Bill Would Right A Grievous Wrong

Statistics alone can’t tell this story, for this is a story written in the blood and tears of crime victims, their families and their communities.

Spokane is one of these communities. Spokane has become a dumping ground for predators arrested elsewhere, particularly in the populous Puget Sound area. The state releases many of these predators here after they have served their time in prison. That’s grand news for residents of Seattle’s swanky suburbs. But it’s bad news for the high-poverty neighborhoods of central Spokane.

Certainly, it was bad news for the young Spokane girl who gave her phone number to a friendly man she met at a bus stop on her way to school; this man, Demetrius Dean, was a parolee. He tracked her down and raped her.

Certainly, it was bad news for a young video store clerk who befriended a customer named Dwayne Woods. Woods clubbed two of her friends to death and nearly killed her, too. Certainly, it was bad news for the Spokane woman whose 2-year-old son was beaten to death by Kenneth Galloway.

All three of these men, and hundreds like them, were convicted of crimes in Western Washington but were unleashed here by the prison system, which operates a large facility in Airway Heights.

Last summer, an investigation by The Spokesman-Review exposed the state’s criminal-dumping practice in a series of stories, “City of Second Chances.” The series is available online at www.Spokane.net/library/sp-prison/cover.asp

We now recommend this series to members of the Legislature, and indeed, to the residents of every city with a prison nearby. We do so because the Legislature has before it a proposal to stop the predator dumping. House Bill 1319 would require that inmates be released to the communities where they were convicted.

Powerful Seattle legislators don’t even want to give this bill a hearing. Strangely, one of these legislators is Rep. Ida Ballisiotes, R-Mercer Island. Of all people, she ought to understand Spokane’s concern. She became a legislator, respected for her efforts to reform crime laws, after a work-release inmate murdered her daughter.

All around the state there are cities with prisons nearby, cities that ought to support HB 1319: Aberdeen, Clallam Bay, Monroe, Shelton, Gig Harbor, Walla Walla. Other cities, too, have prisons in their future due to the booming inmate population. How can the state find sites and funding for new prisons if each one will make nearby cities a target for other cities’ thugs?

Legislators have a duty to open their eyes, to hold a hearing, to learn what current practices are doing to innocent people and communities. The blood of Spokane crime victims cries out from the ground and demands the passage of this bill.