Conference papers

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  Professionalism in the Alaska Department of Corrections: Education and Experience [paper]

  Schafer E. N/A

  A survey of Alaska corrections personnel reveals that employees in all classifications tend to have more than the minimum education or experience required for their positions. More than 75 percent of college-educated corrections personnel earned degrees and more than 40 percent acquired their experience outside Alaska. The advantages and disadvantages of hiring large numbers of employees whose education and experience were gained elsewhere are discussed in the context of the unique problems of correctional service delivery in so large and diverse a state.

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  A Preliminary Assessment of the Impact on Alaska of Participation in the Interstate Compact

  Schafer E. N/A and Leslie Wenderoff

  The Interstate Compact for the Supervision of Parolees and Probationers is an agreement whereby one state agrees to provide supervision for offenders on community release from other states. Participants in the interstate compact agree that any state will accept supervision of a parolee or probationer providing the offender has proper residence either as a resident of that state or with family, and that he/she is able to find employment. Major increases in Alaska's prison population over the past decade have been accompanied by corresponding increases in the number of persons under probation/parole supervision and in the caseloads of individual probation officers. Using a master listing of all persons under the jurisdiction of the Alaska Department of Corrections from 1976 to 1983, the Justice Center at University of Alaska Anchorage made a preliminary assessment of the impact on Alaska of participation in the Interstate Compact. From 1976 to 1983, Alaska processed 1,551 offenders through the Interstate Compact, of whom 999 were received for supervision from other states (64.4% of the total) and 552 (35.6%) were sent to other states. Based on this data, the interstate compact has not yet been an equitable arrangement for any city in Alaska: each city has seen a greater number of incoming than of outgoing transfers.

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  The Interrelationship between Alaska State Law and the Social Systems of Modern Eskimo Villages in Alaska: History, Present and Future Considerations

  Stephen Conn

  Yup'ik and Inupiat villages in Alaska (the territory and the state) experienced a process of legal socialization that was strongly influenced by serious constraints in the allocation of resources. These constraints resulted in legal socialization into what was in essence a second legal state system and provided an opportunity for cultural autonomy by Eskimo villages, even though this de facto situation did not recognize these groups as sovereign tribes. The actual implementation of a single full-blown legal system in village Alaska in the mid-1970s has resulted in a loss of control and serious efforts by Alaska villages to reinstitute village law ways as tribal legal process.

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  Merging Social Control and Criminal Law in Small Eskimo Villages in Alaska — Can It Be Done? The Portrait of the Inner Logic of Social Control Governing Drinking Behavior and Its Relationship to Criminal Law Process

  Conn N/A

  The legal reaction by Yup'ik and Inupiat Eskimos in Alaska to drunken behavior has changed over time from one that penalizes drunkenness to one that seeks to prevent drinking. This new therapeutic approach interferes with any preemptive aggressive response by persons seeking to control an intoxicated person. Moreover, since the law perceives an intoxicated person as sick rather than bad, the traditional perception that an intoxicated person is not his normal self may be reinforced by the law. Indeed, a drunken person may act aggressively without fear of later community blame. The author concludes that the law should re-orient Native community members to understand that there is a connection between the sober and intoxicated self.

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  Discretion, Due Process, and the Prison Discipline Committee

  Schafer E. N/A

  Prison discipline received considerable attention from both the courts and professional organizations during the decade of the 1970s. It was widely assumed that the due process requirements which resulted from judicial review coupled with the promulgation of model discipline standards and procedures would limit the broad discretionary authority found in the traditional prison disciplinary process. A case study of the activities of one prison discipline committee suggests that these external pressures have had less impact on decision-making than such internal pressures as overcrowding. Due process requirements have not greatly inhibited the exercise of discretion in the prison discipline process.

