Andrew gave a lot of statistics which illustrated his premise.
•Reverses presumption of innocence. You’re effectively guilty until proven innocent.
•Punishes before determining guilt
•When charges dismissed or accused is found innocent, not compensated for unjust detention, loss of wages and housing, bail bond fees
•Inflates jail numbers
•Costs public $70,000/year per jail bed
•Being held pretrial results in 37% increase in plea bargain or conviction (National Bureau of Economic Research), because the accused are held hostage and often offered release for “time served”
•Causes homelessness: In the last jail survey over 1/3 reported losing their job and almost half losing their housing
Andrew highlights that there is no jail plan, and no hard numbers:
•County has not hired a jail planner.
•Proposal for 440 cells, almost 2x the 244 proposed in 2017, without a jail plan.
In Summary – Vote No Because
•We’re not being told how tax will be spent (no jail plan and hard figures), only that all $ in first 6 years will be for jail, not services
•County Treasurer says we cannot afford an oversized jail
•Drivers of incarceration identified 6 years ago have been ignored, and have gotten worse
•We will not know the proper size until we fix the bail system
•Crime is declining overall
•A bigger jail will not solve homelessness and drug addiction – it will contribute to them
•Whatcom’s incarceration rate is already indefensibly high
•The newly released WSU Report says getting rid of booking restrictions will “predictably increase the jail population” further
Peter Frazier began by sharing about his time in the workforce and on task forces and boards and the like, and only when he started working regularly downtown did he start seeing the challenges of homelessness. He saw a woman day after day living between a couple dumpsters behind the Horseshoe, her pants often around her ankles. She was living in filth and yelling at the sky. It was heartbreaking to him. Working downtown his eyes were opened to the problems with the criminal justice and behavioral health systems. He found the problems legion. Unless that woman is a danger to herself or others within a 24hr period nothing can be done. How is this possible? Who can come and give her the help she needs?
45 years ago, we had a come to Jesus moment where we decided as a nation to deinstitutionalize our behavioral health system and bring them back to our communities where they could get the help they needed. Well, the help never arrived. Instead, people ended up in our jails and on our streets untreated.
A group including Peter went to Nashville to visit a new experimental Behavioral Care Center. It’s onsite with the jail but separate and doesn’t feel like a jail. It feels like a college campus where people can get better. And each morning a Prosecutor, a Public Defender and someone from the Mental Health Co-op get together to find the best candidates to be diverted from the jail-flow into treatment at the care center. This is what we want to do here. Will it cost $125-137M? Maybe. Maybe it’s $150M? We don’t know yet, but large plans like this take time and involve getting early on estimates.
We can with the help of the Cities and the County pull together these resources with this 2/10ths of 1% sales tax paid for by everybody, including Canadian shoppers. We can build a modern safe humane facility. And here’s the sweetest part. There’s enough money for us to implement this 15-project implementation plan and provide the services and facilities and programs we need, along with behavioral health funding from the State, along with our behavioral health funding from our previous 1/10th of 1% sales tax we passed in 2006. With a “yes” vote we have everything in our community we need to move forward and give people who are incarcerated, the staff that work there, and the people that visit–attorneys, families and such–the facility that will help these folks that are incarcerated come back to our community better than when they came in.
Write-in questions:
- For Peter – What is this levy combination of construction cost and operating expense? Schools have one or the other but not some undefined combination of both. Don’t the voters deserve to have a proposal for both that show scope and recurring operating cost?
PF: I don’t have all the details for a levy. In my experience with this process, we have advisory boards that help determine these answers. We generally know it will cost $137-$150M. Cost of operations, if well designed, will be about the same and less than the current jail and be far safer. This may not be a satisfying answer, but with large projects like this it’s hard to know. We do have the guardrails of the ordinance and the oversight committees to make sure it’s done right.
- For Andrew – How does defeating the jail measure solve the problem of over pre-trial jailings?
AR: As Jerry Brown, governor of CA repeatedly said, “There’s nothing like a good crisis to get people to do what they didn’t want to do before.” No one wants to take on this issue of bail reform because it’s a difficult thing to do politically. Therefore, being forced to do it is the only way to do it because unfortunately that’s how politicians work. I wish they were bolder. We can’t know what the right sizing for a jail is until we fix this problem, because most of the people in there should not be in there according to the Washington State constitution and the State Judicial rules. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have a new jail. But I am saying you need to do the preliminaries. As someone trained in public policy you don’t do that without doing a jail study which looks at all the possibilities, and you don’t do that without knowing why we have unusually high rates of incarceration here and addressing those causes. And as I’ve shown you, we’ve gone the opposite direction in each of the things I identified as drivers of incarceration. There’s been no interest on behalf of our electeds or sheriff to address the issues raised in the reports commissioned by our own council. We must listen to the experts that advise us on the steps to take first in order to get to a point where we can offer a viable plan to the public that actually makes sense. Otherwise, it’s tax and spend and just trust us, and that’s insufficient.
An interesting presentation. I gives us a lot to consider prior to marking our ballots this coming month.
