WA DOC Makes Cuts, Prepares For More
Washington state’s prison system is downsizing. Already nearly 300 positions inside the prisons have been eliminated. Another 200 community corrections jobs are about to be cut. But the budget savings don’t come easily. KPLU’s Austin Jenkins reports.
In order to close a 9-billion dollar budget hole over the next two years, Washington lawmakers cut the prison system by 134-million dollars. That means the agency must reduce the number of parolees it supervises by 9-thousand offenders. And, says Secretary of Corrections Eldon Vail, the department can’t send as many parole violators back to jail. “So one out of four people who used to go to jail because they violated their conditions of community supervision will now go to electronic home monitoring.”
But Vail says deciding who gets put on home monitoring or dropped from supervision altogether isn’t easy – especially when public safety is on the line. Now the Governor has asked the Department to study what an additional two percent budget cut might look like. It doesn’t sound like much, but Vail says it would require drastic across-the-board reductions: like knocking sixty days off every inmate’s sentence and releasing every inmate 30-days before that sentence is up.
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