“I would be remiss if I did not speak to the inmate deaths,” DOC Commissioner Jen Winkleman told lawmakers last week, reviewing a likely record-high toll at Alaska prisons last year. “Eleven were natural. Seven were suicides. There was no homicide.”
In her new role as Alaska’s corrections commissioner, Jen Winkleman gave her first presentation to state lawmakers on Thursday, when she appeared before the House Judiciary Committee.
There were a total of 18 deaths in 2022, the highest in the 20 years that the Department of Corrections has kept records on inmates who have died in custody. The next highest years were 16 in 2002, 15 in 2008 and 15 in 2015. It’s likely 2022 could be an all-time high for Alaska inmate deaths, since the prison population was much lower before the department began tracking them.
Winkleman told the committee that information about the 2022 inmate deaths is now on DOC’s website. Despite demands from groups like the Alaska Civil Liberties Union to disclose the causes of death, DOC had kept that secret until now, other than to say some of them had been anticipated. “We have a really unhealthy population that comes to us,” she said. “Stats have shown that 50 percent have some kind of a chronic medical condition beyond a common cold or COVID.”Winkleman also told the committee that two divisions within the department were involved in investigating last year’s deaths – Institutions and Health and Rehabilitative Services, as well as the Department of Public Safety and the state medical examiner.
Winkleman said the department is working with Project 2025, a national program that aims to reduce inmate suicides by 20 percent. Megan Edge, ACLU’s Alaska Prison Project director, says the commissioner’s report to lawmakers outlined a number of positive steps, but it’s not enough.
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