A Ketchikan stabbing, and the jail violence the public rarely sees

A man being held at the Ketchikan Correctional Center is facing a new felony charge after troopers say he attacked another inmate with sharpened pencils Wednesday evening, stabbing at the man's face as he sat in the day room watching a movie. The other inmate suffered minor injuries to the side of his face and was treated at a Ketchikan hospital and released.

Cory Kelly, 38, was already in custody when it happened and now faces a charge of second-degree assault, a felony. He is presumed innocent, and the account so far is the troopers'.

What the dispatch doesn't say is how ordinary an event like this is behind bars — or how little the public gets to know about it. Assault is a defining hazard of incarceration. Nationally, it accounts for roughly a third of the injury-related emergency-room visits made by incarcerated adults, about five times the share among people who are not locked up, according to a CDC analysis of a decade of hospital data. The single most common cause of those injuries is being struck by or against an object — which is to say, an attack like the one described in Ketchikan.

Alaska holds around 4,500 people across 13 correctional facilities on any given day, most of them awaiting trial rather than serving a sentence — a crowded, constantly turning-over population in which fights and attacks are a steady background risk. Yet the state publishes almost nothing about them. Its public corrections data tracks in-custody deaths and the sexual-assault reports required under federal law, but not the routine inmate-on-inmate assaults that make up most of the violence inside. The incident in Ketchikan surfaced only because it produced a criminal charge and a trooper dispatch. The ones that don't, the public never sees.