The following editorial appeared Tuesday in the Daily News of Longview, Wash.

Washington’s corrections secretary, Harold Clarke, this past weekend became one of the first state agency heads to submit a wish list to the 2007 Legislature. It’s an enlightened agenda – one that suggests Gov. Chris Gregoire made a good choice last year, when she tapped Clarke for the post.

The prisons chief is asking for legislative help in reducing the high number of repeat offenders. He wants an additional $26 million for corrections over the next two years to fund psychological assessments for new prisoners, treatment programs, education and job training.

Clarke’s plan to strengthen rehabilitation efforts in Washington’s prisons is only sensible. The overwhelming majority of inmates will one day be back on the streets. Simply warehousing these prisoners – failing to give them the counseling and skills they need to rejoin society as law-abiding citizens – is lost opportunity that contributes a high recidivism rate.

Clarke told the Associated Press that, for him, “the true measure of public protection is what the individual does after release. Because then the public becomes vulnerable.” That would seem obvious. Yet, a tendency on the part of many citizens to view educational and training opportunities afforded prisoners as undeserved and incompatible with the public’s desire to punish makes legislators somewhat skittish about expanding such opportunities.

Clarke serves up numbers that should help the Legislature overcome any misgivings about pumping more money into rehabilitation programs. He cites a state study conducted earlier this year that showed 42 percent of new prisoners were repeat offenders. Clarke believes his plan can reduce that recidivism rate, substantially. If so, it would be as important to improving the state’s bottom line as it would be to making the streets safer.

Between thousands of inmates cycling back into state prisons each year and tough sentencing guidelines calling for longer stretches behind bars, Washington taxpayers cannot build prisons fast enough to keep up with demand for beds. For example, last year the Legislature provided $229 million for a 1,792-bed expansion to the prison at Connell in Eastern Washington. Corrections officials say the state will be about 1,000 beds short of demand when that expansion is completed in 2009. By 2011, that shortage of beds will have doubled.

It’s time to get creative. Washington’s corrections bill has risen from around $500 million a little more than a decade ago to $1.1 billion for the current biennium. Clarke’s proposed new emphasis on rehabilitation, by itself, cannot be expected to make much of dent in that spending. But it could be part of a long-term, common-sense solution to the bind Washington taxpayers find themselves in. And it might well make the streets a bit safer.