Home Safe: How strong, healthy communities build a safer Washington

How do we build safe communities?  

History has demonstrated that it is not through incarceration. Overinvestment in punishment has devastated our communities and created a mass incarceration crisis in Washington. If Washington state were a country, it would have the sixth highest incarceration rate in the world. This overreliance on life and long sentences has devastated marginalized communities.  

For decades, Washington has invested in increasingly harsher punishment as the solution to public safety.  

• Children as young as 14 can be charged as adults and children as young as eight can be charged in juvenile court.  

• Since the late 1970s, Washington’s prison population has more than tripled.  

• Today, almost half of all people in Washington state prisons are serving a sentence of 10 or more years.  

• Black and Indigenous people are significantly over-represented among people receiving long and life sentences in Washington.  

If locking people up and throwing away the key worked, we would be the safest country in the world. The truth is, we are not.  

Our new blog series, “Home Safe: How strong, healthy communities build a safer Washington,” begins to answer this question. We will explore the origins of our current criminal legal system and the impact this system has on our families, schools, and communities. We will ask tough questions about what actually keeps us safe. 

What do we already know keeps us all safe? Significant investments in the core pillars of healthy communities: education, economic stability, health care, and the built environment. We all thrive when we live in communities where all our needs are met, from mental health support to social services and housing. 

Our first post focused on the school-to-prison pipeline, which refers to the criminalization of youthful behavior and the over policing of schools and communities of color that directly lead youth to courts and jails. To understand how some of our most vulnerable kids end up in youth jails and prisons, we must first understand the systems that criminalize students, especially in our public schools. 

The second post in the blog series discussed diversion programs, which address delinquent behavior without formally involving the court system. Despite their clear successes when used, disparate implementation across Washington state means access to these important programs depends upon the zip code you live in.  

In future posts, we will focus on ACLU-WA's work in the state legislature. Two of our legislative priorities for the 2024 session are aimed at reducing life and long sentences, in collaboration with formerly and currently incarcerated allies.  

Our emerging adults bill updates Washington’s adult sentencing system by increasing the age for sentence review consideration from 18 to 25. This change, if passed in Washington, would bring the state in line with the best evidence regarding brain development and take meaningful steps to address racial disparities in sentencing.  

The ACLU-WA is also working to pass a trailer bill to HB 1324, a bill to stop the use of juvenile adjudications to automatically enhance future sentences in adult courts, called juvenile points in our current sentencing system. This commonsense legislation updated Washington’s sentencing system and stops the practice of automatically punishing people twice for crimes they committed as children. 

This year, we are returning to make this legislation retroactive. It is insufficient and rectifies no past harms if the legislation does not apply to those already serving inflated sentences. Retroactivity is a vital part of any meaningful sentencing reform. It is fundamentally unfair to require people to serve vastly different sentences for the same offense, and retroactive reform ensures that the changes we make to our criminal justice system benefit the people most impacted by it.    

Both of these bills advance developmentally appropriate, evidence-based sentencing laws that promote public safety and lead with racial justice.  

Our new blog series will also bring fresh voices and experiences to the table. Throughout, we will hear from not only experts in the field, but also from people with lived experiences inside our prisons and jails. This series is a resource for anyone interested in building safer, healthier communities. 

<- Back to Washington in Action Winter 2023 Newsletter - Table of Contents