A Mother Jones Investigation Helped Spur a New Alaska Law Protecting Vulnerable Kids

For years, some of Alaska’s most vulnerable children have faced harsh conditions for months at a time in locked psychiatric facilities. A new law aims to change that.

The legislation, HB 36, follows a 2023 Mother Jones investigation that found that the state’s Office of Children’s Services routinely placed foster kids at North Star Behavioral Health, Alaska’s only private psychiatric hospital for minors, when there were no available foster homes. Despite North Star’s troubling track record of assaults, escapes, and the routine use of seclusion and chemical restraints, foster children have been admitted to the facility hundreds of times in recent years. Some stayed for months after they were ready for discharge.

HB 36, which passed into law Monday and goes into effect in 90 days, will require a court to review a foster child’s placement at a psychiatric hospital within seven calendar days to determine if that child meets criteria for hospitalization. (Until the legislation passed, a preliminary injunction required a hearing within 30 days, but the hearings were sometimes delayed.)

“When this started showing up publicly, that made folks pay attention to it.”

Anchorage Democratic Rep. Andrew Gray, who first introduced the legislation in 2024, has said that the bill was inspired by Mother Jones’ reporting, as well as his own experience as a foster parent. Current and former foster youth rallied around the legislation, with dozens traveling to Juneau over the past three years to meet with lawmakers and testify about their experiences.

(Universal Health Services, the psychiatric hospital chain that owns North Star, did not respond to questions for this story but has said in the past that it adheres to policies intended to keep patients safe.)

“It was basically all-out chaos at the hospital,” says Amanda Metivier, who directs the nonprofit Facing Foster Care in Alaska. “When this started showing up publicly,” she said, “that made folks pay attention to it.”

But for Metivier and other foster care reform advocates, the legislative win was bittersweet. Last week, Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed HB 52, another bill that aimed to protect vulnerable youth at psychiatric hospitals and had broad bipartisan support. It would have required the state’s health department to conduct unannounced inspections of psychiatric hospitals, including interviewing at least half of the hospital’s minor patients, and to provide annual reports to the legislature on the use of seclusions and restraints, among other things. Rep. Maxine Dibert, the Fairbanks Democrat who introduced the legislation, has said the bill was inspired in part by the prevalence of Native children in psychiatric facilities.

“Everyone knows we’re going to be inspected, and we all get instructions on what we need to do to check boxes for the inspection, not to actually fix the problems.”

In a letter to the house speaker, Dunleavy explained that he vetoed the bill because “psychiatric hospitals are already subject to strict regulatory and accreditation standards, and this bill adds duplicative inspection, reporting, and notification requirements in statute.”

Legislators attempted to override the veto on Friday, but were four votes short of the necessary two-thirds majority. Rep. Zack Fields, an Anchorage Democrat, noted that even some North Star employees supported HB 52. Currently, the health department conducts announced inspections at the facility; in his floor speech speech, Fields anonymously quoted a North Star employee, who said that “everyone knows we’re going to be inspected, and we all get instructions on what we need to do to check boxes for the inspection, not to actually fix the problems.”

Notably, North Star hired a lobbyist, Dianne Blumer, who was paid $41,000 in each of the past two legislative sessions to advocate on “issues related to mental health, workforce, background checks and State of Alaska budget.”

The institution of vulnerable youth in Alaska is a well-documented, long-standing problem. A landmark Department of Justice report in 2022 found that the state was violating the Americans with Disabilities Act by unnecessarily institutionalizing children far away from their families, often for months on end. Two years later, a state supreme court ruling concluded that children in state custody “are at substantial risk of being hospitalized for longer than they need, or when they do not need to be hospitalized at all.”