Justice System Falls Short in Alaska Bush : Courts: Many remote areas have no police or legal facilities. The Natives ‘get chewed up’ by the circuit court-type program of traveling justice, a state public defender says.

In Alaska’s remote Bush, where alcoholism and violence are rampant, the justice system is falling short.

A 12-year-old effort to deliver police protection to rural residents is struggling because of low funding and a high turnover rate for law enforcement.

Many communities still have no police. Some have no lawyers or judges, no courts or jails--and are only tenuously tied to the city-based justice system of the dominant Anglo culture.

A circuit court-type system of traveling justice sends judges and lawyers--often with little regular contact or understanding of village culture, critics say--into the Bush to dispense justice monthly.

About 60% of the state’s 85,700 Natives live in 200 Bush communities. When they are charged with crimes, they often are assigned state defense attorneys who are based in Anchorage, do not speak their clients’ language of preference and sometimes do not meet them until their day in court.

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Translators for speakers of Eskimo, Indian or Aleut dialects are not available in most cases. In one recent case, the state’s refusal to provide an Inupiaq translator led to a drunk driving conviction. It was overturned by the Alaska Court of Appeals.

Public defenders say Native clients--often without understanding the full implications of their act--have a higher propensity toward pleading guilty to charges than do non-Natives.

“These people get chewed up in the system not even knowing what happened to them,” said John Salemi, the state public defender in Anchorage whose office handles the defense for many Bush criminal cases.

The state is constitutionally required to provide justice to all its citizens. And advocates say it should be delivered as effectively and promptly in the Bush as it is in Anchorage, Juneau or Fairbanks.

“If we’ve imposed this Anglo type of law on indigenous people, there are certain obligations we must follow through,” says Lawrence Trostle, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Alaska, Anchorage.

“Quite frequently, I believe the Anglo is oblivious to this.”

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No one, however, can be oblivious to the problem of crime in the Bush.

The Alaska Federation of Natives, in a 1989 report--The AFN Report on the Status of Alaska Natives: A Call for Action--found that:

* The Native homicide rate is about four times the national average.

* The accident mortality rate is about three times the national average.

* Natives are 15.5% of Alaska, but account for 25% of arrests, 25% of felony convictions and 34% of those imprisoned.

And in a recent report, the Alaska Sentencing Commission found that 75% of rural offenders had substance-abuse problems and estimated the percentage for Natives to be even higher.

Since 1980, the state has tried to deal with these problems through the village public safety officer, or VPSO program.

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In half of Alaska’s 200 villages, the state contracts with regional Native corporations for police and fire, search-and-rescue and emergency-medical services; the corporations then hire the officers, who are trained at the Alaska State Trooper Academy at Sitka and are loosely supervised by troopers.

But participants at Bush Justice Conferences say the system has limitations--that the distance between rural areas and state agencies has led to a lack of responsiveness and awareness of state officials about village needs.

And there have been other problems. Last year, 57% of all officers left the program; some regional corporations lost all their officers.

The VPSO program budget in the last fiscal year was about $5.1 million, sufficient funding for 101 positions--though the program was meant to place VPSOs in 125 of Alaska’s 200 villages, said Capt. Tom Stearns, the Alaska state trooper official who supervises the program.

And though the program is designed to have a ratio of seven VPSOs to each supervisory trooper, that ratio is now 16 to 1, Stearns said.

In the last dozen years, Natives have sought greater sovereignty and have set up a new tribal court system.

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In the Interior Athabaskan village of Minto, the tribal court resolves criminal and civil disputes, including some that would be characterized as felonies if judged under the state court system.

In Sitka, disputes over child abuse and child custody cases are increasingly resolved by the tribal council.

The state does not formally recognize tribal courts, and Gov. Walter J. Hickel is antagonistic toward them.

But the Alaska Sentencing Commission supports tribal courts and other alternative dispute-resolution systems outside the state courts--as well as more and better treatment programs inside Alaska’s jails, and more intermediate or alternative punishments for residents of the Bush.

And in a recent study, doctoral student Nella Lee found that the Anglo court system may be part of the problem, not the solution.

She found that the assimilation of Yupiks had “devastating effects, resulting in increasing feelings of hopelessness, alcohol abuse and socially deviant behavior, as well as a general dismantling of the Native culture.”

Crime may actually increase in those villages that are less traditional and where Anglo law enforcement is the most extensive, she said. “It appears that assimilation and subordination to Western legalism result in increased deviance,” Lee noted.