The Senate Judiciary Committee to order the time is now 1.33 p.m. on Wednesday, February
11, 2026. Before we begin, I want to thank Julianna Singh, the Senate
Judiciary Secretary, who makes sure we have a transcript of our meetings and Doug Bridges
from the Juneau LIO who make sure you have sound. At this time, we want
to remind committee members and those in the room to please silence your
cellphones. President, today we've Senator Tilton, Senator Tobin, and myself,
Senator Clayman. We have the quorum to conduct business. The first and only item
On our agenda is a presentation on the Alaska Criminal Justice Data Analysis
Commission's 2025 report here to present that report is Suzanne D Pietro,
Executive Director of the Alaskan Judicial Council and the Judicial
Council staffs the alasky criminal justice data analysis commission.
Ms. D. Pietra, if you would please come forward, put yourself on
the record you can begin your presentation.
And I would note if, you do have questions, get my attention.
we figure we can interrupt her as needed.
Thank you, Chair Klayman.
My name is Suzanne DiPietro.
I'm the executive director of the Alaska Judicial Council
and by virtue of that role I serve as staff
to the Alaskan Criminal Justice Data Analysis Commission.
The commission was created 2022,
and the commission really is,
the purpose of commission is to look at trends
efficiencies and procedures in the criminal justice system and report those to the legislature and the governor and
the public and every year in November the commission submits an annual report which was submitted to you
and Chair Klayman has asked me to come and tell you a little bit about what's in that annual
report. So I'm going to have to figure out how to work these slides. Okay great.
So, as I mentioned, the Commission is established in statute.
There are 16 members.
I want to tell you that the commission is really a very, it's a
very interdisciplinary commission.
So if we've got members of the judiciary, we have members
of executive branch, all the criminal justice agencies
and the executive branches are represented.
They are not all of them, but OPRA does not have a representative.
the main agencies in the criminal justice executive branch agencies are
represented and then of course on the legislative branch also so it's a good
group to be able to look at these problems from a variety of different
perspectives and that's exactly what they do so I this report is large this
report it over a hundred pages
And there are so many things that I could talk about,
but I'm not going to talk
about everything in the report.
I am sure you will be relieved to hear.
But so I've pulled out some topics that have listed here
on the screen for you that,
I thought might be of interest for today.
Take a look at those topics.
If there's something you're interested in that's not listed
there, I would love to here about it.
I'll try to work it into my presentation.
And also I do welcome questions.
talk about what you're interested in, so I welcome questions at any time during the presentation.
So we're going to, yes.
Senator Tobin has a question.
Thank you, and thank you for being here today, it's lovely to see you.
Good to seeing you too.
I do notice on the list of topics for today we don't cover discretionary parole or mandated parole, or geriatric parole.
And I did look through the report and there's some very, what I find troubling.
graphs that showcase just some trends that I'd love for us to dig in, especially as we see
the cost overruns for our Department of Corrections continue to increase, and what are some mechanisms
that we can do to ensure people are...
You know, repairing harm that they're moving toward recidivism and that we're also being supportive as they reenter communities.
Okay, great. Yeah, so actually, and I can, through the chair, Senator Tobin,
I also can tell you that the commission is going to look at doing a little more work on the parole issue over the upcoming year because that is something.
parole and probation actually, that is a topic
that people are interested in.
So I'll try to work that in towards the end
since that's part of the process that happens
towards end of criminal justice process.
So, I'm gonna kind of start it.
What I think of is the beginning, which is when a crime is committed and then moved
through arrests and citations, that's the law enforcement response.
I'm going to talk a little bit about people who are in prison before they've been convicted
of anything because that is something that happens in between the arrest, being arrested
sometimes and having your case processed by the court system, then I am going move to
the Court process with filings and dispositions and I will talk just very briefly about time
in her state of the judiciary today I thought covered quite well the status of
time disposition in the court system and then I'll talk a little bit about
sentencing and recidivism in that section I will try to talk about some of
the information we have from the parole board about parole discretionary parole
grant rates.
And Senator Tobin's specific to probation and parole and the data that's in the report.
I'm more than happy if we run out of time today.
I am more then happy to schedule an additional hearing specific
to that specific issue.
And happy do that and coordinate with your office to make sure that happens.
Because almost every item, because I chair this commission.
Almost every items that is in their report, we sometimes spend a couple of hours on so.
Alright, so the first thing to think about when you're trying to understand what's happening
in the criminal justice system is what crime is being reported to law enforcement.
