Following a spate of inmate deaths and a scathing report on the Department of Corrections, a key state senator says the legislature will consider reforms.
Senate Judiciary Committee chair Lesil McGuire said Tuesday the legislature will consider an omnibus bill addressing reforms, including a comprehensive look at the statutes defining the parameters for incarceration for alcohol abuse. McGuire and other judiciary committee legislators listened to recommendations from the authors of the Department of Corrections administrative review in Anchorage on Tuesday.
Dean Williams, a special assistant to the governor and one of the review authors, said some DOC policies had not been revised since the 1980s.
“Certainly by what we found, there is a public trust issue here,” Williams says. “We have a ways to go on this.”
Williams said failures of prison policies are system-wide and range from lack of training — or no training at all — for corrections officers, to the widespread disparity in interpretation of the alcohol statutes. Williams’ testimony focused on four cases of inmate deaths which could have been avoided, had prison staff been better trained.
About two years ago, Davon Mosely, a young man who was not charged with a crime but was taken into protective custody on a welfare check, died in a solitary cell after going days without needed medication. Through a series of graphic photos taken from prison video, Williams showed the physical deterioration of Mosely, who died of internal bleeding, without medical attention.
McGuire said many people now incarcerated in Alaska prisons have mental health issues.
“It’s been an evolution, it didn’t happen overnight,” she said. “My belief is it is a combination of factors, but certainly the cuts to the community health system have left the mentally ill of Alaska without a home, without a place. At least two of these cases were those who were either had the disease of alcoholism or had a mental illness, and in both cases, neither had been charged with a crime.”
McGuire said at this time, there is no indication of criminal behavior.
“I haven’t seen anything that I have looked at that to me shows and intentional murder,” she said. “What I think you have is a systematic breakdown. You have lack of training, you have the timing of the training versus when the individual is asked to take the job, you have rules and policies that are arguably not being followed in the best interest of safety.”
She said Davon Mosely’s fiancee and mother of his three children has requested the legislative package be named Davon’s Law.
The independent review, released in November, was conducted at the request of Gov. Bill Walker.
