We Need To Be Hypervigilant
It’s called hypervigilance. After an attack, victims prick their ears for footfalls, startle easily, feel their skin crawl.
Kellie Dawson, raped by a former Spokane County prison inmate, couldn’t sleep for months.
Last week law enforcement officials announced that five more high-risk sexual predators are now living in Spokane County. Three of the five were convicted elsewhere, but chose to settle in Spokane.
They’re part of an alarming surge - up 84 percent in the last five years - of released prisoners who decide to stay. It’s time for collective hypervigilance.
As The Spokesman-Review’s “City of Second Chances” series documented last summer, for every 100 people convicted of crime in Spokane County, we get back nearly 150.
Seventy percent of prisoners at Airway Heights are violent criminals. One inmate out of three is a sex offender.
Each category of released criminal poses a different threat to Spokane.
Sex offenders, for example, can be successfully treated, but not cured, according to state Department of Corrections staff. They’re like alcoholics. After a decade of sobriety, a person remains an alcoholic. The desire to drink lingers. So, too, with people who rape and molest.
Fortunately, since The Spokesman-Review’s series appeared, Gov. Gary Locke has announced his proposal for an Offender Accountability Act, designed to make communities such as Spokane safer.
Part of his proposal was modeled after an innovative program already established here. Field officers located in neighborhood COPS shops relentlessly track offenders.
The governor’s proposal would lessen the field officers’ huge caseloads. Officers who now hound 60 felons would watch only 25. An updated computer would speed their work. And they’d be given the authority to set conditions, such as treatment for addiction, and bypass the clogged court system when offenders mess up.
The governor’s excellent proposal would help protect Spokane County residents from the 12,000 former inmates currently under state supervision here. But there’s one additional step legislators should take. They should enact a new law that would require freed prisoners to return to the county where they were convicted.
Salem, Ore., a city demographically similar to Spokane, pushed for such legislation in its state. It helped. Now prisoners from elsewhere can’t settle in Salem without a sound reason.
Spokane slept as the Airway Heights Correction Center was built. Now Kellie Dawson can’t.
Her anxiety must be transferred to the rest of us. The state and the community must remain watchful, wary, protective. Only then will the Kellie Dawsons of our region feel safe enough to sleep.
The word is hypervigilance.