Alaska Cut $13.5M to Curb Prison Overtime. It Paid $22.2M Anyway.

The Alaska Department of Corrections (DOC) -- the single state agency that runs all 13 of Alaska's prisons and jails, one of only seven states that operates a unified correctional system rather than splitting county jails from a separate state prison system -- paid its employees $22,246,525.13 in overtime over the 12 months from January 5, 2025 to January 2, 2026, according to DOC's own payroll extract⧉ filed with the Legislature.▸ That's despite the legislature cutting $13.5 million from DOC's FY2026 budget the year before, specifically -- lawmakers wrote into the budget's own intent language -- to reduce overtime and find efficiencies. It didn't work: Deputy Commissioner April Wilkerson later told legislators⧉ the department was "not achieving the savings that was identified."

In 2025, facing budget pressure, Alaska's legislature made two cuts to DOC's Division of Institutions -- the division that staffs and runs the state's 13 correctional facilities.▸ It cut $6.0 million from institutional personal-service authorization, and it cut $7.5 million by closing one of three housing units at Spring Creek Correctional Center, a maximum-security prison in Seward, removing 247 beds from service. The legislature's own written intent language⧉ for the closure was explicit about the goal: closing the unit would let DOC "direct personnel resources to other areas of the facility, reduce overtime, and find efficiencies," and it required DOC to report back to the finance committees' co-chairs by December 20, 2025 on the savings achieved.

Unrestricted general funds -- UGF, the state's flexible tax and royalty revenue that lawmakers can spend on anything -- made up nearly all of both cuts.▸ On paper, DOC's enacted FY2026 budget still rose slightly, to $489.9 million from $476.6 million in FY2025 actual spending, but the $13.5 million in institutional cuts was the legislature's attempt to at least slow that growth by attacking its stated cause.

A prison has to be staffed every hour of every day; a correctional officer post that's vacant on paper still needs a body in it every shift, for the safety of both inmates and remaining staff.▸ When DOC can't fill a position through hiring, it fills it with overtime instead -- which costs more per hour than a salaried position would, and pushes the officers already on staff toward the burnout that drives more of them to quit, feeding the same vacancy problem the overtime is meant to patch over. DOC's own February 9, 2026 staffing count⧉ shows a department-wide correctional officer vacancy rate of 11.53% -- 124 of 1,075 budgeted positions empty -- but that shortage isn't evenly spread. Wildwood Correctional Center (2.47%, the lowest in the department), Mat-Su Pretrial Facility (2.70%), and Anvil Mountain Correctional Center in Nome (3.45%) were all nearly fully staffed, while Ketchikan Correctional Center (25.93%) and Spring Creek itself (26.77%, the highest in the department) each had more than a quarter of their correctional officer positions open -- Spring Creek's rate is about 2.3 times the department average.

The $22.2 million wasn't spread evenly either.▸ Of the 1,716 DOC employee positions that were paid some overtime in the 12-month period, 15 individually collected more than $100,000 each -- 13 of them correctional officers, plus one pretrial services officer and one food service supervisor -- and their combined overtime pay alone topped $2 million. The single largest earner, a Correctional Officer 3 based in Anchorage, was paid $225,263.74 for 2,774 overtime hours in the year -- more hours than a standard full-time work-year (2,080 hours) contains. Divided across a standard work-year, the department's total overtime hours are equivalent to about 158 full-time positions' worth of labor that DOC covered with premium-rate overtime instead of hires.

The clearest test of whether the FY2026 cuts worked is the one the legislature itself designed: Spring Creek.▸ After the housing-unit closure took effect on July 14, 2025, the facility became overcrowded, running a waitlist of inmates awaiting transfer in rather than the freed-up capacity lawmakers expected. On January 24, 2026, a fight involving about 50 inmates broke out there; it lasted roughly 10 minutes and left five inmates with minor injuries. Commissioner Jen Winkelman offered legislators a rough, admittedly unaudited estimate -- "quick napkin math," in her words -- that the incident alone cost the department just under $200,000 in medical and inmate-transportation expenses. Deputy Commissioner Wilkerson's assessment to lawmakers was blunt: DOC was not achieving the savings the closure had been designed to produce.

Rather than the savings lawmakers wrote into law, DOC came back asking for more.▸ On February 18, 2026, the Governor amended the FY2027 operating budget bill to add $20.0 million in UGF to the Institutions division, attributing the shortfall directly⧉ to "heightened staffing requirements for safety and security, response to critical incidents, unrealized vacancy savings, and unbudgeted overtime." DOC's own filing said it could not close the gap through deferred maintenance, delayed spending, or reallocating existing funds without further jeopardizing institutional safety.

A second amendment added $3.1 million more for Physical Health Care staffing, driven by the same "unrealized budgeted vacancy factors" -- a shortfall compounded by an aging, increasingly medically complex inmate population: 80% of DOC's exceptionally ill patients have a substance use disorder, 44% have a mental illness, and the department logged 5,926 emergency-room visits and outside medical appointments in FY2025 alone.▸ Combined with the Governor's original $500.3 million December 2025 request, the amended FY2027 request DOC's own budget documents describe reached $523.4 million -- a record for the department, and $8.7 million more in overtime alone than the entire dollar amount the legislature had cut the year before trying to prevent it.