Westneat: Too much jail time or not enough? All the ways Seattle tried to deal with Travis Berge

So what should Seattle have done instead with Travis Berge?

A chorus on one side is saying Berge should have been locked up. Had he been in jail instead of at Cal Anderson, two people wouldn’t be dead.

“Our criminal justice system is asleep at the switch,” Scott Lindsay, the former deputy mayor who wrote the prolific offenders report and knew Berge, told Q13 News.

But here’s the thing about that: Last year, after the report featuring Berge was published, Berge was arrested again, for breaking some windows. He served three months in jail for malicious mischief, but then a Seattle municipal judge did the opposite of coddling him. Ruling on the violation of Berge’s probation for a previous sentence, the judge ordered Berge locked up for a total of 240 days, triple what the city had asked for.

Berge spent most of 2019 and the first part of this year in detention, released in February when his sentence ended.

This protected the public for a period of time, but apparently did nothing to rehabilitate Berge. Which is why, when City Attorney Pete Holmes was asked about the lesson of the Cal Anderson killings, he said it isn’t more jail time. “This tragic alleged domestic violence incident signals the urgent need for more behavioral health treatment resources, more housing access, and additional resources to combat addiction,” Holmes said in a statement.

Last year, a different judge, confronted with the conundrum of Berge, ordered him to attend mandatory drug treatment, called the Community Center for Alternative Programs, Enhanced. The carrot is you get out of jail, while the stick is that if you don’t do the drug counseling, a warrant is issued for your arrest.

So that’s holding Berge accountable while also aiding him with resources to combat addiction. Only this didn’t work either. Berge came to treatment one day without a shirt on and was refused entry, so he got mad and again broke a window. Back to jail he went.

What about mental health treatment?

“He does have under-addressed substance abuse issues and those are really interfering with the ability to do an adequate mental health evaluation,” a probation officer at one point told the court.

But is he a case study of how we need more incarceration of unrepentant drug offenders? Or of how jail clearly doesn’t work?

A couple years ago the state passed “Ricky’s Law,” which allows involuntary commitment for drug treatment. Maybe a sort of “treatment jail” could have altered Berge’s trajectory. But currently there are only a few secure treatment facilities — nine are planned by 2026 — and so in King County the premise of forcing treatment on some of the hardest addiction cases hasn’t yet been widely used.

Involuntary commitment is controversial too. But something’s got to shift. Contrary to the view that Seattle is doing nothing about street crime, the reality is a lot of effort and resources, both inside the criminal justice system and out, were poured into trying to make it so Travis Berge didn’t end up in that makeshift fort in a Seattle city park.

That none of it worked on him seems to defy any easy political point. It doesn’t make his case a poster child for anything — unless it’s a poster saying that Seattle’s got a ton more work to do.