What now for PCC? Trooper training, opioid detox rise to top

PALMER — At the Nov. 9 meeting to brainstorm uses for the sprawling 25-building facility on 640 acres that was Palmer Correctional Center, two ideas came to the fore.

One was to turn it into a training facility for law enforcement.

The other, to turn it into a detox and treatment center, with an emphasis on heroin.

Members of the 100-plus crowd of community leaders put their ideas on sticky notes and affixed them to the walls during the session before a facilitator tallied them up. Other ideas included vocational training and rehabilitation, housing for homeless, manufacturing, tourism, and Christian ministries.

At press time, Alaska Department of Corrections spokesman Corey Allen-Young said the department isn’t favoring any one use for the facility, and commissioner Dean Williams at the meeting promised to consider every idea submitted.

But the most common submissions by far were for law enforcement training and substance abuse treatment programs.

Williams said he’ll ultimately be looking for an “anchor” to place in the facility with multiple other programs to be housed there as well, lauding its potential as a multi-use space shared by governmental, non-profit, and other groups.

In follow-up interviews last week with The Frontiersman, advocates for both ideas shared details about how they think their visions for the facility could help save money and lives.

Alaska Wildlife Trooper Colonel Steve Bear said his travel itinerary for the day following the meeting raised one important way a prison-turned-law-enforcement-training center could save money for the state. He traveled to Sitka to attend the graduation of a list of newly badged Alaskans that sounded like a Christmas carol ending with a pear tree: nine troopers, seven airport police, four municipal police from three PDs, and two village public safety officers.

The training academy is a hard-working center, providing training for troopers and police departments that don’t have their own academy, including those in the Mat-Su Valley.

But it does more than generate newly minted troopers and officers. It’s the state’s center for ongoing inservice training, too.

Bear said flights to Sitka can run upward of $600. A training center in Sutton to provide inservice training could reduce departments’ travel expenses.

For state troopers in particular, who serve wide swaths of Alaska and already face significant travel costs, that’s a drop in dollars spent that could make a significant difference, Bear said.

“We’ve got an entire state to worry about,” Bear said. “Every dollar counts, especially when you’re under budget restrictions. It makes it even harder for us. Anywhere we think we can save money, we’re looking pretty hard at that.”

Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan, who also attended the Nov. 9 meeting, said troopers have already started doing some inservice training, when possible, closer to home, but added they often lack facilities.

He said the inservices ensure that the state’s 280 regular troopers, or “blue shirts,” and 96 wildlife troopers, meet competency requirements set by the Alaska Police Standards Council.

A shared law enforcement training center could serve municipal police departments, troopers and others, he said.

Serena Espinoza, vice president of REAL About Addiction and a board member of Fallen Up Ministries, was also at the meeting, and one of those hoping for a detox and treatment center in the space, particularly to address heroin addiction.

“I believe the facility could provide treatment, work therapy and reentry programs – kind of a one-stop shop for people that need help,” Espinoza said. “That’s my vision.”

Such a plan would need to clear one hurdle though – the community of Sutton has already taken on the question of whether it could support a detox and treatment facility and decided it wasn’t the best placement for one.

The most recent version of the Sutton Comprehensive Plan, in 2009, as well as the town’s applicable SPuD, or Special-Use District agreement with the borough, do not support a treatment facility in the area.

Sutton Community Council member and newly-elected Alaska State House representative George Rauscher said that could change, if planners for a future treatment program build an ongoing relationship with Sutton on par with what it’s used to getting from the former prison.

He cited a decades-long positive working relationship with Palmer Correctional Center that made it an asset, with jobs boosting the local economy and inmates providing community work service in a way that was both safe and beneficial for the community.

“It’s not impossible,” he said. “But it’d have to go through a process, public hearings, getting to know the public, mitigating some of the public’s concerns, working with them to ensure that whatever they agree on will work for the community as well.”

Done right, Rauscher said a treatment program has the potential to save the state some money.

“It’s cheaper to detox people than it is to house them in jail,” he said. “And it’s cheaper to get people off of drugs than it is to continually house them in a public facility like a prison.”

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, between 40 and 60 percent of all drug addiction patients experience a relapse at some point. The institute calls the relapse rate comparable to “other well-characterized chronic medical illnesses – such as diabetes, hypertension, and asthma,” and cites a reduction in crime as a benefit of treatment.

But that raises the point at which the model for addiction, diverges from the disease model for illnesses such as asthma or diabetes. People with diabetes, for example, typically aren’t in danger of committing crimes when they relapse, or when they’re not following their treatment program to manage their disease.

“The relationship between crime and opioid use,” a study based on 151 people with addiction of different types published in the Journal of Addiction Medicine, found that those classified as “heavy opioid users” committed more crimes than “moderate opioid users,” but that moderate opiate users did not commit crimes more often than substance abusers of marijuana, alcohol or other drugs.

Those who were users of multiple drugs, regardless of type, were more likely than any other group to commit theft, and people addicted to alcohol were more likely to commit fraud.

The relationship between addiction and crime makes treatment an attractive front on which to attack crime, but also a potential target for people concerned about crime going up if treatment centers are housed in their communities.

Rauscher said Sutton locals would need to feel reassured that the potential risks of any potential treatment program would be minimized, and that it would provide a benefit to Sutton as well.

In the meantime, the Matanuska-Susitna Valley continues to face a growing heroin addiction problem without benefit of local detox and inpatient treatment programs.

For people like Espinoza, who have been on the front lines of battling heroin addiction in the valley, the idea that the prison could be transformed into a treatment center is hope for a reprieve from an epidemic that continues to damage families and claim lives.

A single live-in detox and treatment program, Ernie Turner in Anchorage, has just 14 beds serving all of Southcentral Alaska for people with drug and alcohol addiction. Some hospitals, such as Providence Alaska Medical Center, offer outpatient treatment.

Espinoza said it’s not nearly enough.

“When people come to us, which is daily, whether it’s an addict or a family member, and they’re reaching out for help, it’s very difficult,” Espinoza said. “There’s only so much you can do, and only so many options available.”

She said she wishes she could connect the people who come to REAL About Addiction and Fallen Up Ministries with a bed in a medically-supervised detox center and treatment program.

Instead, she watches them fall through the cracks.

Kim Whitaker, president of REAL About Addiction, said Alaskans can’t afford to sit by and do nothing while heroin and other opioid addictions claim lives.

“We need big change,” she said. “People are dying weekly here. I know of three OD’s in the last week.”

She said she supports a detox and treatment program at the former Palmer Correctional Center, and that if opened, she would like to work there to help people get clean and transition into healthful, contributing members of their communities.

Espinoza said she’d like to see 100 beds in service of fighting the heroin epidemic, but “realistically, we’ll take what we can obtain.”

Whichever idea takes hold at Dept. of Corrections as the main use of the former prison, Commissioner Williams said the plan is to turn it into a multi-use facility of some kind. The DOC expects to have a detailed plan for the space within a year.

Bear said he’d like to see law enforcement and the state benefit from its use, but added there’s room for more.

“If this facility were available, it might be a good option for us,” Bear said. “This is a big facility. There’s probably more buidings here than any one entity could use.”