WASHINGTON STATE

Washington State House Democrats

HOUSE DEMOCRATS

Corrections spending soars, so does uneven imprisonment

Our state and nation just celebrated the life and legacy of an American hero, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In his towering advocacy and nonviolent protest against injustice, King was no stranger to the inside of a jail cell. He was arrested on a number of occasions over the years. The 1964 Nobel Peace Prize winner, what with his many times behind bars, had something in common with millions of Americans in 2014 — and thousands of Washingtonians today.

In the opening lines of its November 2011 report called “The Changing Face of Corrections,” the Washington state Department of Corrections (DOC) paints a startling picture of a nation increasingly locked up. More than 2.3 million people are imprisoned in America, establishing the United States as home to the highest rate of incarceration in the world. One of every 100 adult Americans is incarcerated. In fact, one of every 32 adults is incarcerated, on probation, or on parole.

Here in the state of Washington, the prison-population has tripled in the last 20 years. Far tougher anti-crime laws, and the new-prison construction necessary to keep up with those tougher laws, have launched a huge increase in corrections-related spending.

Fiscal-year 2012 total expenditures of $561,287,751 were reported by the DOC. The department noted that its nine major institutions, its five minimum facilities, and its work-release operations on any given day housed or supervised an average of 17,006 inmates — an average increase of about 11,000 inmates in just over two decades. The cost per offender per day in 2012 was $90.18 (just under $33,000 a year).

The disproportionate-incarceration rate of African American men is called out, big time, in a new study appearing in a bimonthly criminology journal called Crime & Delinquency. Here’s a Seattle Times item on this report.

By the time they’re 23 years old here in America, almost half of the black men and about 40 percent of the white men have done at least some time for non-traffic-related crimes, reports the study.The authors looked at an annual federal Bureau of Labor Statistics survey of about 7,000 young people to compile these numbers. The respondents to that survey answered questions each year from 1997 to 2008 on a variety of issues, including “Have you ever been incarcerated for anything more serious than a traffic offense?” These “self-reported crimes” range from underage-drinking incidents to violent assaults.

A December 31, 2013, DOC report says that 71.5 percent of the inmates in Washington facilities are white, 18.7 are black, 4.2 are American Indian, and 3.7 are Asian. A Hispanic origin is listed for 12.1 percent of the prison population.