The Washington jail system is experiencing a fatality disaster. This is likely one of the uncomfortable however unavoidable truths we confronted as co-chairs of a legislative job pressure charged with learning our state’s jail system and recommending adjustments to assist make jails safer. Though we come from quite a lot of backgrounds, together with jail administration, civil rights advocacy, and expertise being incarcerated in jail, all of us agree that there should be impartial oversight of Washington’s jails.
Greater than 130,000 individuals had been booked right into a Washington jail in 2022, and but there may be startlingly little details about what happens as soon as they get there. Washington has no statewide workplace chargeable for monitoring jails and reporting information to the general public. A number of the solely info obtainable pertains to deaths in custody.
What we discovered demonstrates that instant motion is required. Even accounting for Washington’s inhabitants development, the Washington jail loss of life fee almost tripled between 2000 and 2019 — a rise 16 occasions that of the nationwide common. Outpacing different states, Washington now has the fourth-highest fee of jail deaths within the nation. This can not proceed.
Reversing the pattern of jail deaths, and fixing the various different points going through our jails, could require some tough coverage selections. Nevertheless, impartial oversight of jails is a essential first step towards a safer and extra humane jail system. Impartial oversight is a demonstrated technique of enhancing transparency and accountability each in Washington and throughout the nation. By our depend, at the very least 25 states have a statewide workplace chargeable for overseeing jails, and all of them have a decrease fee of jail deaths than Washington.
Nearer to dwelling, Washington has just lately established or expanded impartial oversight of state prisons, police, faculties, and different entities. Jails are the notable exception to oversight of establishments which can be chargeable for the well being and security of tens of hundreds of individuals.
An impartial jail oversight workplace can monitor circumstances in jails, meet with employees and incarcerated individuals, report on circumstances that they’ve witnessed firsthand, and even talk issues earlier than persons are damage. A jail oversight workplace can even acquire and report information, serving to directors, policymakers, and the general public perceive our jail system and advocate for data-driven options to jail deaths and different issues referring to jails.
Oversight just isn’t just for the good thing about incarcerated individuals. Our job pressure acknowledged that an oversight workplace can companion with overburdened jail programs to supply much-needed help and suggestions, together with good insurance policies that promote employees security and cut back recidivism.
Washington state briefly had a statewide jail oversight workplace from 1981-87, which america Division of Justice as soon as trumpeted as a mannequin for programs across the nation. Sadly, the Legislature eradicated statewide jail oversight over the objections of jail directors, civil rights teams, and others.
Impartial oversight will promote public belief and data-driven decision-making in a discipline that has for too lengthy operated with out the good thing about transparency. We ask the Legislature to enact into regulation our job pressure’s advice to revive impartial oversight of our state’s metropolis, county, and regional jails. Individuals’s lives rely upon it.