And I'll preface this conversation a little bit by talking about what crimes might not
We only have the statistics that we have if people report things to law enforcement,
so I just want to kind of put a flag on the fact that not all crimes are reported to
law-enforcement, and we can only measure what we
can measure, but I always like to say that just to acknowledge that, for example,
Property crimes are an area where sometimes people don't report to law enforcement, but we have what we
have and and so
What we had is from the Department of Public Safety, which gathers information from
law-enforcement agencies throughout the state and we
have a group of offenses that have been chosen to kind of
be the best indicators of what's happening with crime.
And so it's called the part one, you see our part
one offenses.
I'm just going to talk briefly about those.
Those include both violent and property crimes.
And we usually separate those out
when we're thinking about crime, because we all
sort of, I think, intuitively feel
that violent crimes are different in some ways
than property crime's.
that I have for you here is the UCR crime, part one,
and this shows over the years starting in 2008
and going all the way up to 2024,
which is when.
which was the last data we had when we made this report that UCR Part 1 violent offenses.
So this would include violent crimes, such as the ones listed back here, murder, rape,
robbery, and aggravated assault.
And I think there's kind of two takeaways from this chart that has an awful lot of lines
and color on it.
The first is that, unfortunately, for violent offences, Alaska's rate of violent offence
is still higher than the rate in the United States
and has been for a long time.
But the other thing that you can see from this chart,
well, the second thing you could see
is that there's some variation there, some trends,
you know, it sort of goes down and then it goes up.
And so that's of interest.
And then,
I think on the far right side of the chart, the other interesting thing is that in general,
those reports have been going down the last few years.
So you see most of those lines, some more than others are having a little bit of a downward
trend.
So that's something to look at and, you know, of course, be happy about, but it's
ties into some things that I'm going to talk about later as well.
Here's the same type of chart for property crimes.
So again, if you're comparing Alaska to rates of property crime in the United States, you
see that in some of our communities have higher rates and some have lower rates.
Maybe not perfectly, but a little bit there too that some of the property crimes are going down a
little too in these last most recent years.
So those are crimes that are reported to law enforcement.
So then the next question is, what is the response of law
enforcement?
And so here's some information about the number of arrests
and citations that were made by law
enforcement, and the Department of Public Safety also
keeps track of this information.
And we use shares it with us so that the commission can analyze
it.
You might not be surprised since I just showed that some of the reports of crime are going
down, but also some the arrests and citations are
going down.
In fact, just about everywhere in the state, those have been decreasing, particularly
since 2019.
There was kind of a peak in 2019, and they've been
decreasing since then.
But I think the thing that's interesting or helpful to consider when you're thinking
all the activities of all of the different components are so related.
So you've got the amount of crime, and here we have the law enforcement not making it as
many arrests, perhaps because there just weren't as many reports of crimes, although there
could be other reasons as well, could have to do with staffing.
I mean, you know, the statistics,
the numbers are the number and the whys behind it are things that are interesting.
this graph in as well because a few years ago we had a situation where the number of people in
so after a person is arrested they're brought to a correctional facility and it should
preface it by saying that.
And so then we want to look at, OK,
of the people in correctional facilities,
how many of those are people who've been brought in
because they've be arrested and charged,
but they haven't been convicted yet.
And how may have actually been
convicted and are serving a sentence?
And we had a situation a few years ago
where actually the number of people
who hadn't yet been convicted or sentenced
were actually more than the numbers of
people serving sentences.
And I threw this in to show that that has now
topsy-turvy situation has now righted itself,
if that's a correct way to describe it.
And we see that, in fact, the number of sentenced people
is more than the numbers of people
who are awaiting trial and sentencing,
which seems like a positive trend.
All right, so then after somebody's arrested or cited,
there has to be a charging decision,
and the charges get filed with the court system.
And so here's the next step in the process.
Here are some criminal case filings.
And we divide those out by felonies versus misdemeanors.
And how we do that is, in a particular case,
if one charges a felony and all the rest are misdemeiners,
we characterize that case as a felony.
So we've characterized it by the single most serious charge
in case in court case.
And you can see, and maybe this isn't surprising,
considering the data I just showed you,
that court felony and misdemeanor filings have been going down.
Now, that's not going to be true for every single court location.
These are statewide totals,
but there is of course fluctuation year to year here and there,
but you can see that in general,
we have fewer filings in 2024 than we do in previous years.
Senator Tobin.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
And this might be a question for you or for Mr Patro.
We heard Chief Justice Carney say a word today that I noted on my pad which was unclassified.
And I think it's often an opportunity for us to educate the public about the different
levels and what unclassified means to misdemeanor the felony.
So either one.
I'm more than happy for Ms. D. Pietro to answer your question.
Okay.
All right.
So, felonies and misdemeanors are categories of crimes.
Misdemeanor crimes are crimes that are eligible,
that you can be punished with up to one year in incarceration,
a year or less, and felonies are ones that
you could be sentenced to more than a
year of incarceration.
