Washington to bring inmates home
OLYMPIA – Washington will stop sending inmates out of state and will start bringing home the 1,200 convicts housed elsewhere this summer, the Department of Corrections says.
The state prison system, which has been overcrowded for years, has rented out-of-state prison beds since 2003 and also leases about 1,000 beds in county jails in Washington.
Prison chief Eldon Vail said the scheduled January 2009 opening of new prison space at Coyote Ridge at Connell in Eastern Washington will likely allow the state to house all of its inmates in-state.
The Coyote Ridge expansion will create 1,280 new slots, and the state will initially rent about 300 beds at the Yakima County Jail.
The department plans to bring about 300 inmates back to Washington by November, with the rest returning by July of next year, presuming lawmakers don’t significantly add to the inmate population with crime legislation, Vail said. The out-of-state prisons are for-profit facilities run by Correctional Corporation of America.
“If everything goes according to plan, we’ll start bringing guys home this summer and have them all home next summer,” Vail told the Seattle Times.
That would be welcome news for inmate families, including Nicole Brummitt, whose high school sweetheart, Joshua Scott, was transferred in April from Stafford Creek prison near Aberdeen to a CCA prison in Arizona. Scott is serving a 17-year sentence for a 2000 robbery conviction.
Brummitt said the transfer ended weekly visits between Scott and his 11-year-old son.
Due in part to her lobbying, the Legislature is considering a bill that would ban out-of-state transfers for inmates who are in regular contact with their families, or who participate in parent-teacher conferences.
Some of the transfers are at odds with the department’s own program to keep fathers connected with their children. Research has shown that inmates who keep close contact with their families are less likely to commit new crimes, and their children are less likely to end up in jail.