LEGISLATURE ACTS WISELY IN REASSESSING LAWS THAT PACK THIS STATE'S PRISONS

SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER

Most citizens in Washington state -- with the possible exception of those
who think that "lock 'em up and throw away the key" is the 11th Commandment
- -- can be grateful that sanity appears to be returning to the state
Legislature.

After almost a decade of draconian crime bills that would make Attila the
Hun look like a Boy Scout, our elected representatives seem poised to take
a second look at where the legislative folly of the past few years has been
taking us. This reassessment is not coming a moment too soon.

For the past decade, the fastest-growing item in the state budget has been
the allocation for building new prisons. Washington state is building a new
2,000-cell prison every three years to keep up with the number of people
sentenced to do time behind bars. Taxpayers are shelling out $23,500
dollars per year for each prisoner the state locks up. That's more than
four times the amount the state spends to educate a youngster in the public
schools. Last year, the total bill for operating the state prisons came to
$500 million -- 8 percent of total state expenditures.

Generally, such fiscal comparisons have fallen on deaf ears. The advocates
of "lock 'em up and throw away the key" prefer to point gleefully to the
decline in crime rates as proof positive that taking a hard-line approach
to criminal behavior is working. Thinking that putting more people in
prison makes the public safer is the mental equivalent of giving the death
penalty credit for population control.

If locking up more offenders for longer periods of time affected the crime
rate, we should expect the sale and use of illicit drugs to virtually
disappear because that's who the state is locking up. The great bulge in
the prison population does not come from incarcerating more murderers,
rapists, child molesters, burglars or robbers. Instead, the state of
Washington is building expensive-to-construct and costly-to-operate prisons
for people who use and peddle drugs. While either practice is something
most citizens do not condone, spending $23,500 a year on those who do seems
like a really stupid waste of good, taxpayer money.

Rep. Ida Ballasiotes, one of the state's most respected voices -- and
certainly no pushover -- on crime issues has put the matter crisply: "We
filled up the prisons and didn't do a good job on treatment. There's a lot
of us who think we should save our prison space for our most violent
offenders, and these aren't them."

It is an especial waste when we have better, proven-to-be-effective ways of
dealing with drug addicts.

Instead of shelling out $92 million annually to lock up drug offenders as
the state of Washington currently does, several counties have established
drug courts that present addicts who are apprehended by the police with a
simple alternative: Either submit to drug treatment and stay clean for a
year or spend time in the clink. I'm told by one of King County's former
drug court judges that, ironically, it's the hard-core, long-term users who
elect the treatment option; the brazen young offenders are more likely to
want to take their chances with the prison process. Hard-core addicts --
those who will do anything for a "fix" -- present the biggest part of the
drug problem.

The drug court in King County has been assessed by one of this region's
most respected criminal justice professionals who declares that it is one
of the few programs in the field of rehabilitation that works.

Ballasiotes has sponsored a bill in the current legislative session that
would give judges the alternative of putting some drug offenders into
treatment programs rather than imposing stiff mandatory prison sentences.
Legislators who want to do something effective about the drug problem and
the out-of-control costs of the state's prison system should give the
Ballasiotes bill full support. Citizens who think the Legislature ought to
quit wasting tax money on law-and-order rhetoric and instead start to do
something sensible about crime should call for more of such legislative
reforms.

On an unrelated but important issue, Sen. Jeanine Long and Ballasiotes have
co-written a bill that would make sexual conduct between guards and female
inmates a criminal felony. To its credit, the bill was requested by the
state's Department of Corrections; to their credit, Long and Ballasiotes
have stepped up to a problem that is reaching scandalous proportions around
the nation. It may not be a widespread problem in our state's prison
system, but any case is one too many.