RC Blog

“Ding dong, the jail is dead”

posted by Cydney Gillis on Thursday, May 13 at 10:32am

Turns out the rumor was right: King County Executive Dow Constantine was joined by Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn and elected officials from Shoreline and Kirkland this morning to announce they’re calling off plans for a new $226 million misdemeanant jail that Seattle had intended to share with the county’s North/East Cities.

Instead, the county is offering the cities a new contract for 150 beds a year at the King County Jail between 2017 and 2020. That would extend a deal struck last year in which the cities will lease 300 beds a year between 2012 and 2016.

One reason for the move, Constantine said, is the downward trend in the King County Jail’s population—something that jail opponents attribute to the success of jail diversion programs that offer people treatment and services at lower cost than incarceration.

“We heard you. We listened to you,” McGinn said of the public input. “You want us to be thoughtful, you want us to work together, you want us to work on alternatives to incarceration.”

That doesn’t mean a new jail won’t be built someday, but Shoreline Mayor Keith McGlashan said the environmental impact study that had been started on a potential jail site in Shoreline has been canceled. McGinn said he will recommend that other northeast cities where potential jail sites had been identified—Bellevue, Clyde Hill, Kirkland, Redmond and Yarrow Point—stop their jail siting processes as well, ending an effort that started when the county told the cities it would run out of room and stop housing their inmates in 2012.

By then, a group of seven South County cities plans to open a new misdemeanant jail that is already under construction. In the meantime, Constantine said,  he’s launching a regional jail planning group in which the county will work with the cities on sharing jail space and resources to meet needs in the future.

“We are going to plan for the day when we need new jail space and we’re going to approach that in a rationale, methodical way,” he said. “I think the last process started because the county made a sudden declaration” that its jail beds would be full. “We don’t want that to happen again.”

The Regional Justice Center in Kent has room to build additional units, he said—something he said should be considered as an option for the future. In the meantime, Councilmember Nick Licata said, pre-booking jail alternatives such as Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion—the name for two pilot projects that The Defender Association’s Racial Disparity Project is working to launch this year in Belltown and Skyway—will keep jail numbers down. “With this extension to 2020, we have pulled the plug on the siting process and I can almost hear the cheers now,” Licata said.

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Comments

heeeeey seattle. i got an email about this this morning and my jaw dropped. bad ass is all i gotta say. if i were in the northwest and had a million dollars, i’d buy everyone at real change a mocha frappucino.

Travis Thomas | submitted on 05/13/2010, 2:25pm

It is ironic that Keith McGlashan announced the cancellation of the jail, since he was always a supporter of the NEC jail while it was under discussion during the past two years.  All one has to do is read the online Shoreline city council minutes or watch the online video and see that he believes in punishment and incarceration, rather than diversion and treatment.

Shoreline truth seeker | submitted on 05/20/2010, 2:44am

Get rid of Marijuana laws, get the police and the courts out of peoples private lives,  domestic squabbles, etc, and the need for jails would be greatly diminished.

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