State Senate approves changes to crime bill - Fairbanks Daily News-Miner

FAIRBANKS — The Senate on Friday passed an update to last year’s criminal justice reform bill that restores prison time for petty theft and low-level felonies.

Senate Bill 54, authored by Sen. John Coghill, R-North Pole, seeks to address outcry from the public, law enforcement and prosecutors against the changes made in the bill.

Coghill also authored last year’s bill, Senate Bill 91, that reworked sentencing guidelines to curb prison population growth, particularly for people awaiting trials and nonviolent offenders. Some of the savings were intended to be put toward drug and alcohol treatment.

During the Senate debate Friday, Coghill said some of the changes weren’t changing criminals’ behaviors.

“The people of Alaska are struggling with people who will steal to keep their drug habits going, the alcohol issue in Alaska is still kicking the feet out from under us in so many ways,” he said. “What we tried to do diverted some of those in the criminal justice reform, but we found some of the diversion tactics weren’t working the way we had hoped to.”

Senate Bill 91 did away with prison time for Class C felonies, though it did have a range of as many as 18 months of suspended time that could be triggered by violating probation or committing a new crime.

The rewrite passed Friday would institute a range of prison time for Class C felonies from no time to a year behind bars. For petty theft of less than $250, the bill institutes a sentencing guideline of five days of jail time or less for the second offense and as many as 10 days for the third or subsequent offenses.

The proposed changes have met with some opposition. Critics said it would undercut the savings that are intended to make long-term changes in criminal behavior by providing substance abuse treatment.

Sen. Lyman Hoffman was the only legislator to voice dissent to the bill and he said it focused on the change to Class C felonies. In the Senate Finance Committee he had offered an amendment to reduce the maximum sentence to 120 days, but ultimately withdrew the amendment before it went to a vote.

“I agree with just about every provision within this particular piece of legislation,” he said on the Senate floor. “The Alaska Native Federation strongly opposed this particular provision, and even though I had the necessary votes in Senate Finance to come up with a compromise of 120 days, I did not offer that amendment.”

On Friday he said that, though he believed the change was necessary, he worried that making it in the Senate Finance Committee would have tied up the bill and delayed its arrival in the House. He said he believed the House — which last year was a strong supporter of Senate Bill 91 — would take up the issue.

Sen. Click Bishop, R-Fairbanks, said he hoped this change satisfied the opponents of the Legislature’s criminal justice reform efforts and that the bill could get to work.

“Hopefully this will put some of those fears to rest going forward,” he said, “and we all now need to take a step back and let this bill do its job. It’s just been in law for eight months and it hasn’t been fully implemented. Let’s let it have some time to work so we can move Alaska forward with public safety and the treatment of people that need it in drug and alcohol abuse.”

Contact staff writer Matt Buxton at 459-7544. Follow him on Twitter:@FDNMpolitics.

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