Haven't Cons and Their Kids Been Separated Long Enough?

Throughout much of October and November, Leah League started her weekdays at 3:30 in the morning. She would rise, get dressed, and head out the door of her Tacoma house for a bus commute to Olympia that took two and a half hours and required up to four transfers. After working a full day as a landscaper, she'd do the commute again in reverse, reaching home by 7:30 or 8 p.m., by which time she was often so tired she would fall asleep before eating dinner. League, 42, recognized that the sensible thing was to move to Olympia. But she couldn't. An ex-convict, she was trapped in Tacoma by a new law that requires former prisoners to return to the county where they were first convicted, and stay there, while under Department of Corrections supervision, for one to two years.

League had found her landscaping job while living at a work-release facility in Olympia, just prior to her official departure from prison. She'd gone into a treatment program for her drug addiction (the source of many of her nine felonies), joined Narcotics Anonymous, and made clean-and-sober friends—"a whole new life," she says. But when she was forced to move back to Pierce County—where she'd been convicted of a string of felonies, most recently a little more than a year ago for possession of drugs and a stolen car—she felt as though the state was yanking her new life away.

"It can be done," she says of her attempt to commute to that life in Olympia. "But, it's pretty devastating," she says, starting to cry as she describes constant fatigue from an existence spent either working or waiting for buses. "I can imagine a lot of people not making it."

If people can't make it in their new, law-abiding life, she implies, they'll fall back into their old, not so law-abiding ways. Which is precisely the opposite of what Senate Bill 6157 intends. The law, which was passed this spring and took effect on July 22, was supposed to reduce recidivism by building up community resources for released prisoners and developing "re-entry" plans that require them to participate in treatment programs and support groups.

The requirement to return prisoners to their "county of origin" is one little piece of the bill. Under that provision, newly released inmates must return to the county where they were first convicted—even if they've had multiple convictions since—regardless of where they were last living. It came about because of a pet peeve on the part of Pierce County, namely a feeling that Tacoma and its environs were a dumping ground for ex-cons.

"The Pierce County prosecutor absolutely insisted on it because of the belief that once folks are released to Pierce County, they become Pierce County's problem forever," says Sen. Debbie Regala, D-Tacoma, one of the bill's prime sponsors. Pierce County has developed a number of attractive support programs for released prisoners, Regala says, but was suffering for its good deeds under the old system that gave offenders wide latitude as to where they could return.

Regala acknowledges that ex-cons may not have lived at the site of their first crime for years, maybe decades, and may have family, including spouses and children, in a different county. "In some cases, people don't even know where their first conviction was," she says. But Regala overcame her reservations about the provision in order to get the broader bill passed.

In some cases, convicts are now being sent back to a crime scene that they'd only been passing through. That's Dawn Wiltzius' story. It was the summer after her junior year at the University of Washington when the premed student started driving herself, her boyfriend, and another friend back to Spokane from a gathering at her family's cabin in Stevens County. Having drunk some beers during the party, she swung too fast around a curve on a winding mountain road in Pend Oreille County, and ended up half-submerged in a marsh. She kicked her way out of the car and survived. Her passengers were not so lucky. She was charged with vehicular homicide. After serving four years in jail, she was set to return to UW in September but, she says, was told by her prison counselor a week before her release date that because of the new law, she had to move to Pend Oreille, located in the northeast part of the state.

"The only two people she knew there were the two people she met in the [local] jail," says her mother, Kerry Wiltzius, who lives in Spokane. "One taught her how to make crack, another told her about killing her husband."

"That's why the deviation process is there," responds Sen. Mike Carrell, R-Lakewood, a prime sponsor of SB-6157. He's speaking about four exceptions that are built into the law, including the presence of family or other support elsewhere. In the end, Wiltzius got an exception approved in time to start UW classes in the fall, but that was after her mom contacted legislators who intervened. "If my mom hadn't been out there fighting, it would have taken who knows how long," Wiltzius says, sitting in a cafe near the university, a thin, blond 25-year-old exuding an aura of sober restraint that hints at a past otherwise unrevealed by her student outfit of jeans and a fleece jacket.