Washington won’t dig its way out of a $9 billion budget hole without making communities more vulnerable to criminals.
That’s one of many hard truths that emerged last week as the Senate and House rolled out separate plans to bring state spending in line with revenue projections hit hard by the recession.
One proposal trades early prison release for greater monitoring of ex-convicts in the community. The other attempts to preserve truth in sentencing, but at the expense of probation and supervision for supposed “low- risk” offenders.
Each approach has its detractors. The question for lawmakers is which strategy will do the least damage.
Sen. Jim Hargrove, a Hoquiam Democrat who chairs the Senate Human Services and Corrections Committee, thinks reducing prison time is the answer.
He’s working on a plan to let thousands of inmates out of prison a month or more early and, in turn, keep ex-cons under supervision longer. Running prisons is much more expensive than community supervision, so the state can take a smaller bite out of prison sentences and get the same savings it would from a much larger cut in probation and parole programs.
Reducing the inmate population would also allow the state to close the prison at McNeil Island, long a target of Hargrove’s because of its higher operating costs.
The senator has a point when he argues that one fewer month behind bars is a small sacrifice for keeping better tabs on the former offenders living among us. But that argument assumes that community supervision protects the public. There is good reason to believe that the way it’s often been practiced in Washington is something of a farce, with resources spread too thinly to be effective.
One good side effect of the state’s budget woes has been a renewed interest by the Legislature in how the state chooses which offenders to track. Getting rid of the more toothless forms of supervision would be a wise move even in flush times.
In the House – the chamber that would rather reduce community supervision than hard time – legislators have been hard-pressed to preserve supervision for offenders who deserve it and still save enough money. The feat is more art than science, since an offender’s conviction isn’t always a reliable predictor of whether he or she is violent or will reoffend.
The answer, like so much in the budget, probably lies somewhere between the House and Senate plans. No matter the mix, it will boil down to the state doing less to hold offenders accountable.
That’s never good news for public safety – but it’s the brutal reality of a budget that must be balanced on false economies.
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