And there are different kinds of felony's.
unclassified felonies, A felony's, B felonies, and C felinies.
And those classification ranges relate to the seriousness of the crime.
So the unclassified felanies are the most serious, the kidnapping and murder cases.
The A Felonies are, are next most seriously B Felonie's below that.
And then the C Felony, which as the Chief Justice mentioned,
by volume number of felonies that come
through the court system are sort of the quote unquote least
serious felony's which of course a felony is still a
felony so it's still serious crime.
And then misdemeanors we have A misdemeeters
and B misdemeter's same idea.
The A misdemeanor's the legislature is classified as considered
more a little more serious than the B misdemeanor
if that helps.
say this before, but yes, it is the legislature that makes those classifications and distinctions.
So it's the Legislature that decides which types of crimes are more serious than others,
and also the legislator that sets the sentencing ranges for all the crimes.
Please continue.
All right, so now we've had our filings in the court system and then those cases have
to get processed and the question is, well, how does it all turn out?
And so here's a chart that looks at these felony cases that I was just talking about
and it shows, and this isn't how all of them resolve, but of the ones that resolve with
a conviction or a dismissal.
So the interesting thing, because you can also be acquitted, that's another way that
So, this is an interesting chart to me anyways because it shows that there's actually a fairly
high number of cases that end in dismissal of charges, of all charges.
You can see that, there are many, many cases at end, in a conviction of one or more charges
but many also result in the dismissal and that relatively large percentage of dismissals
is actually something to keep in mind when I talk a little bit later about, for example,
recidivism.
And then here's the same idea with misdemeanors.
You'll see, again, there are quite a few misdemeeters
that get dismissed, and there was even a little bit of,
there's a small amount of time recently
where more misdemeters were being dismissed
than people were getting convicted.
And then this is that some of that same information just in a different format for people who are more number oriented and this also adds in the number of cases that are that resulted in an acquittal and you'll see that that's a very small number relatively speaking.
It's not small to the people get acquitted.
Through 2022, there's a big spike in dismissals
and then it drops back again.
Is there any connection to that
in the COVID pandemic and some of the dynamics with COVI?
Yeah, to the chair, I think, you know,
I was,
to answer your question indirectly,
I had a conference with some.
research professionals recently and I asked one of my colleagues there I said
what are you doing with the pandemic year data like how are
you explaining that and incorporating that into your reports in charge and
they were kind of kidding but they're like we're not using it
because it's so
different. The trends that were present during the pandemic were just so different than any
other trends and they were, and their hard to explain and kind of erratic, I would almost say.
So yes, anything you see in the 2020-2021 period is going to be something, usually that's going
to a blip in a chart. It's gonna be a disconnect in trends you saw before and after.
And, you know, to sort of delve into that and understand it all and explain it
all, I don't know if we ever will be able to sufficiently.
Okay.
So then, another issue that I know is of interest is and has been spoken about.
So I'm not going to dwell on this too long, but we are looking at the time to disposition.
So the Commission has been
analyzing the court case data to see how long these dispositions are taking whether it's whether the case is disposed within a quittle
Conviction or a dismissal. How long did that take from the from they point of filing until the judgment and?
We do see actually as you heard this morning a decrease in the amount of time. It's taking to
resolve these cases and
Another thing that I think it's important to point out that actually also you heard in a different way this morning is if you look at some information that we have here, we went into court file cases and we counted up the number of hearings that were continued in each case.
continuance range and there's a small number that are that
are up pretty high in the over 30 or 21 to 30 and those are
outliers. I mean we are not happy with that.
I don't think anyone is happy but this is kind of those
cases that have like really a lot more
They're not a large percentage of everything that the court's resolving, and they do tend
to drag the mean and median down.
So that's how numbers work.
Like if you've got a lot of things in the zero to ten range, but then a few things that
are like way, way longer than that, it's going to drive that down, so that is just something
to keep in mind when we're thinking about the majority of cases that go through the system.
And this is another way, just another
way of kind of looking at that.
This chart shows, and I'm not going to go through the numbers,
but for felonies, the mean and the median.
And also, you'll notice there's, so the
mean is the average.
And then the medium is, is
the midpoint and you will notice that those are pretty different
in some cases and that's.
That's because of what I was talking about that you may have some cases that are just
really taking a few cases, that were taking really long time and they're dragging that
mean out to the end, to end of the scale.
So then the case gets resolved and if the person is convicted, do they receive a sentence?
And looking at sentencing, this is just an illustration I chose.
B felonies are not, there's not that many of them, but C felonies, as I mentioned,
there is a large volume of C Felonies.
The mean act of sentences that convicted defendants are receiving
have actually been increasing, you can see in that chart right there.
