Opinion ID: 2514247
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The superior court properly required compliance with the settlement agreement as a condition of approving the state's plan to reduce overcrowding in Alaska prisons.

Text: Cleary argues that even if the settlement agreement does not directly apply to conditions at the Arizona facility, it empowered the superior court to require compliance as a condition of approving the state's plan to reduce overcrowding. The settlement agreement sets forth population control measures that remain in effect until emergency overcrowding legislation is enacted. [14] Section VIII.E of the agreement obliges the state to limit overcrowding and requires it to submit mitigation plans for court approval if overcrowding becomes chronic; when the state seeks court approval, prisoners may object to the plan and seek such other relief ... as they deem appropriate. Section IX additionally provides for future monitoring, modification, and enforcement of the agreement and broadly authorizes the superior court to give[] meaning to the intent expressed by the parties with consideration for changes to Alaska's adult correctional facilities that may exist at the time. After the parties entered their settlement agreement, Alaska prisons became chronically overcrowded; when the state failed to remedy the problem, the superior court declared the state to be in contempt of the consent decree for failing to present a plan to reduce overcrowding below the settlement agreement's emergency caps. In response, the state developed its plan to house prisoners on a contract basis in the Corrections Corporation of America's Arizona facility. The original transfer involved more than two hundred inmates; thereafter, the Arizona facility continued to play an integral role in the state's efforts to control overcrowding in Alaska, and hundreds of additional inmates were transferred to Arizona. Indeed, corrections officials who testified before the superior court expressly acknowledged that the department had found no other effective solution for overcrowding. The record thus amply supports the superior court's decision to treat the Arizona transfers as the state's plan for reducing overcrowding under the agreement. The state does not seriously dispute the court's decision to treat the contractual arrangement for housing prisoners in Arizona as the state's plan to mitigate overcrowding under Section VIII.E.7 of the settlement agreement, which specifically required court approval. [15] But the state nonetheless insists that the scope of the court's approval authority is quite narrow. Because Section VIII. E.7 deals exclusively with overcrowding, the state reasons, its grant of approval authority should also be limited to whether the plan is likely to produce the intended result of reducing prisoner populations. But the state's proposed reading of Section VIII.E.7 is unreasonably narrow, for it would reduce the court's power of approval to a simple process of counting heads. By so doing, it would render meaningless the provision's express language allowing prisoners to object to the plan and seek other appropriate relief, which necessarily implies the settlement agreement's intent to grant the court considerable discretion in exercising its approval authority. Here, because the state's mitigation plan would inevitably have long-range effects on a large number of inmates who were or would be covered by the settlement agreement, and because the plan's primary purpose was to fulfill the state's obligations under the agreement itself, the superior court did not abuse its discretion by making its approval contingent on the state's continued compliance with agreement in the Arizona prison, even though the agreement did not directly extend to privately operated facilities. This is not to say that the superior court was bound to order compliance with the agreement in Arizona, or even that its understandable desire to ensure substantial compliance compelled it to order literal compliance with all of the agreement's original requirements. In holding that the superior court did not abuse its discretion, we emphasize that the forward-looking flexibility provisions of the settlement agreement, discussed above, make it clear that the superior court had broad discretion to tailor its application of the settlement agreement to the particular needs and circumstances that the prisoners, the correctional staff, and the state would face upon transfer of prisoners to the privately operated Arizona facility. To the extent that the state argues here that application of the settlement agreement to the Arizona facility is burdensome in uncontemplated ways, and to the extent that the superior court may not have fully considered the possibility of tailoring the agreement to the particular conditions in Arizona, the state may request appropriate modifications upon return of this case to the superior court, and the court will have discretion to consider any such requests in the exercise of its continuing supervisory authority. As matters currently stand, however, because the superior court had discretion to require compliance with the settlement agreement at the Arizona facility and because the state has failed to demonstrate an abuse of that discretion here, we affirm the court's ruling.