OPINION: Failing to meet the needs of children is failing Alaska

He said he lived in upwards of 11 foster homes. Only “six or seven” stood out because he can only remember the “really bad ones.” In one of his last homes, the father of the family he lived with beat him with bungee cords or the branch of a willow tree for regular childlike behavior, like not coming home right after school. He also took beatings for his little brother. Sometimes they ate dinner in their rooms because they weren’t allowed to eat in the dining room with the rest of the family. His biological father became incarcerated when he was seven or eight. His mother “chose alcohol.”

When I spoke to Evan Ramsey last fall, he was soft-spoken.

“I never felt cared for when I was growing up,” he said.

The immaturity of his youth was absent. In its place was a thoughtful, middle-aged man who spoke gently about a childhood that privileged folks like me have only read about in books. He never used any of his traumas to excuse the two lives he took and the countless others he changed forever when he brought a gun to school in 1997. He never asked for sympathy for the 198-year sentence he received as a teenager.

I didn’t learn about Evan from old newspaper clippings. Evan told me his story because I asked to hear it. The national conversation on how we treat juveniles who commit terrible acts has dramatically changed in the last decade, and while I support those efforts, changing sentencing laws is only one piece of the puzzle. I want to know how we prevent children from ever having to be sentenced at all.

What I learned is, Evan’s life has mostly been a cascade of tragedies. He doesn’t tell it that way. Woven into his journey were moments of goodness, memories of helping at fish camps in Western Alaska and listening to Nirvana albums.

I was troubled by the end of our conversation though. What frightened me was how preventable the crimes he committed at 16 were and how the lessons of this tragedy had gone unheard for more than 20 years. What struck me the hardest was that as a state, we’re spending money too late.

Alaska spends hundreds of millions of dollars feeding, housing, clothing and providing dismal medical care and behavioral health services to incarcerated people for sometimes decades. This places thousands of Alaskans out of sight and mind, without ever addressing the systemic issues that lead people, including children, to commit terrible acts that they can never undo.

But there is an opportunity to address these long-documented issues head-on. It starts with a critical review of how Alaska is spending its money.

According to the Sentencing Project, it costs more than $33,000 per year, on average, to house an incarcerated person. That cost doubles when the person is older than 50. By that math, sentencing a 16-year-old to even 50 years costs the state and taxpayers about $2.25 million if they serve their full term.

Instead of spending those millions to incarcerate children for a lifetime, we should ask ourselves if the money we spend on our struggling foster care system, or other institutions for youth, like McLaughlin or North Star, are meeting the needs of our children. We should ask ourselves if we’re providing enough to support parents struggling with housing security, generational trauma, mental health, substance use, and raising children with learning disabilities and behavioral health issues. And finally, why are we so quick to spend these millions on incarceration and so resistant to invest in public education, which reduces a person’s likelihood of interacting with the prison system later in life?

We all want to be safe, but that statement is more than a talking point. This is a value that requires action and a willingness to adjust when what we’re doing isn’t working. Overcoming challenges and adapting to change is a requirement of living in Alaska.

Decades of Supreme Court and state court decisions have also been pushing us to accept what scientific research has demonstrated about the juvenile brain and a child’s remarkable ability to be rehabilitated. Because of this, many courts have found that sentences ranging between 40 and 112 years are unconstitutional under the U.S. Constitution or respective state constitutions.

The issue has been raised in Alaska’s courts too, with a recent ruling that Winona Fletcher’s 135-year sentence for crimes committed when she was 14 years old is probably unconstitutional. The decision opens the door for the Superior Court to resentence her and others similarly situated. Evan Ramsey’s sentence exceeds hers, as does that of Brian Hall, who was sentenced to 159 years when he was 17.

Court rulings and scientific evidence are hollow without public education and policy adjustments, though. That’s why, as of May of this year, 12 states — including Florida and North Dakota — and the federal government have enacted “second look” laws, which give those convicted of crimes as juveniles an opportunity for judicial review of their sentences to see if they did what most kids eventually do — matured and changed.

It’s time to revive Second Look legislation in Alaska.

Evan, Winona and Brian are not anomalies, and they have a lot more in common than the virtual life sentences that landed them in concrete tombs. The ones I know wear a variety of scars reflective of different and similar adverse childhood experiences like homelessness, addiction, witnessing violence, expulsion, abandonment, abuse and being shuffled from one system to another.

While their hair turns grey, more children and their families continue to fight the same battles they did and they continue to be funneled right into the prison system, sometimes leaving a wake of tragedy and fear in the communities they left behind.

We can do better. We’re proud Alaskans, and we’d be even prouder if we took care of each other before bad things happened. We can do better than rooting our laws and everyday practices in vengeance, hate, fear, and self-righteousness so overpowering we forget the truths about what it means to be human. My mother, my religion, and the community that raised me taught me this. Maybe if we did better, we’d all begin to heal and break cycles of harm in families, like the one Evan and his brother were born into.

Evan’s path to change started with forgiveness. When he said it, he wasn’t asking for your forgiveness, but he spoke it as a truth to his rehabilitative process.

“What helped me move on is, I came to the understanding in about the 14th or 15th year of my incarceration, I have to forgive the people who did me wrong and understand that they might have had their reasons for doing what they did. They were likely all the wrong reasons, but it’s still important to forgive them, which allows me to let go of the anger and sadness of experiencing all of that stuff. I had to figure out how to not allow terrible experiences as a child to define me as a person.”

“I also had to understand that there was nothing I actually did to merit the abuse I experienced as a child.”

Evan’s right. Healing, growing, evolving, and becoming the best version of ourselves requires compassion, understanding and a lot of forgiveness. As hard and scary as that is, we must start the conversation. If we don’t, I’ll see too many more children turn into greying elders wearing yellow prison jumpsuits.

Megan Edge is the ACLU of Alaska Prison Project director, a former journalist and Department of Corrections employee, as well as a lifelong Alaskan.

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