Alaska Governor Sean Parnell's "Choose Respect" campaign may be destroying young native lives and possibly the very fabric of village life.

This opinion piece showed up yesterday over at the Alaska Dispatch:  

I have worked in Bush Alaska for more than 20 years. I started in Nome working for the public defender agency, and then for a tribal consortium. I worked as a prosecutor in Bethel for almost two years and then moved to my own practice, where I travel and represent those in Bush Alaska. I regularly travel from Barrow to Unalaska, and most people I represent live in small villages off the road system. I’m married to a Yup’ik Eskimo and have three young children enrolled in the local tribe who also attend school in Bush Alaska. I have never been more frightened for their future.

Instead of improving education, helping tribes develop their courts or curbing problems like alcohol addiction, our governor has really only given these villages one legacy: more jail time for young Alaska Native males. 

More jail time does not, and will not, help the youth of Bush Alaska.

Is jail time even a deterrent in rural village communities?

First, jail only works when it’s worse than your home. Running water, good food and entertainment is far better than what most have in their villages. Our governor never goes to Tuluksak or Teller. He needs to see how my Gambell friend lived and how his family now survives. He needs to get out and see that too many of our citizens live in Third World conditions. Until we raise the standard of living in Bush Alaska, jail will never be a deterrent. 

One village I’m very familiar with has stopped enforcing state law but has turned to punishing its young men in tribal court. This village could care less what the governor is doing, as they want to enforce their own rules and control their own destiny. One of the reasons given to me: “One week emptying honey buckets is far worse than the luxury of being in jail and eating all that good white-man food.” 

Second, jail only works when it is in combination with strong community condemnation. This is the idea that your community has a vested interest in correcting misbehavior. Community condemnation begins with the idea that the village has agreed to all these laws, and wants to punish its citizens for violations. All of the laws the state imposes on these rural areas were passed in a foreign land by foreign people. The principles and values behind the laws rarely apply to Bush Alaska, and I constantly hear the complaint that no one in these communities had a choice for more laws and more jail. Instead, they are simply watching their young people leave for longer periods of time and then hear it’s called “choose respect.” 

When my Napakiak and Gambell friends committed their crimes, they were arrested in their villages by white, foreign troopers from the outside. They were taken to a jail run largely by white outsiders. They were then taken outside their village to a court, where each was defended and prosecuted by white outsiders. Finally, they were sentenced by judges, also white, from somewhere else. No one spoke their language, no one from their villages participated, and no one even discussed this crime or its impact on their communities.

With these conditions in place is there ANY hope for rehabilitation?

Finally, jail does not work because it is not making our youth better. Time and time again, I see that when my young Native clients get of jail they are lazier, angrier and more criminal-like than when they went in. Jail is not making our youth better — it is destroying their personalities and any chances of living a productive life. 

The governor aggressively seeks convictions for domestic violence, regardless of the circumstances. The deals offered by his prosecutors are too good to pass up, and too many plead guilty without attorneys at their first appearance in court. But the results of such plea are devastating — this Native male will now have what’s called a “barrier crime” on his record, which will preclude him from ever working for what little jobs are in town (clinics/schools). These convictions, like jail, are not making Alaskans better. 

Our jails are filled with young Native males, and it is not slowing down. Want to know if this “choose respect” campaign is working? Just spend a day at court watching the cases in Bethel, Dillingham, Barrow, Nome or Kotzebue. Or ask anyone who works at any jail in Bush Alaska. They know jail is not making them better, and they know we don’t have enough beds to even keep them in Alaska. Native young men are being sent to Colorado in droves. The cost of this is shocking.

This may be hard for many who live in other parts of the country, or even in more urban areas of Alaska, to understand, but there is a lot of truth to what this man is describing.

I know, I've seen it first hand.



I have often worked with at risk youth in this state, many of whom had been taken out of their village for disruptive or dangerous behaviors.

What I discovered is that while at first these kids were quite traumatized by the hospital setting, they often acclimated quickly and many preferred it to village life.

There were numerous entertainment choices, video games, warm clean beds, and often more food available during mealtimes than they had ever seen in their lives.

If it was determined that they could not immediately be returned to the village, they were put into local schools and placed in foster care, most often with non-native families.

The problems would occur once the child had seemed to make progress, and there was a plan in place to reunify them with their biological families. 

Back in the village the child, or teenager, would find themselves hanging around the same old crowd, and getting into the same old kinds of trouble.

So back they go into the hospital in Anchorage, and the process would start all over again.

The reward for their positive behavior in the village was often poor conditions and boredom, and their reward for disruptive behaviors was a return to the city with new clothes, new games, and great food. How does THAT rehabilitate a troubled youth, with behavioral or mental problems?

One kid I worked with was the terror of his town. But here in Anchorage he was a sweetheart who was always wanting to help and who quickly demonstrated that he had NO real mental illness nor developmental delays. So a plan was put into place to get him back home as soon as possible.

He often talked about how much he loved the Dimond Center, which is a mall close to my house, because, in his words, it was "Twice the size of my village!"

When he was returned he took over the only phone they had and answered every incoming call while making numerous calls to people in Anchorage who had worked with him. You know, just to talk.

(I received one late night phone call as well, and he seemed very upbeat though he did want an assurance that the Dimond Center was still there.)

It wasn't long before he started talking about being bored and that he did not like it in his village anymore. About a month later he set fire to an abandoned house, and was carted away in handcuffs by the State Troopers with, from what I understand, was the biggest smile on his face that you could imagine.

Look I applaud the idea behind Parnell's desire to crack down on sexual abuse, but he DESPERATELY needs to understand the community that he is serving, and THAT will never happen while he is sitting behind a desk in Juneau or Anchorage.

Instead of a revolving door of incarceration that will never work, there needs to be a real effort to educate the rural communities in how to interact with members of the opposite sex in a respectful manner, more sex education, and programs in place that work with the community to come up with reasonable and effective deterrents.

Remember many of these communities have functioned for thousands of years without the intrusion of the white man, and they seemed to have survived quite well in a very challenging environment. Perhaps it is time to respect that and work together, rather then forcing them to bend to the will of their white oppressors.