Not by a lot,
but they have been going up and that's something to
Keep an eye on, because that has implications for the Department of Corrections and, you know, all kinds of downstream implications in the criminal justice system.
In terms of the sentencing, would that mean active sentence increasing any sense of what factors are leading to that increase?
I actually was looking into that to the chair, I was
looking in to that the other day.
I do think that some of it was driven by maybe statutory
changes, and there may be other things as well that I
haven't hit on yet.
And I also should say about this slide, this is not the
amount of time that people spend incarcerated.
This is what they are sentenced to.
So we all know, so I will say, just remind folks that, you know
there is good time that people are given under statute.
People can be put paroled.
So I don't want to give the idea that this is the amount of time.
This just, this the sentence that's given at the end of the case.
All right, so now I'm going to talk a little bit about recidivism.
That's one of the things that the commission spends a lot of time analyzing and looking
at and so it's a complicated topic and I probably won't be able to do it justice here, but
do people who've been through the criminal justice system return to the
criminal-justice system. That's sort of like the the broadest brush way of
thinking about it. And then you get into the details and it gets it can get
quite complicated. But the commission uses a definition of recidivism when it
does its calculations that that's in statute and
it's down at the bottom there. So first of all who are we looking at?
We're looking at previously convicted people,
so this is people who have been convicted of a crime.
And then we follow them, you know, metaphorically speaking,
for three years following their date of conviction
or release from incarceration, whichever is later.
And we see whether they are booked into
or are otherwise returned to a correctional facility.
Couple of things about this.
previously convicted individuals in this definition include both people
convicted of felonies and misdemeanors. So it's important to think about like
who are we looking at. We're looking it really people convicted
of felony and misdemeanor. Second of all we're following people who may not
So it is, some people can be convicted of a crime and receive a probationary sentence.
And they may not, so they be charged and convicted and have never gone to prison while we're still following those people.
But they never touched the Department of Corrections.
metaphorically speaking. So that's another thing to consider in our definition, so we're
following all those people. And then finally, we are looking at people who really come back
to a correctional facility either for anything, for they could be charged with a new crime,
but they might not be convicted of that crime or they can be charge with the new
crime brought back into a criminal facility and convicted that of crime and then serve
That's sort of the universe of people we're looking at,
which is a very specific cohort.
And so, and we do divide people into cohorts
because we can only measure their recidivism
every three years, right?
Because we have to wait for that three year period.
So it gets a little technical,
but here basically is a sort of a one chart depiction
of the recitivism rates of people in the different cohorts.
that we've been looking at and it's pretty consistent so that you do like to see that and
Some of them are you know a little bit higher a Little bit lower, but they're they are all sort of in that range
Does the does the fact that the
Purple line, which is the 2022 number is
Generally below the other three numbers. Does that suggest that? We're getting we are improving and having less recidivism
To the chair that is one
hypothesis. But remember when I said like lots of cases get dismissed. So we also, so we're
counting people who come back, but we are counting also people that maybe are convicted
as well. And so if you never, if get charged but never convicted, you wouldn't have, and
you'd never come to a correctional facility, we wouldn t count you as having failed.
And, of course, it's that tricky 2022 cohort, right?
And then the second follow-up on that is that the line rises quickly and then levels out
fairly soon.
What does that suggest in terms of when the greatest number of people who recidivate?
Oh, to the chair.
Do recivative.
Yeah, thank you.
That was something I wanted to mention.
I forgot.
Thank you!
As you can see from this chart, the rate of recidivism
is the strongest immediately after we start measuring.
And so people really, if they're going to fail,
they usually fail right away.
And that is something really to think about.
It's a little counterintuitive, at least to me.
I think to myself if I had just been convicted
or had come out of a correctional facility,
I'd think I would be pretty motivated
to not get in trouble again,
but that's not what the data show.
And so these are people, that is something to think about.
Could there be some other way of interacting
with those folks during that most at risk period,
the event
So I'm in this interesting place in which I have a Senate bill. I am up in Senate finance momentarily
And so I
Think we have one slide left
But what we I'll leave it to the other members of the committee
We can we can start with a 30-minute break and come back and and have discussion after that if you'd like
Or we could recess for the day and get her back on the phone today
But come back today in 30 minutes.
Okay. All right.
So what we're going to do, we are going
to adjourn for the day.
We will reschedule for you to come
back. I expect at that point you won't
be in person, you'll be on the phone
or on teams or Zoom or whatever the
technology is.
But we will re schedule for
the future to continue this.
And at the time we'll also ask
specifically provide some additional
information on probation and
parole statistics.
So with that,
adjourn for the day our next meeting will be Monday February 16 at 1 30 our
meeting on Friday February 13 is cancelled and we stand adjourned the time
is now 2 o 2 p.m.