Airway Heights Corrections Center adds sex offender treatment facility

First update to state program in 18 years will open counseling to low-risk recidivism inmates

By RYAN LANCASTER

Staff Reporter

The Airway Heights Corrections Center has completed construction of a $5 million building which houses a new Sex Offender Treatment Program (SOTP) to prepare lower-risk offenders for transition into the community.

Superintendent Maggie Miller-Stout said there are currently 17 sex offenders receiving treatment at the Airway Heights facility, a number that will rise to 200 by December 2010.

Roughly 20 percent of the facility's 2,150 inmates are being held for sex offenses, a number that Miller-Stout said is near the statewide norm. She made it clear that the SOTP will be treating people who are at the prison already. “We're not going to be importing people to release here,” she said. “They are released into their county of origin by state law.”

For the past 21 years, high-risk offenders have been treated at the 240-bed Twin Rivers Corrections Center in Monroe. Fifteen female sex offenders are also undergoing treatment at the Washington Corrections Center for Women in Gig Harbor.

The Airway Heights program targets offenders who have a lower risk of re-offending once released. It's the first time in 18 years the state has expanded sex offender treatment.

“Before, we focused on higher-risk offenders because there wasn't enough treatment for everyone,” program director Sally Neiland said. “What we can do now is provide to a wider variety – lower risk individuals who would otherwise go out into the community without skills and information to avoid re-offending.”

Neiland and other officials pointed to studies that show 15 percent of sex offenders who don't get treatment in Washington prisons are likely to offend again after release, compared with 3 percent of those who have received treatment.

A current team of eight staff members and two officers will eventually be expanded to 30 staff members who will work with offenders in group and individual sessions for six to eight hours a week for a total of 350 hours.

“It's a long, difficult process,” Neiland said. “Imagine being asked to share everything about your sexual life openly with a therapist in a group, especially the shameful aspects of offending.”

She said the inmates in the program are all volunteers who work on identifying early interventions for problematic sexual behavior and thinking. There is an “inpatient,” intensive portion while offenders are incarcerated followed by “outpatient” sessions for a year or more once they are released. This can assist offenders in transitioning to a community setting, Neiland said. “When they go to the grocery store there are children, families, pornography, alcohol – those things are not on a day-to-day basis in the prison.”

Neiland said the Airway Heights program was fashioned in part from the Twin Rivers curriculum but, unlike Twin Rivers, sex offenders in the program will not be isolated from the general prison population.

Capt. Ron Haynes said there is a risk that sex offenders seen entering the treatment center might be targeted for violence by other offenders, although the new building will house other programs besides the SOTP. He said they have been training staff and educating prisoners and will instigate steeper consequences for harassment in order to assure the safety of those seeking treatment.

Neiland said about 95 percent of sex offenders will be released, and that this program will make the community a safer place. “What we do here is primary prevention work,” she said. “Every offender who is successful, who goes back into the community and doesn't harm another child or another adult, then we've done our job and that's why I continue to come to work every day.”

Ryan Lancaster can be reached at [email protected].