Valley prison conference drops startling figures

WASILLA — Of all the figures tossed about at the Community and Corrections forum Thursday, one stands out: The Mat-Su Borough houses 38 percent of Alaska’s prisoners.

That’s kind of a brand new phenomenon. According to Alaska Department of Corrections Deputy Commissioner Ron Taylor, most of those inmates are at a prison that just came online in the last year, the Goose Creek Correctional Center. When that prison was filled with inmates, its 1,299 prisoners nearly tripled the Valley’s incarcerated population.

Bill Aube with the Mat-Su Coalition on Housing and Homelessness said that a survey of the inmate population of Goose Creek indicates that 30 percent of those prisoners are likely to move their families here to be closer to them. Doing a rough estimate and assuming inmates have 2.4 children on average, Aube said that means a potential 1,200 new children who will need education.

And that’s not counting staff. Of the 360 staff the prison intends to hire, 310 are already on the job, said Goose Creek Assistant Superintendent for Operations John Conant. So far, the majority of them are settling in the Knik-Goose Bay Road and Wasilla areas.

The inmates are all behind bars, but they won’t always be. According to Taylor, 1,418 were released from Valley facilities last year.

He said the statistics are sobering. Ninety-five percent of prisoners will be released, and within a year 48 percent will be back in jail. Within three years, 66 percent will have re-offended. Those recidivism stats came out years ago. Since then, the department has worked to reduce them.

“Obviously, we’re dong something wrong and we need to look at that,” Taylor said of the sentiment in the department.

He said the focus has changed at corrections toward rehabilitation. They’ve rebuilt the programs offered to inmates and changed probation and parole programs to focus on successful reintegration.

“That’s a huge change because as a corrections institution, we’ve always been focused on failure,” he said.

Over the recent decades, the prison population in Alaska has undergone a couple of major shifts, Taylor said. First, the population is getting older, which is to be expected as baby boomers age. But that change means more health care costs.

Second, the prison population has shifted to where the majority of people are incarcerated for non-violent crimes, mostly drug-related offenses. To address that trend, the system has put resources toward drug treatment, opening up 240 residential treatment beds where before there were 60 and working with more and more offenders on an out-patient basis.

Taylor said the proof of its efficacy is in the numbers. Offenders who complete a DOC program are 14 percent less likely to reoffend.

“Which is, for us, incredible,” he said.

But recidivism isn’t just a problem that the prison system can tackle on its own, he said. A recent survey of state and federal laws found 1,600 barriers to felons re-entering society. There are restrictions on where they can live and for whom they can work.

“They’ve got these barriers before they even walk out the door and then you’re wondering why they’re coming back?” Taylor asked.

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