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  Bush Justice and Development in Alaska: Why Legal Process in Village Alaska Has Not Kept up with Changing Social Needs [original paper]

  Stephen Conn

  This paper analyzes the evolution of the working legal process in the predominantly Alaska Native villages of rural Alaska after Alaska statehood. Replacement of territorial government by highly centralized state justice agencies led to a weakening in the working relationship between formal law and extralegal mechanisms such as the village council. This change coincided with development and other changes which demanded more formal legal presence in villages rather than less. The paper reviews the fate of various bush justice reform efforts made by state agencies and efforts by villages to respond to justice needs. The author suggests that the inadequacy of legal process in village Alaska is not due primarily to language problems or Native confusion about Western law; rather, the "bush justice problem" is caused by a lack of resources, a lack of legal planning for development, and the state governmental system's lack of accountability to its rural constituency. The author recommends experimentation at village level, better planning, and greater autonomy for villages.

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  Bush Justice and Development in Alaska: Why Legal Process in Village Alaska Has Not Kept up with Changing Social Needs [revision]

  Stephen Conn

  This paper analyzes the evolution of the working legal process in the predominantly Alaska Native villages of rural Alaska after Alaska statehood. Replacement of territorial government by highly centralized state justice agencies led to a weakening in the working relationship between formal law and extralegal mechanisms such as the village council. This change coincided with development and other changes which demanded more formal legal presence in villages rather than less. The paper reviews the fate of various bush justice reform efforts made by state agencies and efforts by villages to respond to justice needs. The author suggests that the inadequacy of legal process in village Alaska is not due primarily to language problems or Native confusion about Western law; rather, the "bush justice problem" is caused by a lack of legal planning for development, the state governmental system's lack of accountability to its rural constituency, and a lack of control by villages over the mixture of formal law, extralegal authority and nonlegal social control appropriate to their needs, both present and future.

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  Prisoner Behavior, Staff Response: Using Prison Discipline Records

  Schafer E. N/A

  Official prison misconduct records are used to test some of the assumptions inherent in previous research based upon such records. Many of these studies used prison data to measure changes in prisoner behavior, while others used them to indicate changes in the actions and attitudes of prison staff. Analysis of one prison's official discipline records over a 30-month period reveals flaws in both approaches. The same data cannot serve to draw conclusions about both groups though they can provide information about both when supplemented with other research methods. Conclusions drawn from official prison misconduct records are more reliable when used to assess the end of the prison discipline process — assessing discretionary decisionmaking by staff — than at the beginning of the process — evaluating prisoner behavior.

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  Evaluation Capacity Building in Pretrial Diversion Services: A Case Study

  Serena Shores Partch, Steven M. Edwards, and Knowlton W. Johnson

  Despite increasing use of adult pretrial diversion programs in recent years, the limited capacity to produce, analyze, and translate evaluation data in pretrial diversion programs has frequently resulted in policy and programmatic decisions being made on the basis of little or no empirical information. This paper presents a case study of the development of an evaluation system for the Alaska Pretrial Intervention (PTI) program of the Alaska Department of Law which can generate timely results for policymaking as well as monitor staff productivity.

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  An Analysis of Outpatient Accident Trends in Two Dry Eskimo Towns as a Measure of Alternative Police Responses to Drunken Behavior

  Stephen Conn and Bonnie Boedeker

  Two rural Eskimo towns of approximately 3,000 persons each have banned the sale but not the use of alcoholic beverages in their communities. In the town of Bethel, police pick up intoxicated persons and transport them to a sleep-off and treatment center. In the town of Barrow, police take intoxicated persons into protective custody. Each town uses its police practice as an alternative to arrests for drunken behavior, decriminalized by the 1972 Alaska State Legislature. At least half of the adult population is picked up in each place. The authors seek to measure the impact of these differing approaches on violence related to alcohol use by employing Indian Health Service data in lieu of poorly maintained police data.

