Kirill Klippel gets released from a halfway house, in just a few hours.

Twenty-one years old, Klippel’s been in the corrections system since he was 18. On the phone at the Cordova Center (the halfway house, or “community residential center” in the parlance of the corrections community), Klippel explains he was kicked out of his house in Eagle River when he turned 18, while he was a senior at Chugiak High School. He headed to Anchorage, homeless, and stayed at Covenant House, which helped him transfer to West High School.

“I had to make new friends; I was at a new high school with people I didn’t know,” Klippel says. “I didn’t know anything about Anchorage.” He started hanging out at the People Mover Transit Center on Sixth Avenue. Some of the friends he made there had a less than desirable influence on him. One thing led to another, and Klippel was eventually locked up for theft in the second degree. Since his incarceration and his stay at the Cordova Center, Klippel’s been working on getting his GED by taking classes at Nine Star Enterprises, and he’s almost there. “I’m looking at my life, telling myself it’s about time I start doing things for myself, stop hanging out with the wrong crowd,” he says. “I’m trying to get out of jail, get a good, steady paying job, find low income housing, and try to do my two year probation.”

Klippel’s plan is to go to UAA this fall; he hopes to get a job at one of the stores on campus, and live in a campus dormitory. But when he’s released from the Cordova Center tonight, he doesn’t know where he’ll be sleeping. “I’m trying to find a place to stay where there’s good influences,” he says. “But if worse comes to worse I’ll stay at a homeless shelter if I have to. You gotta do what you gotta do, I guess.”

His story isn’t uncommon. Re-entry into society is difficult for released prisoners, and as a result, according to the Department of Corrections, two-thirds of offenders in Alaska end up back in the corrections system within three years (in comparison, Florida’s recidivism rate is one out of three). Consider that statistic, then consider the fact the Department of Corrections released an average of 287 felons a month in 2008.

The problem is evident to the Department of Corrections as well.

Under former Governor Frank Murkowski, most rehabilitation programs—substance abuse treatment, sex offender treatment, parenting, anger management—were slashed from the correctional institutions (the exception being the federally funded residential substance abuse treatment).

When Sarah Palin was elected governor in 2006, she appointed longtime DOC employee Joe Schmidt to the post of Commissioner of Corrections. The first thing Schmidt did was craft a new, three-pronged mission statement for DOC: providing secure confinement, reformative programs, and a process of supervised community reintegration.

“We tackled them in that order,” Schmidt says, starting with institutional staffing, grievance procedures, and making sure the discipline process was fair. He was still working with the previous administration’s budget, so instituting new programs wasn’t yet an option. But he could make sure the prisons were running smoothly.

Meanwhile, Schmidt hired mental health clinician Bryan Brandenburg as Deputy Director of Institutions, and Brandenburg began developing a program plan for rehabilitation that DOC could present to the legislature for funding.

As the architect of the rehabilitative programs DOC wanted to implement, Brandenburg examined programs that had proven to lower recidivism rates in other jurisdictions. “We made sure all of them had research to back them up,” he says.

Schmidt took the program plan to the legislature and it agreed to fund $3 million in institutional programs—“a fantastic success,” Schmidt says. The subsequent year was spent implementing the programs: substance abuse treatment, sex offender treatment programs, parenting classes, family reunification programs, education and vocational learning programs.

“Even though we have these programs in place, we can’t really say they work—the real test is do these people come back to jail,” Brandenburg says.

So DOC is returning to the legislature next month with numbers in hand—numbers that are being crunched right now. “We’re going to go there with numbers on people who’ve gone through our programs, those who’ve come back to jail and those who didn’t,” Schmidt says. “We’re going to be honest about the ones that did and talk the best we can about why, and if we stay ahead of it and honestly report numbers good and bad, we have a much better chance of retaining these programs if we can tell the legislature, ‘here’s what we think went wrong.’”

That covers the first two elements of DOC’s mission (and the institutional programs are an element of successful re-entry into the community) but the supervised community reintegration is just now beginning to get off the ground.

Carmen Gutierrez was a criminal defense attorney in Alaska for 24 years, first as a public defender, then as a federal public defender, then—for the last decade of that career—in her own practice. “I represented some serious, serious cases in the state,” she says.

Gutierrez was in the middle of one of those—a double homicide and sexual assault trial—when her brother died. The timing of the events led Gutierrez to spend some time reflecting on things, including her career.

“I decided to reexamine what I was doing,” she says. “I was also very frustrated with the criminal justice system; I saw my clients going to jail and absolutely nothing was happening inside the system to change the problems and the thinking of these people that led them to the criminal behavior. When we released them from prison they were coming out worse than they were before, and they weren’t in great shape when they went into prison.”

Gutierrez took some time off, doing a little criminal defense work for the Office of Public Advocacy. But the institutional issues were still on her mind.

“Everybody was becoming aware of what happens when you don’t do anything inside of institutions to try to change the behavior that led people into the problem in the first place. We weren’t doing anything to promote public safety and make our communities better. All we were doing was spending a ton of money and getting very little in return for it. So I decided that rather than walking away from the problem, I would see what we might be able to do to make our system better in reforming offenders, and better at its ultimate goal, which is promoting public safety.”

Gutierrez called up Commissioner Schmidt for coffee; she’d heard about Schmidt and his team putting the rehabilitative programs back in the prisons, and that there was a serious effort by the new administration to address the issue of recidivism. Schmidt offered her a job as his special assistant, and Gutierrez started six months ago, primarily working to put a re-entry system in place.

