WASHINGTON STATE

Washington State House Democrats

HOUSE DEMOCRATS

Lower crime, but more prisons?

The Seattle Times recently wrote about a strange problem facing Washington state: with crime hitting historic lows, why are there so many more inmates that taxpayers may need to fund a new $480 million prison?

The facts outlined in the Times are clear:

  • Since 1990, the population in Washington has boomed by 40 percent.
  • Crime has consistently gone down
  • Yet the state prison population keeps going up

 Here’s part of what the editorial board said:

A consultant, the Council of State Governments Justice Center, analyzed 16 million state records dating back three decades. That data analysis leads to a clear conclusion: Washington could take a new “smart-on-crime” approach to property crime..

Due to a series of policy and budget decisions dating to 2003, Washington rarely puts burglars on community supervision — the state’s version of probation — as part of their sentence. Nor does the state sentencing structure emphasize diversion for them into court-ordered treatment — ignoring the fact that thieves often steal to fund addiction. Instead, they are mostly locked up, swelling the demand for more prison beds.

In short, the presentation showed Washington relies too heavily on short, ineffective incarceration for burglars and skips lower-cost, but effective, community supervision and diversion programs.

This isn’t a local issue. Nationwide, crime rates have dropped dramatically. Common sense holds that when crime goes up, prisons get more full, and when crime drops, you lock fewer people up.

Three big states reduced standard prison sentences, then watched crime in those states go down even more compared to the rest of the nation.

Here’s a key passage explaining what happened, and it echoes what the Times wrote about diversion and drug treatment as crime-fighting tools:

Between 1999 and 2012, state prison populations in all 50 states increased 10 percent, as states continued their over-reliance on drug war policies and harsh sentencing. But New York and New Jersey simultaneously bucked that trend, each decreasing their prison populations by 26 percent during that same period. Nationwide, crime rates declined over this decade. But in those two states, the crime rates dropped even more, despite their reverse pattern of locking fewer and fewer people up. California, which saw a significant decrease of 23 percent, also saw its violent crime drop even more than national levels.