At any given time there are more than 10,000 people in jail in Washington state and around 750,000 people in jail across the nation. These figures have steadily risen over the last couple of decades.
Fortunately, this trend may be reversing in some Washington counties. With little public fanfare, other than a few newspaper articles and blog posts, two of Washington's largest jail systems (King and Spokane Counties) have seen significant decreases in inmate populations.
According to a Seattle Times article, county officials say they're facing a "regional glut of jail space." They don't know why inmate numbers have dropped, though a council legislative analyst suggests that the decreases occurred because "the county has invested in drug and mental-health courts that emphasize treatment over incarceration, and in housing homeless people who are otherwise frequently jailed."
Regardless, King County now has fewer inmates than expected and is even considering lowering its fees for housing inmates from surrounding cities to fill bed space.
A similar development has occurred in Spokane County. According to a May 2010 article in the Spokesman-Review, Spokane County has experienced "a big drop" in the number of inmates, as an expected 930 inmates a day turned out to be only 768. According to the article, "county officials couldn't fully account for the reduction," although streamlining in the prosecutor's office may account for some of the drop.
These decreases in inmate populations are a big deal. Spokane County citizens will vote on whether to build a new jail this April. In King County, a new jail is being built by a coalition of seven south King County cities. Several north King County cities, including Seattle, were considering building their own jail because King County would no longer have bed space, although those plans have been suspended for the time being.
Despite the drop in inmates and resulting excess in bed space, city and county officials in both counties are still pursuing new jails. Why? To accommodate expected needs for housing inmates in the future. But why is it a foregone conclusion that jail inmate populations are destined to increase and why can't policy decisions be made to keep inmate populations low? Remember, jails cost millions to build and millions to operate each year.
Jail inmate populations could be kept low if doing so were made a priority.
If faced with the prospect of building a new jail, lawmakers should keep the following in mind:
Jail population is driven by policy decisions Predicting future jail bed needs for local governments is extremely difficult, despite sophisticated estimation techniques. Both King County and Spokane County have invested great sums in jail population forecasts. Unfortunately, these estimates are frequently inaccurate.
What really matters is why people are being sent to jail According to a report produced for Spokane County, "the size of a jail is determined, to a large extent, by the policy choices made to the system and the availability of alternatives."
For example, drug crimes account for roughly one-third of all felony jail sentences in Washington. Treat drug use as a public health issue instead of a crime and jail populations will drop.
Reducing jail use does not mean crime rates will go up Nationwide and in Washington crime rates have been going down over the last couple of decades. According to data compiled by Washington's Office of Financial Management, there were about 120,000 index crimes (homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny-theft, motor-vehicle theft, and arson) in King County in 1995 and just over 88,000 in 2009. In Spokane, there were about 27,000 index crimes in 1995 and just under 22,000 in 2009.
These decreases defy easy explanation and I'm not making conclusive judgments about the causes either. But it's time to admit that relying primarily on incarceration to deter crime is expensive and not all that effective. We cannot arrest our way out of problems. This is especially true when it comes to crimes of addiction, such as drug possession and small-time/subsistence drug dealing. This is a lesson Washington state's Department of Corrections has learned. As stated by the Pew Center on the States, "locking up more drug offenders ... in Washington began to cost more than it was worth." Washington's jails should learn the same lesson.
Alternatives to incarceration work Encouragingly, the decreases in jail populations may indicate that alternatives to incarceration are working. To their credit, both Spokane and King County have implemented programs aimed at helping people stay out of jail. For example, in King County alternative programs such as the Community Center for Alternative Programs have been made a priority. This type of program is focused on changing the underlying behaviors which cause people to commit crimes, not to simply punish them. Investments should be made in these programs, not new jails.
By MARK COOKE ACLU of Washington