“This administration’s philosophy is re-entry begins when you walk in the jailhouse door,” Gutierrez says.

Four months ago the Department of Corrections established a re-entry unit at the Spring Creek Correctional Center in Seward. The program is for inmates who have less than 18 months until their date of release. There they receive job training, their substance abuse and mental health needs are assessed, and they go through family reunification and life skills programs. DOC is also beefing up its educational and vocational programs, and working on a system to track the individuals going through the programs, so they can be tracked for three years to determine whether the programs are truly effective at reducing recidivism.

Among the re-entry programs begun by the DOC thus far, one sticks out: the YK Delta Sex Offender Program at a community residential center in Bethel. “This program to me is the best example of restorative justice I’ve ever seen,” Gutierrez says. “The men who are in the sex offender treatment program are doing work for the Women’s Resource Center—they fish, provide fish for the women; they did carpentry work on the new Women’s Resource Center that just opened. And the Women’s Resource Center really supports them. It’s a way for these men to give back.”

Still, the state’s re-entry programs are lacking, so much so that we don’t qualify for federal funding from the Second Chance Act of 2007, a program that President George W. Bush signed into law to provide funds to slash recidivism by 50 percent within a five-year period.

Gutierrez is in the process of establishing the prerequisites to receive funds from the Second Chance Act. First, the act requires a re-entry task force of relevant agencies, with the support of the governor.

“Prisoner re-entry isn’t just a DOC problem,” Gutierrez says. “It’s a problem where the solution lies with the Department of Health and Social Services, the Department of Education, the Department of Labor, the Alaska Housing Finance Corporation, and DOC. What other states have recognized is you need to bring all of these heads of these departments together to work collaboratively on solutions to the problems.”

The process has begun, she says. There are already a number of independent community organizations that provide services for prisoner re-entry, many of whom are involved with the Alaska Coalition for Prisoner Re-entry.

“One of the things we’re making a lot of progress on is creating a statewide stakeholder coalition, that’s not this loosely knit group of community groups. We get the state involved, the community involved, and under the auspices of the heads of these stakeholder departments we create working groups addressing the issues of housing, employment, and sober and mental health support.” The state agencies are meeting in late January to solidify this coalition.

The other element the state needs to qualify for Second Chance Act funding is a strategic action plan to cut recidivism in half within five years, which Gutierrez is working on as well.

In a perfect world, Gutierrez envisions a one-stop shop where individuals would find information on housing, employment, clothing, etc.; this sort of re-entry portal doesn’t currently exist.

She’s also examining models that have been successful elsewhere. One idea she’s researching is the establishment of Restorative Justice Panels. As a pilot program, the Restorative Justice Panel would launch in a community with a high number of released felons, like Mountain View or Fairview. It would consist of two community members, two members of one or two churches in the community, an APD officer, and a probation officer.

If an offender wanted to take advantage of the Restorative Justice Panel, he or she would meet once a week with the panel and talk to them about their re-entry challenges, as well as reconnect them with their community by interacting with the panel.

“What I’ve learned in talking to lots of judges, a lot of people coming out of jail, is they just can’t navigate the system, and they just give up,” Gutierrez says. “Imagine, you have to take the bus to the DMV, to social security, to all these job interviews, to go look for an apartment; riding the bus is a daunting challenge—where do I get the schedule? They don’t know you can call a number for the bus service. It’s little things, those kinds of tidbits of information, that if there was somebody who would take the time to share that, it would make a big difference.”

Gutierrez says that Mayor Sullivan has expressed his support for the Restorative Justice Panel idea. It would connect offenders with supportive members of the community they’re in, as well as establish a positive relationship with a law enforcement officer. “It’s a way to build connections, for that person to feel tied to their community,” Gutierrez says. “When people feel connected to their community they’re less likely to violate their community.”

She’s also looking at a program in Hawaii called Project HOPE. A large percentage of petitions to revoke probation—51 percent—are for multiple technical violations of probation. The model from Hawaii—Hawaii’s Opportunity Probation with Enforcement—was launched in 2004 by a judge named Steven Alm. HOPE enforces probation requirements by immediately punishing technical violations with short jail stays—weekends, for instance, if the probationer is employed—to prevent the multiple technical violations that land so many probationers back in prison doing serious time. It’s estimated to have reduced recidivism by half, and caused an 80 percent reduction in missed probation appointments.

In Wasilla, construction is under way on the $250 million Goose Creek Correctional Center, which will have 1,536 beds to house male prisoners doing long-term sentences. In Alaska, according to a March 2009 study by the Pew Center on the States, one in 36 residents of Alaska is under the control of the Department of Corrections, whether it’s incarceration, probation or parole. The national average is one in 31 adults under correctional control.

Much of this is due to the tough-on-crime stance adopted by states during the 1980s and 1990s, when a high number of nonviolent offenders began to be incarcerated. The effect has been a boom in prison construction at a time when states really can’t afford it; besides the construction, DOC estimates it costs $44,000 to $46,000 a year to house a prisoner in Alaska.

“Nationwide, because state budgets can no longer accommodate the growing incarceration rate, lots of people are coming together to see how to do this better,” Gutierrez says.

“My only opinion on the wisdom of [locking up large numbers of nonviolent offenders] comes from the results that we’re reaping; it seems to me it hasn’t worked very well given our high rates of recidivism, and how our state budgets have grown to accommodate the prison population. If we can figure out how to effectively reassimilate people, fewer budget dollars will go to corrections, and more to education or other priorities.”

bjk@anchoragepress.com