STATE'S PRISONS NOT KEEPING UP WITH INCREASE IN PRISONERS

ABERDEEN - The fastest-growing chunk of the state budget is invisible
to most taxpayers unless they see a massive new prison under
construction, like the Stafford Correctional Center rising from the
mud near this gritty Grays Harbor County city.

Stafford will be finished a year from now and swiftly crammed with
1,936 convicts. Another $200 million prison for another 2,000 inmates
will be needed three years later, and then another, as the state
scrambles to keep pace with a prison population that has more than
doubled since 1989.

Today it stands at 14,300, about the same as the population of
Tukwila.

Every year, the state's prison system must make room for 700 more
inmates. Prisons are now so swamped that corrections officials are
preparing - for the first time - to pay other states to house the overflow.

Washington's prison network costs almost $500 million annually and
consumes about 5 percent of the state's operating budget. But costs
are snowballing by about 19 percent every two years, twice as fast as
the state budget as a whole.

That trend will continue as long as tough sentencing laws are
fashionable in Olympia.

"We're not likely to see that slow down unless we take the politically
impossible position of cutting back on sentencing," says Richard Van
Wagenen, a top policy adviser to Gov. Gary Locke.

Van Wagenen predicts prison spending eventually will cut deeply into
other state programs. "We will come to a point where we have a stark
decision: Are we going to open up a prison and close a community
college to do it?"

Some lawmakers appear to be reconsidering their hard-line stance. One
bill would reduce some sentences, but several others would ultimately
increase prison costs by imposing tougher sentences on mail thieves,
car thieves and other felons.

Since 1989, the Legislature has attacked crime with an assortment of
tougher sentencing laws that locked more people up longer, triggering
the need for more guards and prisons.

- -- A 1990 law that lengthened sentences for rapists and other sex
offenders is responsible for 2,000 people in the state's current
inmate population who would have been released by now, according to
the Caseload Forecast Council.

- -- The "Hard Time for Armed Crime" measure, approved in 1995, which
increased penalties for felonies committed with weapons, is
responsible for an estimated 300 inmates.

- -- Tougher drug laws are responsible for some 4,000
inmates.

Taking care of one prisoner costs about $23,000 a year. So the new
drug sentences alone are costing the state about $92 million annually
in prison costs - almost as much as Locke suggests the state invest in
rescuing threatened salmon.

Sen. Adam Kline, D-Seattle, says the Legislature likes longer
sentences because they sell well with voters.

"If politicians want to play to the grandstands, why don't they try to
do something that doesn't cost the public so much money?" Kline says.
But he adds that he risks being labeled "soft on crime" every time he
raises the question.

State prisons now are so overwhelmed, officials are hoping Colorado or
some other state will lock up as many as 700 Washington prisoners
until the Stafford Correctional Center opens next January.

"The day this sucker opens, the intent is to get our inmates back in
the state," said Doug Waddington, superintendent for the Aberdeen
prison. "We'll have them waiting at the door."

The state's newest and most-modern prison is emerging out of view of
drivers cruising along Grays Harbor on Highway 105.

A massive construction crew led by Fluor Daniel, the company
overseeing cleanup at the Hanford nuclear reservation, is working
through the winter, trying to meet a tight deadline, pouring concrete
under tents in the rain on the 93-acre, timber-ringed campus.

Building this prison isn't like constructing an office complex. The
concrete walls and floors are far thicker and more densely packed with
steel. There can be no recessed doors or decorative nooks that might
double as hiding places. And there are 968 tiny rooms to build, mostly
12- by 7-foot concrete cells with just enough space for two bunks, two
desks, a toilet and a sink.

The prison will be ringed with three high-tech fences featuring a
computerized alarm system that alerts guards in roving vehicles when
anything weighing more than 60 pounds tugs on a fence link. The fence
will also plunge 4 feet into the earth to thwart tunnelers.

Stafford will save taxpayers money, prison officials say, because its
modern amenities won't require as big a staff as other prisons, though
it will still need 630 employees.

Locke's latest response to the state's rising corrections costs
focuses on preventing released criminals from returning to prison. The
governor's proposal calls for $15 million over the next two years to
get more community corrections officers to supervise ex-cons in their
neighborhoods, as well as upgrading an agency computer system used to
track released offenders.

Joseph Lehman, director of the Department of Corrections, says the
heavy punishments the state has set up in the past decade have helped
deter and imprison violent criminals. But he isn't so sure the prisons
should be filling up with drug users.

Rep. Ida Ballasiotes, R-Mercer Island, whose daughter was murdered by
a convicted sex offender, is perhaps the most respected authority on
criminal-justice matters in the Legislature and has helped shape new
sentencing laws. But now she hopes to save money and free up prison
beds by altering drug laws. A bill she introduced would reduce
sentences for drug offenses not involving weapons or sexual violence.

Ballasiotes, co-chairwoman of the House Criminal Justice and
Corrections Committee, senses a growing awareness among many lawmakers
that the state's penalties are tough enough, in some cases too tough.

"Everybody tries to out-tough each other," she says. "How much more
can we do?"