City Should Reject Work-Release Center

Nearly every one of the inmates in Washington’s prison system will be released someday. During the final six months of their prison stay, all but the worst offenders will go to a work-release facility. They’ll get a real-world job, undergo counseling and urinalysis for drug and alcohol abuse, and spend their non-working hours under guard.

Where should work-release facilities go? Near the communities inmates are about to rejoin, of course.

And yet, it is not so easy to be welcoming when some entrepreneur tries to locate a work-release facility next door to your home, your business or the schools and day-care centers your children attend. Inmates have proved their capacity to commit crimes. Prisons do not rehabilitate. Thirty percent of work-release inmates violate rules and return to prison.

No amount of security precautions can prevent a work-release center from making nearby residents or business customers nervous. And fear is damaging.

Here in Spokane, a Seattle company that runs work-release centers under contract with the state wants to establish a 120-bed facility on the edge of downtown, in a vacant building at Third and Browne, formerly the home of the Gold Coin Market.

The current work-release facility does need to move. It’s overflowing cramped quarters in the least desirable of all possible settings - West Central, a residential neighborhood.

There are other types of group homes that healthy neighborhoods do and should welcome - those for elderly folk, for example. But prison inmates are different. Eighty percent have drug and alcohol problems, and their records range from burglary to murder to child molestation.

Neighbors of the proposed location at Third and Browne include a day-care center, an elementary school, a tire store, an antique shop, an eye clinic, a club and an appliance repair shop. These good, contributing members of the business community feel threatened. At the very least they worry customers will flee and property value, in their slowly recovering area, will decline.

If the proposed building doesn’t become a home for inmates, it likely will be remodeled into low-income apartments. Good low-income housing is a use called for in the city’s downtown land-use plans. A prison-related facility is not.

The city will decide whether to grant this facility a permit. It ought to say no. City policy should direct prison-related facilities away from both residential and commercial neighborhoods.

But industrial-type land long has served very well for Spokane County’s work-release facility at Geiger Field. From there, inmates ride the bus to work and spend the rest of the time in a renovated military compound. That kind of location - maybe that very spot - is preferable by far to the one now under consideration.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board