With the number of Washington residents headed to jail or prison at a modern low, one might expect Christie Hedman to be declaring victory.
As executive director of the Washington Defender Association, Hedman’s organization has been at the forefront of a justice reform effort keenly interested in slashing incarceration rates in the state. Instead of celebrating the drop as a sign that reform is succeeding, though, Hedman sees it as more evidence that the system remains highly dysfunctional.
“There isn’t as much intentionality in these drops,” Hedman said. “The criminal legal system is still in denial about how broken everything is.”
By the time the pandemic began, efforts were well underway to move Washington away from incarceration as the primary response to crime. The calls for changes following George Floyd’s 2020 murder by a Minneapolis police officer and a 2021 state Supreme Court decision invalidating laws against drug possession fueled that shift.
Rising crime rates and heightened worry about public safety have led some to suggest the reforms went too far. More jail and prison, the argument goes, will equate to less crime.
The number of adults Washington courts sentenced to prison and jail on felony charges has nearly halved in the past five years. State Caseload Forecast Council records on felony sentences provide insight into how that reduction has played out.
The drop in sentences involving incarceration stems directly from a state Supreme Court ruling that Washington’s felony drug possession law was unconstitutional. Legislation passed earlier this year recriminalized drug possession as misdemeanor rather than a felony, but it’s unclear whether local governments, including Seattle’s, will enforce the new law.
In 2022, about 800 people were sentenced for felony drug crimes — a 66 percent drop compared with the previous year, and an 86 percent drop compared with 2020. (The state does not regularly collect misdemeanor sentencing data. All the data presented here relates to felony convictions.)
Nearly 95 percent of these sentences were for dealing, compared with 2018, before the Supreme Court decision, when 84 percent were for nondealing offenses.
Last year also saw a drop in jail and prison sentences for felony property, assault and sex crimes. Experts attribute the overall decline in incarceration to the strains on the system since the pandemic.
During the pandemic, local jails and Department of Corrections-run prisons limited their populations by restricting who was taken into custody, said Russell Brown, executive director of the Washington Association of Prosecuting Attorneys.
“The whole court process was basically stalled,” Brown said.
From March to December 2020, arrests resulting in fingerprinting dropped by 48 percent, new criminal prosecution filings by 23 percent, jail bookings by 51 percent and prison admissions by 44 percent, according to a review of the state criminal justice system by the Washington Institute for Public Policy, the state Legislature’s think tank. The statewide criminal backlogs had jumped to 16,000 cases by the end of 2020 from 2,000 in 2019.
The average daily population of incarcerated people in Washington prisons was down 30 percent in 2022 compared with 2018, according to Department of Corrections data.
“So much of what you’ve seen has been a response to the system itself constricting and shutting down during this period of time,” said Hedman of the Washington Defender Association. “There are huge shortages of people wanting to be police officers, correctional officers, lawyers, whether it’s prosecutors or defense attorneys.”
The lingering effects of the pandemic will be evident across all criminal justice data for the next few years, said Lauren Peterson-Knoth, a senior researcher at the Washington Institute for Public Policy.
These constraints led prosecutors and courts to prioritize certain cases.
“The types of cases that were most likely to be processed were the crimes that were serious enough or repetitive enough that they finally had to put someone in custody,” said Brown of the prosecutor’s association.
In 2022, sentences for crimes that involved a deadly weapon, specifically firearms, increased the most in five years. This tracks with the reported increase in crimes involving firearms, said Brown, citing a King County report for 2022 showing reported shootings more than doubled compared with 2018.
“Not just in Washington but across the country violent crime seems to have ticked up, and often violent crime is attached to firearms,” Brown said. “So the fact that sentencing on firearms is the highest in five years doesn’t surprise me.”
The trend is also reflected in the increase in the average sentence length, which for drug crimes has nearly doubled from about two years in 2018 to over four years in 2022, after the Supreme Court halted lower-level drug prosecutions.
Still, the question lingers: Has criminal justice reform led to lower rates of incarceration? Not really, say legal defense experts.
“There’s been a couple of reforms the Legislature has started to nibble on around the edges but there hasn’t been any substantial change in sentencing law,” said Greg Link, director of the Washington Appellate Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to offering legal services to people from vulnerable communities to appeal court decisions.
Link called for a reevaluation of the use of incarceration, pointing to research showing longer sentences do not reduce crime.
“The overwhelming majority of people sentenced are going to rejoin our community, they are going to be our neighbors and our co-workers and our family members,” he said. “So what we ought to be thinking about is how do we want those people to come back to us?”
