In a June 4 Guest Opinion (“Victims should be our first safety consideration”) state Sen. Kirk Pearson (R-Monroe) intimated that the state Department of Corrections routinely releases offenders into the neighborhoods of their victims.
That is an erroneous claim.
The column’s assertions about Senate Bill 6157, which is now state law, are simply incorrect.
It includes several lines about global positioning systems intended to track sex offenders upon their release from prison, but SB 6157 has absolutely nothing to do with GPS tracking of sex offenders.
In fact, I agree that the state should be doing more to keep track of offenders released by DOC.
The column also unfairly targets SB 6157 for its provision that requires offenders to be sent back to the county where they committed their original felony crime.
Is it fair to release King County’s offenders of any type in Snohomish County upon their release?
It is no fairer than sending a Snohomish County offender to King County upon release.
The fair share provision in SB 6157 is intended to help counties in Washington develop services to house, monitor and treat offenders being sent back to their home county.
More effort should be directed toward helping counties develop services to treat their own offenders, rather than spending time crusading against a law that has the support of both houses of the Legislature, the Department of Corrections, state and local law enforcement agencies and the governor.
In fact, a delegation of members of the United Kingdom’s House of Commons Justice Committee recently visited the McNeil Island Corrections Center to learn more about Washington’s offender re-entry program and how they could apply it as a possible national model in Great Britain.
The column also inaccurately states that a provision in SB 6157 requires sex offenders be placed in communities where their victims live.
That statement is false.
The law actually contains provisions that prevent DOC from releasing offenders into their counties of origin if there are victim concerns or negative influences on the offender in the community, if the offender has supportive family members or other sponsoring persons elsewhere, or if there are any court-ordered conditions of the offender’s sentence that preclude it.
And that holds true for all offenders being released to their county of origin, not just sex offenders.
The Department of Corrections takes SB 6157 very seriously when considering where to place released offenders, and has already diverted numerous offenders to other counties because of the exceptions, including five offenders diverted out of Snohomish County in April.
It’s important to remember that if an offender has served his or her time in prison, they are inevitably going to be released.
The state cannot keep an offender locked up indefinitely, and in light of that fact I would hope that the Legislature support legislation next year that creates temporary housing to allow law enforcement to more effectively monitor homeless offenders of all types.
We all want to protect the public from sex offenders, and I look forward to working constructively with other members of the Legislature on public safety issues next session.
State Sen. Mike Carrell
(R-Lakewood) represents
Washington’s 28th Legislative District.
