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City planners are looking at how to provide beds behind bars for 800-900 jail inmates when a contract for jail services with King County expires Dec. 31, 2012.
After that, 39 area cities are exploring three options: build and operate their own separate jails, jointly open one facility, or get the county to build their offenders a new home.
Somewhere in King County a new jail, or maybe a few, will be built.
First, the City of Seattle is asking the legislature to lift a ban on urban cities using sales tax revenue to build jails. That’s one item on city lobbyists’ work plan in Olympia this year.
“We need all available tools” for providing enough space for offenders, says Catherine Cornwall, senior policy analyst with the Office of Policy Management.
The cities will need 440 more jail beds in the next two decades. South King County cities have an average daily inmate population of 500 people; eastside cities have 196, while Seattle itself has 440. While some cities have their own jails, the county currently provides 330 beds for the city’s misdemeanants: people brought to local authorities with charges like driving while intoxicated, domestic violence, petty theft and shoplifting, criminal trespass, and failure to appear in court. Those charged with felonies are the county’s responsibility.
The expiration of the contract is made more urgent because Yakima County, which houses Seattle and other local cities’ offenders, could not house the number of inmates it originally promised. Inmate overcrowding and access to lawyers has been a problem at the central Washington jail (“Locked in Doubt,” March 30 – April 5, 2005). Local cities’ contract with Yakima ends in 2010.
King County is a willing player in finding new jail space, says regional jail coordinator Claudia Balducci. “We are interested and planning with the cities to try to work with them past 2012, but we don’t know yet what that looks like.”
A feasibility study on how and where to house local inmates will be out this spring.
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