Tales from Wasilla: Angela Lincoln

Angela Lincoln shown a plaque honoring her as Goose Creek Correctional Center’s 2017 employee of the year (Alaska Department of Corrections via Facebook)

In 2017, Wasilla resident Angela Lincoln was chosen as Alaska Department of Corrections Employee of the Year.

In August 2021, she was sentenced to two years in a federal penitentiary after pleading guilty to charges of bribery and conspiracy to provide contraband to prisoners at Alaska’s Goose Creek Correctional Facility.

She admitted to the charges in the criminal complaint, which alleged she accepted bribes of nearly $30,000 from a seriously bad dude – a man identified only as Inmate 1 in the complaint – who is serving a sentence of one hundred years for a double murder. In return, she smuggled drugs and burner cell phones into the prison. She was a key component of a sophisticated criminal conspiracy detailed the complaint. And she plead guilty to those activities.

According to the Anchorage Daily News, her defense lawyer, at sentencing, tried to portray Lincoln as naive, that her “radically cheerful and trusting nature made her ill-suited to work with the kinds of people she interacted with at GCCC.” Lincoln was an easy mark, her attorney wrote, and “her tendency to only see the good in people was her undoing.” Sorry. Accepting $30,000 disqualifies her from a tendency to “only see the good in people.”

Lincoln has surrendered her corrections officer certification. Ya’ think?

Partly this is on the the Alaska Department of Corrections. There are well-established protocols to guard against this kind of event. But mostly it’s on ex-corrections officer Lincoln, who provides another example we have sadly come to expect from Wasilla.