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December 26, 2008
Alaska's prison population falls
Fairbanks Daily News-Miner
Alaska's prison population falls
The Associated Press
Published Thursday, December 25, 2008
ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- There are fewer prisoners under the watch of the Alaska Department of Corrections this year even though there have been more bookings.
The number of prisoners - including Alaskans being held here and in prisons outside the state, halfway houses and under electronic monitoring - fell about 5 percent, from 5,397 in December 2007 to 5,110 this week.
The number of prisoners within the state was 3,718 last December. By November, that figure also was down about 5 percent, to 3,528.
"We've never seen a decline before," said corrections Commissioner Joe Schmidt. "We've seen flat growth for short periods of time, and we've seen slow growth for short periods of time, but our projections called for between 150 and 200 prisoners' increase this year, and instead of that we actually went the other way by a couple of hundred."
Schmidt met with the Alaska Judicial Council this week to discuss the phenomenon.
Inmate numbers in Alaska and across the country have consistently been on the rise.
Schmidt said there is still no shortage of people entering Alaska's justice system. This year the department has so booked about 250 more people into jails than by the same time last year.
"The number of actual remands is up this year over last year a little bit, so that's obviously not it," said Sam Edwards, deputy commissioner of operations. "There are a number less revocations from probation and parole this year over last year. That, I can't help but believe, has an impact on our overall numbers."
A study by the Judicial Council released in early 2007 found that two-thirds of prisoners were back in prison inside of three years - with the majority back inside of six months.
"That's a plague in our system," Schmidt said. "That's going to cause us to always be crowded, so my hope is that this reduction is somehow related to recidivism."
Probation revocations, which occur when offenders violate their probation terms, are down by about 240 this year because of what Schmidt attributes to an increase in the number of probation officers hired.
Recidivism rates also can be affected by helping prisoners reintegrate into society by placing them in halfway houses in the community before they are released, according to Edwards, who said the department has worked to put more prisoners into such programs.
Larry Cohn, the judicial council's executive director says one possibility - one that the council is planning to examine - is whether people are getting out on bail more frequently or spending less time in custody before their cases are closed.
Increased plea dealing in Alaska also could have the effect of defendants being incarcerated for shorter periods, he said.
"You had many more cases and fewer people and resources to deal with them, and so increased charge bargaining would seem to be a natural consequence of that circumstance," Cohn said.
http://newsminer.com/news/2008/dec/25/alaskas-prison-population-falls/
Posted by lois at December 26, 2008 10:51 PM