Airway Heights Corrections Center will see cuts to positions, programs

DOC secretary says fourth round of reductions could increase risks, will shrink inmate rehab services, claim 45 jobs at West Plains facility

By RYAN LANCASTER

Staff Reporter

After three years of reductions that have eliminated more than 1,200 positions and closed two prisons, the Department of Corrections (DOC) is now looking to trim another $52.7 million off the budget.

About 25 staff members and 20 contractors will likely be cut from the roughly 700 employees at Airway Heights Corrections Center, according to AHCC superintendent Maggie Miller-Stout, who was joined by DOC Secretary Eldon Vail for a press conference at the prison Nov. 10. Eliminated positions include recreation and kitchen custody staff, emergency response managers and staff counselors.

Agency-wide, 300 jobs will be cut, about 120 vacant positions will not be filled and an as yet untold number of workers will be required to take temporary layoff days.

“We have a very talented, motivated, well-trained staff that will rise to the occasion again and again,” Vail said. “We're asking them to do it one more time with a little bit less.”

Several programs will be reduced or eliminated at AHCC, including Right Living, a therapeutic community program introduced in 2007. Prison officials are still evaluating how they might spare the widely-acclaimed program, but Vail said the $500,000 saved through its loss is hard to find elsewhere.

Vail said reducing programs like Right Living will lead to more crimes down the road, but state budget woes leave few alternatives. “You can't invest in the future if you're just trying to get to the end of the month without bouncing a check.”

Other reductions planned across the agency include cutbacks to chemical dependency, education and therapeutic programs, closure of Larch Corrections Center in February 2011, lockdown at major prisons once a month and eliminating electronic home monitoring for community corrections violators.

Vail said the budget will likely be revised further in light of recent caseload forecasts that predict more female and male inmates, with the male population expected to rise by about 300 this coming year. Safety will suffer if something isn't done to curb this trend, he said.

“We have to see our caseload go down or we will be at a place where more correctional officers will be gone, more programs will be gone and we would be in a much more risky situation,” he said. “If the DOC needs to save money, we need responsibility for fewer people.”

But achieving that goal will be difficult. At just more than 16,000 offenders, Washington already has one of the lowest rates of incarceration in the country, with about 7,000 fewer inmates than the national average. Most of these inmates are locked up for violent crimes and many of the remaining property and drug offenders have multiple felony records, Vail said.

“When people think that we are like other states and say, ‘just let all of those non-violent people out,' we're dealing with folks who are really in business to be burglars or drug dealers,” he said. “To reduce their sentences is not something prosecutors and law officers are going to be in support of.”

Further cuts to the DOC could lead to an up tick in incidents like one last month, when AHCC inmate Michael West brutally attacked and blinded a cellmate. Many have questioned why West was put in a shared cell at AHCC when he was known to have murdered a cellmate six years ago at the Spokane County Jail.

Vail said budgetary constraints limit the number of single-person cells available for long-term confinement of dangerous inmates like West. Instead, staff members do their best to avoid potential conflicts through cellmate pairing and interventions. “Everything we do is a calculated risk,” he said. “It amazes me we don't have more problems.”

Ryan Lancaster can be reached at [email protected].