Bill Lapinskas was remarkable in that he had the epiphany while he was still in a position to do something about it, and he did.

The Department of Corrections was not enthused.

Most of the time, the epiphany comes from the “formerly” folks, formerly a cop, formerly a senator, formerly a judge. But when they had the power to do something, they were company men through and through. Only afterward do they come out with passionate tears for all they’ve done wrong, when they no longer have any power or authority to actually do anything. And when doing so no longer involves any risk.

Bill Lapinskas took a risk.

Bill Lapinskas started working at Alaska’s only maximum-security prison when he was a young man, just a few years out of high school. Over the next two decades he rose through the ranks, spending his days alongside guys doing life for murder.

By the time he became superintendent in 2016, he was convinced: Prison takes broken people and makes them worse. And all but a few are eventually released, dropped off at the Seward bus depot with a cardboard box of their belongings and a ticket to Anchorage. As superintendent, he was not interested in overseeing what he saw as a failing system of punishment.

But don’t confuse Lapinskas with some bleeding heart SJW, spewing platitudes about privilege and -isms. He didn’t see his inmates as victims of society who would otherwise be riding unicorns on rainbows. He just didn’t see them as subhuman, irredeemable, or even deplorable.

“I’m not pro-prisoner,” he said. “I don’t think any one of those guys should get a free ride. But their sentence is separation from the community. They lose their freedom. It isn’t for us to menace them every day and make them worse human beings.”

Unlike so many woke enthusiasts, he didn’t wish rape on the prisoners who committed the day’s most hated crimes, like Jeffrey Epstein, but wanted to have them serve their sentence and, when their time came, have a chance to return to society and survive.

Lapinskas started to make changes, some of them based on his gut feelings, about how to make the culture at Spring Creek less about violence and despair and more about regeneration. He reduced the use of solitary confinement, placed an emphasis on earning GED diplomas and supported prisoners leading groups discussing everything from moral reasoning to sobriety. It didn’t seem like there was much stopping him.

It wasn’t that he felt badly for his charges, though he likely did, but that as a very practical matter, they were going to be shown “the door” one day, set free, and for their sake as well as the sake of everyone on the outside, they needed to be capable of dealing with it.

Last year, Lapinskas embarked on his most ambitious project yet: a housing unit meant to “immerse” prisoners preparing to re-enter society in the challenge they were about to face.

The re-entry unit launched in October 2018, near the end of the tenure of former commissioner Dean Williams. It involved some unorthodox calls for a prison warden to make, like not forcing certain inmates to be locked in their cells at night in service of preparing for release.

One of the more pedestrian, but critical, things Lapinskas did was to acclimate them to the brave new world, letting them use new technologies and giving them clothes to wear.

To that end, Lapinskas let the men in the re-entry unit Skype with men who’d been released about the everyday challenges of getting official state identification cards, or filling out apartment rental applications. Men’s Wearhouse donated clothes for the men so they could wear something other than prison garb on release day.

This wasn’t Lapinskas being a “radical,” although it was radical in its own way to break away from blind adherence to the rules and try to do things that made sense and might actually help people. So naturally, it was not appreciated.

By November 2019 the experiment in Spring Creek’s “Juliet Mod” housing unit earned the ire of the Department of Corrections’ top leadership under Commissioner Nancy Dahlstrom, who was appointed by Gov. Mike Dunleavy.

Dahlstrom has pursued a “back to basics” approach for running Alaska’s prisons, including stripping back some policies viewed as soft or indulgent, such as no longer allowing volunteers to enter prisons outside of visiting hours, restricting the amount of property inmates can take when they move from one facility to another, and banning homemade treats like cupcakes from in-prison diploma graduations and other celebrations. More substantively, Dahlstrom also closed an internal investigations unit formed during the tenure of former commissioner Dean Williams.

The rationale for Dahlstrom’s “ire” will come as no shock.

Lapinskas said he was told to stop doing most of the things he believed made the Juliet Mod program work. The phrase “evidence based best practices” was used a lot, which Lapinskas considered a series of empty buzzwords.

“At some point I came to the realization, they are gonna ruin everything I’ve done,” Lapinskas said. “And they are gonna make me do it.”

After all, what Bill Lapinskas did was what he thought would help, and it did. But it was his way of helping. Not theirs.

In an interview, Hough, the corrections deputy director of institutions, said the department was just trying to get Lapinskas to follow the rules and regulations. And prisons have a lot of rules and regulations.

Rather than preside over failure, a system he called “broken” with good reason, Lapinskas put in his papers.

Two days before his scheduled last day of work, Lapinskas said, a manager showed up from the commissioner’s office and gave him what he says was by far the worst evaluation of his 26-year career. He says he was walked out of the building.

He hasn’t been back.

If we don’t want recidivism, if we want public safety, if we want to imprison people until their “debt to society” is paid, then they have to be given half a chance to walk out and survive. Bill Lapinskas tried to do that, for which he, too, was shown the door.

H/T Don Larson