On the other hand, almost every community in the state seems prepared to fight, in court if necessary, any attempt to put the halfway house in their area.
So, if people don't want the halfway house in their community, where do you put it? As last week's public hearing unfolded, it became clear that legislators either didn't want to decide, or in the case of one lawmaker--state Senator Mike Hewitt (R-Walla Walla)--seemed determined to undermine any solution. If passed, Hewitt's bill would ensure that no transitional housing would get built in the state of Washington.
The unbuilt halfway house has a long and convoluted history, but here's an abridged version. Eleven years ago, legislators created the SCC to house certain convicted sex offenders so they can receive mental health treatment after they've already served their prison time. The center was not supposed to hold all of these sex offenders forever, but legislators never created a halfway home as a way to help release SCC residents back into the community. SCC residents sued, correctly believing that legislators simply wanted them to rot away at the SCC. Federal Judge William Dwyer agreed with the SCC residents, citing the lack of an SCC halfway house as a major problem the state needed to fix. He's now fining the SCC at the rate of $50 per SCC resident per day (the current fine is $1.7 million--and growing).
Court order in hand, the state's Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS), which runs the SCC, set out last year to find a neighborhood to place transitional housing. DSHS found potential spots in Thurston County and Walla Walla County, but the residents and local politicians who live there got so mad that DSHS had to halt its efforts. Ironically, DSHS sought help in the matter from Olympia legislators--the same legislators who never wanted to release SCC residents in the first place.
With the judge's order, Olympia is finally being forced to act. The state senate's Human Services and Corrections Committee has two bills that would establish criteria for DSHS to follow in order to establish a halfway house. Both bills address issues of internal security in the house, local police response time to the house, and how DSHS should notify the surrounding community about its halfway house proposals.
One of the bills, however, has a clause that undermines its stated purpose. Hewitt, who represents Walla Walla (a possible recipient of the halfway house), has a plan that could easily frustrate DSHS's effort to build a halfway house anywhere. The senator is sponsoring a bill that would make it impossible for the state to put transitional housing in any municipality until that municipality has agreed to accept it. In other words, avoiding the halfway house would only require a majority "no" vote of the local town or city council--no hard feat. The full implications of Hewitt's proposal became immediately clear when committee chairman James Hargrove (D-Klallam), a co-sponsor of Hewitt's bill, asked a very pointed question.
"If every local jurisdiction in the state passed a moratorium [against a sex offender halfway house], what would be the result?" Hargrove asked. The committee's legislative aide suggested that Judge Dwyer might get so frustrated with the state that he would unilaterally release the 130-plus sex offenders into society without any transitional plan. More likely, Dwyer would simply start levying the fines he's been threatening, and perhaps even raise them, until the state complied with his order.
Hewitt doesn't want to jeopardize his own political career. He knows how emotional his Walla Walla constituents got when DSHS tried to put the halfway house in their community. As a result, he evaded questions about his moratorium plan, but he didn't back down. Each time he was pressed about dropping the idea, he just smiled breezily and said that he would work with Senator Karen Fraser (D-Olympia), who is sponsoring a competing transitional housing bill.
Hewitt and Fraser plan to come back in the next week or two with one agreed-upon bill to push through the state senate. It's unclear whether Hewitt's moratorium idea will survive the amendment process or not.
They better deal with the issue soon. Dwyer's fines keep adding up. It's a hard reality everyone recognizes, like it or not. "We'd all like to just leave [the sex offenders] in jail," said committee chairman Hargrove. "But that just isn't going to happen."
