In his younger years, Anchorage Republican Rep. Bob Lynn served as a police officer in Tucson, Arizona.
Last year, when the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, that decision and Lynn’s firsthand experience merged in his mind.
On Friday, Lynn introduced House Bill 218, which would prohibit marriages at the state’s prisons. Lynn said the bill is a matter of fairness. If a same-sex couple falls in love within a prison’s walls, he doesn’t want them to have the ability to get married and share a cell with their spouse.
“We’ve got a lot of prisoners who have a spouse outside the prison,” he said. “That’s not fair to them where somebody in the jail can have their spouse in there.”
Lynn said the bill would apply to same-sex and heterosexual couples alike; a person would not be able to get married to an inmate on prison grounds.
According to figures provided by the Alaska Department of Corrections, there were six applications for prison marriages in the last six months of 2015. Four were approved, and were between inmates and another person who wasn’t in DOC custordy. It is unclear how many, if any, were same-sex marriages.
To accommodate a married same-sex couple who commit a crime together, Lynn’s bill includes a provision that would prohibit the Department of Corrections from putting the couple into the same facility.
It also toughens the ban on conjugal visits — currently a regulation of the department — by putting it into law. That makes the ban tougher to overturn.
