Light Sentences Urged For Small Dealers Lowry’s Drug Proposal Aimed At Cutting Rising Prison Costs

Small-time drug dealers should be labeled “drug facilitators” and given lighter sentences to try to rein in galloping prison costs, Gov. Mike Lowry proposed Tuesday.

A top lawmaker said she doubts the Republican-controlled Legislature will go for the idea.

But the 1997 Legislature will be asked to amend two laws and write a third one, the result of which would be to cut prison costs by about $9 million and the prison population by up to 500 inmates by the end of this decade, said Corrections Secretary Chase Riveland, who presented the proposal at a news conference on Lowry’s behalf.

A key element of the proposal would be a new law allowing judges to sentence drug dealers based on the amount of illegal drugs they were selling.

The proposed law would allow reduced sentences of 12 to 14 months for low-level dealers classified as “drug facilitators” - that is, those caught with no more than three grams of an illegal drug. Such offenders now can be sentenced to several years in prison.

House Corrections Chairwoman Ida Ballasiotes, R-Mercer Island, said she wasn’t “crazy about the proposal, and I don’t think the Legislature would be thrilled with it, either.”

But Riveland predicted the Legislature will be forced by fiscal realities to embrace this and similar proposals to cut prison population growth - if not next year then in following years.

“It may be that finances will push (prison) policies,” said Riveland, who is resigning his post Jan. 15.

Among trends he cited:

Between 1983 and the end of this decade, the state’s prison population will have increased by about 130 percent, while the general population will have increased by about 30 percent.

The number of people not in prison but under community corrections supervision has more than doubled in the past 10 years to about 45,000.

The Corrections Department budget is consuming a growing share of state dollars, eating about 8 percent of all money not already set aside by law for public education. That percentage will continue to grow even as voter-approved spending-limit Initiative 601 continues to put a crimp in state government expenditures.