Monday, May 4, 2020

Winner of Pulitzer Prize for Public Service reveals Alaska's "two-tier" justice system, which barely serves rural areas

I'm devastated by what this multi-part series discloses about crime and justice system deficits in rural Alaska, but I'm so delighted that the Anchorage Daily News and Pro Publica have been awarded the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for their "Lawless:  Sexual Violence in Alaska" coverage.  The Anchorage Daily News describes the series in its coverage of the award:
“Lawless” was the first comprehensive investigation to document Alaska’s failing, two-tiered criminal justice system, in which many rural communities are denied access to first responders. The project evolved from reporting on similar issues by the Daily News in 2018, and the partnership continues in 2020.

The collaboration’s first story, based on more than 750 public records requests and interviews, found that one in three rural Alaska communities has no local law enforcement of any kind. These communities are also among the nation’s most vulnerable, with very high rates of sexual assault, suicide and domestic violence. The series’ second major installment found that many Alaska villages, desperate for police of any kind, hired officers convicted of felonies, domestic violence, assault and other offenses that would make them ineligible to work in law enforcement or even as security guards anywhere else in the country.

Another major story revealed how the state’s 40-year-old Village Public Safety Officer program, designed to recruit villagers to work as lifesaving first responders, has failed. The series documented how Alaska State Troopers resources have been deployed largely to patrol areas on the road system, and concluded with a set of practical solutions based on interviews with experts, village leaders, Alaska’s congressional delegation and sexual assault survivors.
In the wake of the investigation, U.S. Attorney General William Barr visited Alaska last spring. He declared an emergency for public safety in rural Alaska and pledged more than $52 million as part of a sweeping plan to better support law enforcement in Alaska Native communities. The plan included three new federal prosecutors to focus on rural Alaska, the hiring of 20 more officers, upgrading public safety infrastructure for Alaska villages and expanding tribal victim services. The U.S. attorney’s office in Alaska announced it would hire rural prosecutors, and some communities will receive Alaska State Troopers posts for the first time. 
I'm surprised that this story (and the series on which it reports) doesn't say more about Alaska Native women in particular; they are mentioned only in this prior paragraph. 

Reporters and editors primarily responsible for this reporting include Kyle Hopkins, David Hulen, and Tess Williams of the Anchorage Daily News.  For Pro Publica, Charles Ornstein helped edit the series, and Adriana Gallardo and Nadia Sussman contributed reporting and photography.

The series confirms and illustrates a lot of my own theorizing about rural difference  and disadvantage over the years, especially in relation to the presence of law, legal actors, the state.  Perhaps most on point is "The Rural Lawscape:  Space Tames Law Tames Space," which appeared in a legal geography collection published by Stanford University Press, The Expanding Spaces of Law:  A Timely Legal Geography (2014).  At the workshop where the scholars who participated in that collection came together to discuss our contributions, I was nearly laughed out of the room for insisting that rural places were more lawless than urban ones, that the state struggled to police these areas.  All of the other legal geographers there were coming from an urban perspective.  I was the sole ruralist, though one observer, a legal scholar who had grown up in a small town in North Dakota, was perhaps my most vocal critic that day.  He refused to grasp the difference between small town America and remote rural, open country, which is exceedingly hard to police because of sheer space/material distance. As I said then, it can be policed, but doing so is costly, in personnel and/or technology.

Other work I've done over the last 15 years that is also consistent with and relevant to this reporting:  "Place Matters:  Domestic Violence and Rural Difference," "Gender, Geography and Rural Justice," "Toward a Feminist Theory of the Rural," "Law Stretched Thin," and "Legal Deserts:  A Multi-State Perspective on Rural Access-to-Justice," among others.

I'm reminded of this passage from my 2006 article, "Rural Rhetoric." The case is One v. State, and it was decided by the Alaska Supreme Court in 1979 (592 P.2d 1193, 1195).  In it, the Court observed that residents of a rural fishing camp were more threatened by an escaped criminal than those in more developed areas, because those in the fishing village could not call nearby police and receive a quick response.  I believe the determination of relatively vulnerability or threat was relevant to sentencing.

Post script:  The series, "Alaska Daily" (2022-23) is, according to wikipedia, based on the reporting that won the Pulitzer, but the television series features a much greater focus--indeed, a nearly exclusive focus--on missing and murdered Alaska Native women.  Rural spatiality and corruption among local law enforcement are present, too.  

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