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  Converging Science and Practice in Analyzing Evaluation Data

  Johnson W. N/A

  A strategy is presented for converging science and practice which focuses on the needs of scientists and policymakers in analyzing evaluation data. Emphasis is placed on employing powerful statistical techniques that maximize the evaluators' confidence in their results. Attention is also drawn to the need for producing results which can be easily communicated to and interpreted by policymakers. In regard to these requirements, the discussion concerns application of four statistical techniques: factor analysis, Guttman scalogram analysis, multiple classification analysis and cross-break analysis. Each statistical analysis technique is described as to its value in evaluation research for dealing with problems known to inhibit the convergence of science and practice. The application of these techniques is demonstrated by illustrations taken from previous evaluation studies. The paper concludes with implications for stimulating the extent and quality of evaluation use.

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  Law Enforcement Selection Practices in the U.S.A. and Canada

  Johnson W. N/A

  Selection practices in law enforcement have been said to be one of the most complex facets of personnel management. In an effort to document the state of this complexity internationally, the study presented provides state of the art information about police personnel practices in the USA and Canada.

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  Utilization of Research in Combating Violence in Alaska: An Ecological Perspective

  Johnson W. N/A

  Research diffusion and use has increasingly become an interest of social scientists and policymakers. This interest on the part of policymakers is evidenced by the results of this study. In particular, high level administrators in 268 human service agencies of Alaska reported moderate to high use of statistics, evaluation studies and other social science research in making pol icy decisions about combating violence. Findings are also presented that point to specific facilitators and inhibitors of research use. The conclusions and policy implications highlight how the results of this research utilization study can direct the formulation of a research and development agenda at the agency and state level.

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  Profiles of Prison Visitors

  Schafer E. N/A

  An exploratory survey of visitors to two men's prisons finds that the visitors differ in some significant ways from prisoners' families previously described in the literature. The results raise some questions about the correlation that has been established between visits and post-release success and provoke suggestions for in-depth research into visitor/prisoner relationships.

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  Alaskan Bush Justice: Legal Centralism Confronts Social Science Research and Village Alaska [1982 revision]

  Stephen Conn

  This paper traces the history of the bush justice system in rural Alaska, describes the relationship between traditional Alaska Native dispute resolution mechanisms and the state criminal justice system, and analyzes bush justice research between 1970 and 1981 and its effects on state agency policies and changes in the rural justice system. Innovations by researchers were well-received by villagers and field-level professionals, but not by agency policymakers. Hence, most reforms made in the 1970s had vanished by the early 1980s. The author concludes that further reforms will be ineffective unless Alaska Natives are drawn into the decisionmaking process as co-equal players negotiating on legal process from positions of power.

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  Town Law and Village Law: Satellite Villages, Bethel and Alcohol Control in the Modern Era — The Working Relationship and Its Demise

  Stephen Conn

  In southwestern Alaska the underpinning of the working relationship between official law and village social control was tied to alcohol control. This paper examines the breakdown of this relationship in the 1960s and its impact on village law. It also assesses the role of town liquor policy and town police and treatment resources on alcohol-related violence in the villages in the 1970s. It argues that a recent movement to reinstitute prohibition of importation and sale in many villages must be understood as a desire for renewal of a working relationship between two centers of legal authority.

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  A Socialist System of Justice: Observations from a Visit to the U.S.S.R.

  Endell V. N/A

  This paper presents observations of the Soviet system of justice, including the courts, the procuracy (described as a combination of a prosecutor or district attorney and a police investigator), criminal trials, sentencing, and corrections. The paper is based upon a three-week visit by the author to the USSR as one of 24 American participants in a criminal justice study program. In all, just over three weeks were spent in the Soviet Union including lengthy visits in Leningrad, Moscow, and Tallin (then-capital of Soviet Estonia). The opportunity of first hand observation and direct interaction with Soviet policy and law makers and Soviet academicians has done much toward destroying myths about Soviet justice practices.

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  Alaskan Bush Justice: Legal Centralism Confronts Social Science Research and Village Alaska [original paper]

  Stephen Conn

  This paper traces the history of the bush justice system in rural Alaska, describes the relationship between traditional Alaska Native dispute resolution mechanisms and the state criminal justice system, and analyzes bush justice research between 1970 and 1981 and its effects on state agency policies and changes in the rural justice system. Innovations by researchers were well-received by villagers and field-level professionals, but not by agency policymakers. Hence, most reforms made in the 1970s had vanished by the early 1980s. The author concludes that further reforms will be ineffective unless Alaska Natives are drawn into the decisionmaking process as co-equal players negotiating on legal process from positions of power.

