“A lot of states have thought about it in terms of, ‘prison is our most expensive public safety resource, given that, let’s make sure we’re using prison beds on the most violent offenders,’” Zoe Towns, the manager of state policy for Pew Charitable Trusts, told me. States have spent the savings from reducing prison populations on programs like drug courts or alternatives to incarceration. Their experiences and criminal-justice research have proved that it is possible to have less incarceration and less crime, she said.

Alaska’s proposed reforms mostly follow this general mold. Like other states, it looked at its own data, at what other states were doing, and at research in criminal justice to come up with recommendations, Towns said. Like other states, it wants to reduce incarceration for nonviolent offenders and come up with alternatives to incarceration. But it’s different in some ways, too. Because the state is responsible for defendants before trial, it “will certainly be on the forefront of the states that have thought about bail and pre-trial considerations,” Towns said.

In Alaska, courts don’t consider the likelihood that defendants will engage in criminal activity before deciding whether they can be released before trial. But pre-trial detention can lead to bad outcomes, such as increased criminal activity after they are released. The Alaska commission recommends looking more closely at the risk defendants pose before making pre-trial decisions.

The state has also succeeded in advancing victim priorities, Towns said. The commission recommends diverting more money to services for victims, for example, and in making sure offender reentry programs have a section devoted to victims.

It piloted a program that allows people to take a drug test or blow into a breathalyzer twice a day before going to work and on the way back from work as a way of keeping them out of jail. For conservatives, keeping people out of jail has two benefits: it saves money, and allows for more potential for them to reform their lives. “Quite often, just housing people in jail does not make us a safer community because they come out the same way they went in,” Coghill told me.

Alaska’s reforms will stop short of spending money to fight poverty or address other leading correlates of crime. That’s because Coghill and other conservatives disagree with the premise that poverty causes crime.

“I'll always challenge the premise, and it's a much more liberal premise, that poverty equals crime,” he said. “I grew up in a very impoverished area and the crime level was low.”

Whether or not these programs will be effective remains to be seen. As Joan Petersilia, a Stanford law professor pointed out to Bill Keller in the New Yorker, efforts to reduce the number of people in state institutions can have unintended results. In California, for instance, which was under a court order to reduce overcrowding in jails, downsizing the prison population has led to an increase in homelessness and crowding at community jails. In the 1960s, when President Kennedy’s Community Mental Health Act sought to deinstitutionalize the nation’s mentally ill , many former hospital patients ended up on the streets or in jails.“We didn’t answer the question: if not prisons, what?” Petersilia told Keller.