle inmates to Anchorage.

“The new correctional center will double the available beds in the state of Alaska Department of Corrections in‐state system and will also provide overflow capacity for un‐sentenced prisoners from local pre‐trial facilities,” the report said of the then-unfinished Goose Creek Correctional center.

Schroeder said that in the department’s view, the decision was based on bed space.

“It just didn’t make sense to make Anchorage deal with that kind of overcrowding,” she said.

Prior to the arrival of Goose Creek, overflow prisoners went to Palmer Correctional, where the housing layout is more modular and more difficult to manage, she said.

“Pre-trials tend to be a little bit more unpredictable,” Schroeder said. “Our sentenced population is a little more settled.”

And while Goose Creek is a medium security prison, the decision on which pre-trial inmates to send there doesn’t necessarily hinge on their classification.

“It depends on a lot of things and one of the factors is actually how often they’re going to be needed in court,” she said. “If you have a really volatile prisoner that’s going to be needed in court quite often, he’s going to stay in Anchorage.”

That doesn’t mean Goose Creek can’t handle a volatile prisoner. The facility has segregation units it can use for that.

Schroeder said it is not the department’s intention to turn Goose Creek into a jail.

“Goose Creek is not going to ever be a totally pre-trial facility,” she said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.