Offenders Flow Into City; Cycle Must Be Broken

We, the law-abiding, wanted to get tough on crime.

Now, we’re paying the price, and a big bill is coming due in Spokane.

This week The Spokesman-Review wrote the book on the impacts of the region’s booming prison economy and prison culture.

The series, “City of Second Chances,” is the first examination done in Washington state of what has happened since the Legislature passed new sentencing guidelines and doubled the prison population.

Today, Washington has more people on parole, probation or under state supervision than any state except Texas. And, no city in Washington has been affected more than Spokane.

Prisoners, ex-prisoners and their families are congregating here, boosting the population, changing the street life, and building an institutional support system bigger than Gonzaga University.

Did Spokane expect to become what one minister calls a “city of refuge” for ex-cons because of the community’s high-quality social services and low-cost housing?

Did Spokane expect that Airway Heights Corrections Center would bring 2,043 prison inmates to the county, 70 percent of them violent criminals and one in three a sex offender?

Did Spokane expect, as a result of geography and the state’s overall crackdown on crime, to end up as an importer of felons?

No, but this is what has happened.

Today, more prisoners are released into Spokane than the county sends off to prison.

Today, Spokane County has more than 1,100 registered sex offenders, 40 percent of them convicted in other cities and towns.

And this is just the beginning. The prison and parolee numbers in Washington are rising by 4,500 a year.

Take a stroll through the Spokane Transit Authority downtown Plaza some evening. That’s a favorite hangout for some of the more than 12,000 offenders who already are required to report in some way to community corrections officers in Spokane. More are on the way.

Ask your children who works next to them at the fast-food outlets or the telephone sales center. It’s ex-cons who desperately are trying to find jobs.

Ask police to show you the map of where registered sex offenders live. They reside all over the county.

Until now, few politicians or planners have thought about what happens to civic life in places like Spokane when new prisons are built, support services are expanded, cheap housing is available and nobody tracks where ex-offenders end up.

No, all we thought about 10 years ago was getting tough on crime.

Local government rushed to develop economic incentives and infrastructure to build the new prison and turned down state impact fees that would mitigate negative community impact.

Taxpayers didn’t even blink at spending about $25,000 per cell to build the new prison, which cost $113 million or about three times the cost of the new Spokane Arena.

Even now our political leadership often seems blind and deaf to the reality that we can’t afford to keep supporting a cycle of arresting more people, building more prisons, and coping with rising numbers of damaged ex-cons on the street.

There have been some economic benefits.

The 587 people who work at the Airway Heights prison are part of a $38.5 million mostly tax-supported annual budget.

Inmates build backboards for Hoopfest.

Deaconess Medical Center has a $910,000 contract to provide emergency medical care for the prison.

Do these benefits offset the civic costs of a corrections system that, by its own admission, isn’t trying to repair damaged personalities, but only house them under increasingly strict limits?

Is this what we intended when we got tough on crime? We know the answer. We know this cycle must be broken.

In Spokane, political leaders simply must act to stem the importation of felons. We’ll take our own back, but not the troubled from Seattle, Tacoma and out of state.

Within the Department of Corrections, the shift must continue away from centralized supervision of offenders to neighborhood-based supervision where better tracking systems and better neighborhood communication systems are employed.

Local law enforcement must join the media in pushing for much more open records on where sex offenders live — all levels of offenders — so neighborhoods can know who needs to be watched.

Finally, and most important, those who truly want to get tough on crime must turn their attention away from prisons and toward schools, early childhood development centers, and family planning programs.

The answer to the astounding rise in violent crimes, sex crimes, and drug-related crimes isn’t to be found in building better prisons. It must be found in building better people from a very young age.

His column appears each Sunday on Perspective.