Frank Prewitt on the Stand

Frank Prewitt, former Commissioner of Corrections for the State of Alaska, testified for six hours Friday.

Seventeen years ago, I was director of Alaska's biggest halfway house, the Cordova Center, in Anchorage. Frank Prewitt was Alaska's Commissioner of Corrections. I was heading up the efforts by the owners of the Cordova Center to have the facility become the first correctional institution in Alaska to be fully accredited by the American Correctional Association. Soon after we passed the accreditation review, I met Frank. We hit it off, right away. Of the four Commissioners I met while working in the Corrections field, Prewitt was by far the most competent.

In 1993 I left the field and turned to teaching music. Prewitt, through contacts with Allvest, the company which then owned the Cordova Center and three other halfway houses in Alaska, left employment with the state behind, to take a job with Allvest for $150,000 per year. Allvest was then bought by Cornell Correctional Industries in 1998. Prewitt stayed on as a consultant.

During the time period between when I left Allvest and last year, Prewitt was involved in many of the company's questionable efforts to create privatized programs in Delta, Whittier, Anchorage, the Kenai Penninsula, and in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough. Those are the Alaska programs. Ultimately, after the Cornell buyout, Prewitt helped in the partnership of Veco and Cornell to build privatized prisons in Alaska and elsewhere.

From my experience in the private jail/prison/halfway house industry, most of the executives running most of the companies should be put behind bars. They don't simply cut corners to save money. Many good executives do that. They don't merely save money and time when doing background checks on employees, they do it constantly. They don't have their lobbyists pass on campaign contributions to politicians with more than the usual strings attached, they do it in spades.

When I worked for Allvest, Cornell's predecessor in Alaska private corrections, once I had been promoted to the executive level, I had to prove up. The company's starters were all Democrats. I was a Republican for a long time, and had gotten to know many prominent Alaska Republicans during the 1970s, while serving as Harbormaster for the Whittier Small Boat Harbor. Since none of the company's founders or top executives wanted to be seen at GOP fundraisers, I became the brown bag-bearing guy who would be happily greeted. Until I turned over the money - either a check or checks from St. John's Investments, or cold, hard cash. Then I'd be marginalized at the fundraiser, as I wasn't a party "activist." Some of these contributions were legal, but I've never doubted that some weren't.


I was continuing to prove up until, one day I simply refused to perform an illegal act for the company's president, Bill Weimer. He tried me a fw more times, but after my refusals, I was sidetracked away from the VP track, and into a dead-end internal inspector kind of role, until I left to get back into the music business after a 20-year hiatus.

I was hoping it would turn out that Frank Prewitt had gone to the FBI himself. Now, from reports of the trial of former lobbyist and legislator Tim Anderson, comes the information that Prewitt only began to co-operate with the FBI after he himself was implicated.

Sad. Am I glad I got out of that dirty business when I did? Yes! Should I have gotten out earlier? I'm not entirely sure, but I took the part of the job dealing with sensible rehabilitation of inmates - we called them "residents" while in the halfway house - very seriously, actually gaining great enjoyment from seeing people emerge from a period of difficulty and back into productive, sane life.