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  The Social Context of Pinball: The Making of a Setting and Its Etiquette

  Conn N/A

  Pinball and the settings in which it is played are perceived by the public as having an aura of deviance. The perception derives in part from behavior observed in pinball parlors, but goes beyond the reality of the pinball setting. Public labeling of pinball, with its taint of illegitimacy, molds the etiquette of pinball and acts to repel or attract potential players. Recent efforts by industry to improve the image of pinball aim to dispel negative attitudes toward pinball, thereby widening the social acceptance and use of pinball in public settings.

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  The Resilience of Indigenous Law in Alaska and the New States of Africa South of the Sahara

  James S. Opolot

  Comparative analysis of not only criminal justice administration, but also efforts to modify existing legal systems, are informative to the extent that they allow readers to broaden their perspectives and to learn lessons from other countries. This paper seeks to elaborate on this statement by comparison of the ways in which customary law in Alaska and the young nations of sub-Saharan Africa has been become living law, that is, law which dominates life itself even though it has not been written into the official law of the state.

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  Crisis Intervention: The Challenge of Stress

  John E. Angell

  Most people agree that the stress connected with police work affects the way police officers relate to the people they contact and serve. While many assume the primary source of stress on police officers lies in factors related to police job activities, the author argues that the primary factors creating stress for police officers are related to traditional police organizational and management philosophy and related practices.

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  Police: An Agenda for the 80's

  John E. Angell

  Arguing that the police field suffers from excessively narrow frames of reference and perspectives, this paper asserts that a top priority for the 1980s police agenda must be on establishing a broader perspective for the development of theory and study of policing and explores the implications of those values and trends which the author contends will shape policing for the remainder of the 20th century, identified as (1) demographic changes, (2) the diminishing quantity of fossil fuels, (3) the accelerating rate of monetary inflation, (4) rapid developments in technology (5) changing attitudes toward the acceptance of a conflict model for achieving social change objectives, (6) continuing democratization and equalization of human society and its institutions, (7) increased danger and damaging consequences from natural and manmade disasters, and (8) need for higher levels of knowledge and skill for performing future police responsibilities.

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  Police Organization and Community Relations

  John E. Angell

  Police scholars approached the decade of the 1970s with optimistic expectations that the use of alternative organizational designs could improve the responsiveness and effectiveness of American policing. These expectations were not fulfilled. The 1970s ended with the traditional bureaucratic philosophy more firmly entrenched in the police managerial psyche than it was in the 1960s. The author argues that this is not because the traditional bureaucratic arrangements are superior, and proposes specific changes to police organization to improve community relations and the effectiveness of the police function.

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  Crime and the Justice System in Rural Alaskan Villages

  John E. Angell

  Approximately 20 percent of Alaska's population live in small remote Native villages. Very little factual data regarding contemporary criminal justice operations has been compiled. For example, comprehensive data concerning present crime rates, policing methods, and local deviancy control mechanisms in rural Alaska simply do not exist. The research underlying this paper was an exploratory effort to begin the collection of crime and justice information which can be used in criminal justice policy development in rural areas of the state by the State of Alaska.

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  Developing Prosecutorial Charging Guidelines: A Case Study

  Ring Smith N/A

  In July 1975, Alaska's attorney general announced his intention to end plea bargaining by assistant attorneys in all criminal cases involving violations of Alaska criminal law. While the major thrust of this policy change was intended to halt negotiations over sentencing, the policy also dealt — albeit less intensely — with charge bargaining. This paper describes efforts ot the Alaska Department of Law's Criminal Division to enhance the effectiveness of plea bargaining policy through the development of uniform, statewide charging guidelines, including the development of Project PROSECUTOR (PROSecutor Enhanced Charging Using Tested Options and Research), and presents preliminary findings from the project's prosecutorial screening intake component.