Gov. Chris Gregoire signed a bill Tuesday that she hopes will stop the revolving door to Washington’s prisons and that Pierce County lawmakers hope will end the county’s status as a dumping ground for ex-convicts.
“For far too long, Pierce County has borne a burden that is unfair to them,” the governor told a gathering of state and local officials at Lakewood City Hall, where she signed Senate Bill 6157 into law.
Although it was not part of her original request, the governor embraced the so-called “fair share” provisions in the bill that were included at the insistence of Pierce County legislators.
In the future, the state Department of Corrections must take into account how many work-release and other prison-related programs already exist in a community and look elsewhere to site new ones. Prison officials also must release most former offenders only to the county that first sent them to prison, instead of concentrating them in counties such as Pierce and Spokane.
Those two counties have disproportionate numbers of ex-convicts, largely because they are home to state work-release and offender-reporting centers and other corrections programs that funnel inmates into those communities in greater numbers than other parts of the state.
The governor said the prison reform bill represents a change in direction, acknowledging that 97 percent of prison inmates will return to the community, yet too many will end up back in prison.
The thrust of the law, which takes effect July 22, is to ramp up drug treatment and schooling for more inmates while they’re still in prison. Then after their release, prison officials and community groups will work together to find them jobs, housing and other services. The 2007-09 budget includes an additional $28 million for those programs, as well as additional money aimed at reducing recidivism among juvenile offenders.
“We can’t solve the problem with more prisons,” Gregoire said. “You can’t just lock ’em up. You have to do something to change them.”
State officials hope the new programs will avoid the need to build another $250 million, 2,000-bed prison in the next 10 years.
It will take two to four years to see the results of the reforms, said Sen. Mike Carrell, a Lakewood Republican who co-sponsored the bill with Sen. Debbie Regala, a Tacoma Democrat.
The average stay in prison is about two years, so most of the inmates who will benefit from the new approach will just be getting out of prison in 2009. Two years later, officials will be able to see whether those felons return to a life of crime, Carrell said.
However, Pierce County should start seeing some improvement in July when prison officials comply with the requirement to return offenders to their county of conviction, he added.
The new law requires all counties to conduct an inventory of what services they can provide to recently released prison inmates and apply for grants from the state Department of Community, Trade and Economic Development to set up a transition network or housing programs for offenders.
Tacoma City Councilwoman Julie Anderson, a member of the council’s public safety committee, said officials from Tacoma, Lakewood and other cities plan to meet next month to figure out what role Pierce County should play under the new rules.
“We want to get a jump-start on other counties on how to implement this to our best advantage,” Anderson said.
Meanwhile, state Corrections Secretary Harold Clarke said his agency will meet the new law’s July 1 deadline to announce where it plans to build or lease work-release centers in the state. Clarke said last year that Snohomish County is a likely site since it has no such facility and is the state’s third-largest employment center.
Clarke also said prison officials will stop paying rent for newly released offenders on June 30. For the past six years, his agency has provided up to three months of housing for former inmates who were homeless or at risk of committing more crimes.
He said state lawyers have told him to stop the program because he doesn’t have clear authority to provide that service.
The new law gives that authority to the community, trade and economic development department. However, the agency won’t start its transitional housing program until Jan. 1, 2008, so there might be a six month gap when high-risk offenders won’t receive any state housing assistance.
Joseph Turner: 253-597-8436
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