Additional work-release centers sought

TACOMA – Corrections officials want to open more work-release centers across Washington to relieve pressure on the state’s overcrowded prison system and to ease ex-convicts’ transition into local communities.

Harold Clarke, secretary of the state Department of Corrections, announced last week that his staff will look for potential sites where centers don’t already exist.

There are currently 16 work-release sites statewide: four in King County, three in Pierce County, two in Spokane County and one each in Thurston, Kitsap, Clark, Whatcom, Franklin, Yakima and Benton counties.

Pierce County Prosecutor Gerry Horne, a critic of the state’s work-release program, said it’s too early to tell if building such facilities in other counties will help Pierce County because prison officials have not said whether any of the new ones would be located in the county.

Horne has long complained that Pierce County gets more than its share of ex-convicts. Clarke addressed that concern, at least in part.

“All communities have an obligation to accommodate effective transitional offender programs such as work release,” Clarke said when he announced his plan on Wednesday. “It is not fair to place that burden more heavily on one community than another.”

Prisoners are allowed to spend the final six months of their sentences at less-confining work-release facilities if they’ve demonstrated good behavior behind bars and can find a job in a community, prison spokesman Gary Larson said.

Clarke said he is a big believer in work-release programs because he thinks they give inmates a better chance of avoiding a life of crime if they have jobs and are more closely supervised.

Horne challenged that notion, saying a study of Progress House, one of Pierce County’s work-release programs, showed inmates were more likely to commit more crimes than prison inmates who are released directly to the community.

Horne wants the prison system to change its work-release program radically or get rid of it.

The prison system oversees 17,900 inmates, but nearly 1,000 of them are housed in rented, out-of-state cells because there isn’t enough room for them in Washington prisons.

Even when the state finishes enlarging a prison in Eastern Washington in two years, it will be full virtually the day it opens.

Work-release centers would give the prison system more places to house inmates in-state and would be cheaper to run. It costs about $26,000 a year to house an inmate in prison compared to roughly $21,000 a year per inmate in work release programs, which require inmates to pay $13 a day for room and board.

Nearly 500 prison inmates are currently eligible for work-release, but there’s no room for them.

Clarke plans to ask Gov. Chris Gregoire and the Legislature for more work-release money in the 2007-09 state budget. He has not yet indicated how much he’ll request.

It could be years before any more work-release facilities open, and other communities are likely to resist them, Horne said.

The state Growth Management Act, however, says cities and counties cannot ban essential state facilities and must set up a process for the state to obtain the necessary permits to build them.