In the late 1980s, when a national crack-cocaine epidemic inspired get-tough-on-crime political movements left and right, Orville Pung had other ideas.

Among them: acupuncture. Pung, a cigar-chomping straight talker who served as the Minnesota Commissioner of Corrections from 1982 to 1993, told the Pioneer Press he believed alternative medicine could help crack addicts beat their addiction, an effort aimed at treating the whole prisoner rather than merely locking them up.

Those and other strategies designed to rethink incarceration as a purely punitive tool resonated on both sides of the political aisle, especially when his approaches were proven to save taxpayers money.When Republican Gov. Arne Carlson was elected to office in 1990, he asked Pung who had served DFL Gov. Rudy Perpich and Republican Gov. Al Quie before him to stay on.

That wouldnt happen today, because of politics, said longtime friend Dan Cain. Orv was the best thing that ever happened to Minnesota corrections.

Pung, a restorative justice advocate and high-ranking corrections official to three governors, died Monday surrounded by family at the Lakeview Hospital in Stillwater. He had suffered a stroke complicated by Parkinsons disease and dementia, a week shy of his 84th birthday.

Pung is survived by his wife Nadine, four children, 10 grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.

His son Rick Pung recalled how he insisted against installing a modern bathroom in his cabin in northern Wisconsin because, in his view, using an outhouse installed fortitude in the grand-kids.

The one thing my dad instilled in us was how he saw people, no matter who they were, said his daugher, Ann Pung-Terwedo. He always looked for the good in people and always encouraged helping them to move forward in education. And he instilled with us the value of family and hard work.

Pung became an assistant Department of Corrections Commissioner in the mid-1970s, during a tumultuous era for the nations prison system, which had seen riots, scandals and upheaval.

He started as a teacher in 1958 at a state training institution for boys, and by 1974 was superintendent of the facility, located in Red Wing.

As the top corrections official in the 1980s and 1990s, Pung advocated for Sentence to Serve alternatives to incarceration, which offered convicts the chance to work road crews or put out sandbags in advance of floods.

He believed in second chances, said Cain, who retired as director of the RS Eden sober housing, drug rehab and prisoner re-entry program in February. He instilled that in the people who worked for him.

Pung relieved state prison overcrowding by using abandoned state hospitals to hold minimum-security prisoners. He also resisted double-bunking prisoners, or putting more than one prisoner in a single cell.

Not all of his stances went over well in St. Paul. In 1990, Pung supported efforts by a nonprofit to study the feasibility of acquiring a motel at University and Prior avenues and convert it into a minimum-security facility for non-violent criminals, most likely women. The position put him at odds with neighborhood advocates.

By the end of the century, he was openly critical of key aspects of the so-called War on Drugs.

Largely due to enforcement and judicial response to drugs, particularly crack cocaine, a black man is now 19 times more likely than a white man to go to a Minnesota prison, wrote Pung, in a corrections retrospective published in 1999.

By consciously deciding to imprison three times as many citizens as we did two decades ago, have we made things proportionately better? he wrote. Are we safer?

Richard Mulcrone, a former probation officer who once served as chairman of the first full-time paroling authority in Minnesota, worked for Pung for years in state corrections.

He said Pung would welcome some of the present-day debate over the purpose of jail, prisons and corrections, including the increased public scrutiny.

Pung felt we shouldnt consider it an invasion of our privacy, we should consider it an opportunity to tell our story, Mulcrone said. He was a good teacher.

Throughout his 35 years in the states corrections system, Pung advocated for more spending on education and victim services, including battered womens programs, in the hopes of cutting off crime before it escalates.

Pung noted in his 1999 article how even territorial prisons that opened prior to Minnesotas statehood offered the inmates enrollment in night school.

The job that any prison has got to face is to make somebody less dangerous than when they came in, and theres no role for that like education, said Pung, quoted in the Pioneer Press in 2016.

Funeral arrangements will be conducted by Simonet Funeral Home in Stillwater and St. Michaels Church in Stillwater.

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Obituary: Orville Pung, who advocated for humane incarceration and drug treatment, served as corrections commissioner to three governors -...