Abstract:
One hundred and seventy-five residents
in 28 predominately Alaska Native communities throughout the state were
interviewed on-site to obtain information for assessing and improving public
safety operations and services in rural villages of Alaska. Throughout the
communities surveyed, state justice system personnel were viewed as being
unconcerned about local governance arrangements, practices, and problems,
and insensitive to values, feelings, and priorities of village residents
and officials. Many villages surveyed were found to have established, without
support from the Alaska justice system, their own policies and methods for
dealing with crime and social control problems. Despite the importance of
these extralegal local practices to villages, in general they seem to be
unrecognized or ignored by justice system employees serving in the communities.
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