February 7, 2010 in City

State ignoring own report on Pine Lodge issue

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OLYMPIA – Last year, the Legislature spent $500,000 for a consultant to tell Washington state which prisons should close and which should stay open.

The consultant released his study in November, and the Pine Lodge Corrections Center for Women in Medical Lake wasn’t on the list. Instead, he recommended it stay open to handle female prisoners on the east side of the state.

That has some legislators balking at Gov. Chris Gregoire’s plan to close Pine Lodge and move its inmates to a women’s facility in Western Washington to help fill a $2.6 billion hole in the state’s budget.

“I’m willing to do it if it makes good economic sense. But the numbers just don’t add up,” said Rep. Joe Schmick, R-Colfax, whose district includes the Medical Lake facility.

State Rep. Joel Kretz, R-Wauconda, contended last week that closing Pine Lodge was an effort to save jobs in Western Washington: “I can’t see a financial reason to do it. It looks political to me.”

But a spokeswoman for Gregoire said the closures are strictly financial, not political. “There are a lot of communities that certainly don’t want to see facilities in their area close,” spokeswoman Karina Shagren said. “Because of the economy, the state has to close some institutions.”

Pine Lodge was among five correctional facilities on a list first announced in December, but the only one the consultant didn’t recommend closing. The study recommended operating Pine Lodge at its current level of about 187 inmates. The state could expect to need more minimum-security beds for women inmates, the study said, and additional capacity is available at Pine Lodge, which closed a unit with 242 beds earlier in the year.

“At its current level of operation, Pine Lodge is appropriately sized to house minimum security women from Eastern Washington,” the report said. “This reduced size improves opportunities for maintaining family and community ties – an important consideration for all offenders but especially for female offenders with children.”

Corrections Secretary Eldon Vail announced late last month the Pine Lodge closure was temporarily on hold, but not because the state might need more prison beds. Rather, the state wanted to give the city of Spokane and Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich time to study taking over the facility for city or county prisoners.

Minority Leader Mike Hewitt, R-Walla Walla, said the state keeps getting shifting projections on prison population. That’s one reason the state paid $500,000 for the study.

The language authorizing the study also says “the governor and the Legislature shall not consider closure of any state institutional facility unless the report recommended the facility for closure.”

That won’t keep the Corrections Department from closing Pine Lodge, said Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown, D-Spokane. “They have the ability to close a facility unless the Legislature precludes it.”

Brown wouldn’t say last week if that’s the step the Legislature would ultimately take. But she said she is looking at ways to address Pine Lodge with state Sen. Mark Schoesler, R-Ritzville, whose district also includes Medical Lake and who serves as the Senate GOP floor leader.

Nine comments on this story so far. Add yours!

• 

  Liberty_Bell on February 07 at 4:52 a.m.

  That’s just the additional daily interest on many studys.

  Ever read those Alaskan Way Viaduct Studies?

  That’s now over $1.1 Billion in studies on 3 miles of highway?

  “The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body.”
  Notes on the State of Virginia, 1782
  Thomas Jefferson

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  bobk on February 07 at 8:54 a.m.

  Don’t tell me this is not policital. They have prisons on the West side that will reduce or close,so they want to move Pine Lodge.Now they are threating Medical Lake. Let the City and County of Spokane share the prison or we will close it. If that isn’t the lowest form of blackmail then I don’t know what is. By now we all know how our Governor feelings toward us poor “cousins”. So much for all her promises. It is time for someone on this side of the mountain to run for Governor. Better yet, maybe we should be a state of our own.

• 

  liarsinnews on February 07 at 9:25 a.m.

  Gregoire, needs to go!!

• 

  PhiltheBibliophil on February 07 at 9:29 a.m.

  I recently had “the misfortune” of having to go to the “coast”. Stopping in at a prominent Coffee Shop for a “Cuupa Joe” I struck up a short conversation with the “Barrista”, a nice young lady in her early 20’s. I mentioned that I was from Spokane. She seemed dazed for a short moment and then replied, “Oh isn’t that a town on the other side of “those” mountains?” pointing towards the Cascades! Having worked in the 1980’s in construction on the correctional facilities of McNeill Island, Twin Rivers, Calallam Bay and Walla Walla I can unequivicably tell you fraud, waste and mismanagement of those institutions at the highest levels of State procurement is atrocious! We have always been the bastard “step-child” of Washington State and someday (when pigs fly) we need to stand up as one and just say - NO!

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  mikeln on February 07 at 9:39 a.m.

  I see a lot of studies saying there is a need for more and more prisons in the future. I see very few studies on how to fix the social ills that cause the need for more prisons. As it is now, if you get into trouble you are going to be punished for life. I, for one have never seen this so called christian forgiveness that all of you so called christians keep telling us about. The only thing I can see is that fixing the problems that cause the need for more and more prisons will not make you as wealthy as building a private jail.

• 

  Liberty_Bell on February 07 at 11:07 a.m.

  mikeln?
  You seem to be slightly mixed up about Jefferson’s writings on the laws of God, Man, and Nature, July 4th 1776?

  When in the Course of human events…the separate and equal station to which the Law’s of Nature and of Natures God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind require that they should declare the causes which impel them to their seperation…

  …The standards of the law are standards of general application. The law takes no account of the infinite varieties of temperament, intellect, and education which make the internal character of a given act so different in different men. It does not attempt to see men as God sees them, for more than one sufficient reason. In the first place, the impossibility of nicely measuring a man’s powers and limitations is far clearer than that of ascertaining his knowledge of law, which has been thought to account for what is called the presumption that every man knows the law. But a more satisfactory explanation is, that, when men live in society, a certain average of conduct, a sacrifice of individual peculiarities going beyond a certain point, is necessary to the general welfare. If, for instance, a man is born hasty and awkward, is always having accidents and hurting himself or his neighbors, no doubt his congenital defects will be allowed for in the courts of Heaven, but his slips are no less troublesome to his neighbors than if they sprang from guilty neglect. His neighbors accordingly require him, at his proper peril, to come up to their standard, and the courts which they establish decline to take his personal equation into account…

• 

  crikey on February 07 at 6:29 p.m.

  I don’t know what planet mikeln’s on, but here in Spokie, criminals get their hands slapped repeatedly until they force DOC to find them a cell. No 3-strikes here, and no habitual offender category for the idiots, either.
  Pine Lodge has some great programs that offer female offenders wonderful opportunities for change. Gregoire sees nothing wrong with spending a half-million dollars on an ‘expert’ when all she had to do was leave her ivory tower to speak with the employees of the facilities she’s hell-bent on closing. This is the same idiot who wants special treatment to hire a $66,000/yr. speech writer, because she’s too stupid to put her own nonsense ideas into words…I still can’t believe she was reelected, but sure do hope a buncha Washingtonians have learned a hard, hard lesson they won’t repeat again.

• 

  ChefGus/ John Olsen on February 08 at 12:01 a.m.

  Personal experience with women that have “graduated” from Pine lodge does argue that proper services they recieved DID help them a great deal… the way out of this prison dilemma is to realize that we don’t need more Lock Up joints.. an alternate solution of education/ treatment/ social and psychological support does lead to a lower rate of recidivism.. the irresponsible choice by the County Commissioners to gut sheriff ozzies very successful pilot program was in the face of these facts. john