A prison reform bill designed specifically to reduce the number of people placed in solitary confinement, one of the most expensive forms of incarceration, is working through the Washington legislature. The price tag the Department of Corrections (DOC) put on it? Initially, it was more than $70 million through 2029. Now it’s $7 million.
Activists and lawmakers say the DOC hasn’t explained why it’s estimating such high personnel costs for HB 1137, a law that should reduce the need for more personnel. In fact, they say agencies like the DOC are overestimating the costs to implement prison reform bills in a way designed to kill them.
And for incarcerated people, these bills could mean the difference between life and death.
Karen Peacey got out of prison 12 years ago and, troubled by what she’d experienced in incarceration, immediately became an activist for policy reform in how Washington state runs its penal system.
Her time in “the hole” — or solitary confinement, where incarcerated people are segregated from the rest of the prison population for between 20 and 24 hours a day for sometimes a day or two and sometimes decades — was traumatizing. She was there for 14 days.
“For people that stay in [solitary] for years and years, I don’t know how they do it,” she said. “The two weeks did me in. I still have flashbacks of it.”
Three other bills RANGE analyzed also carry large asks from state agencies. Another bill, HB 1147, would codify the right for incarcerated people to interact with their lawmakers. Another, HB 1274, allows incarcerated people to petition to receive shorter sentences that eliminate what are called “juvenile points,” which stem from crimes committed when they were minors and are used to lengthen prison time by years. Another, HB 1166, would have created a right for incarcerated people to purchase electronic technology to earn an education, but it died in its policy committee on February 21 after lawmakers declined to schedule it for a hearing.
The bills, taken together, are meant to reduce the mental toll of serving time — and to diminish the nearly $3.2 billion Washington taxpayers will spend on the cost of incarceration from 2023 to 2025.
But the DOC has asked for tens of millions of dollars to implement them.
For a state like Washington, which has a $10 billion budget deficit, such fiscal notes create an incentive for lawmakers to vote against a piece of legislation.
Similar bills have failed in the legislature for years. Activists and lawmakers RANGE spoke with said the inertia of an entrenched incarceration system — influenced by state agencies averse to change — is getting in the way. One of the ways reform bills can die is when lawmakers think they cost too much, but that decision is made based on a pro forma document, called a “fiscal note.” The agencies attach them to proposed laws to tell lawmakers how much money they would need to implement any piece of legislation. It’s essentially an estimate of the economic impact of a bill — and is a normal and necessary process that informs how much the legislature should appropriate in its budget.
But activists say fiscal notes are being abused, pointing out that many of the items used to justify certain costs are speculative, unrelated to the legislation they’re attached to or are simply unjustified. Many carry a steep price tag — between hundreds of thousands and tens of millions of dollars. Several agencies have attached fiscal notes to the bills mentioned above, including the DOC, the Governor’s Office, the Office of Public Defense and the Administrative Office of the Courts.
DOC spokesperson Jim Kopriva said incarceration is a complex industry to manage, and each of the fiscal notes issued by the agency was rigorously calculated and justified. He denied that there was any malfeasance in the agency’s calculations of its fiscal notes, saying any laws that expand the ability of incarcerated people to interact with the outside world necessitates more attention by DOC officials because some will exploit that contact to conduct illicit activity.
“Attention means labor means money,” Kopriva said. He said the DOC has issued more than 150 fiscal notes for legislation so far this session.
How much could 4 bills cost?
The DOC issued fiscal notes for a total of more than $60 million — a figure that has shifted as the bills make their way through the legislative process — for the four bills RANGE analyzed for this story. Based on its own interpretation of some of the bills, the department says it will need to spend money on several kinds of line items, the most expensive of which is hiring hundreds of new staff members. But Peacey and five activists RANGE spoke with who’ve been working to reform prisons for years say they don’t know how the DOC came to some of these estimates.
HB 1137 creates standards for when to put incarcerated people in solitary confinement and asks the DOC to try harder to limit confinement there to less than 15 days.
For Peacey, who served two-and-half years in state prison for theft, a law like this would likely have prevented some of the trauma from her time in solitary.
“It’s awful what they do in there,” said Peacey. She told RANGE a story about a time she was up for work release. “They sent me to get a [urine test] and they had new cups that they didn’t know how to read. So they said that I was on drugs and put me in the hole. I had this big goon squad of like eight people coming to get me. And they took me to segregation and left me there for two weeks. It was hard to get out.”
The agency attached a fiscal note to HB 1137 for $7,033,000 to hire dozens of new guards to reduce the amount of time incarcerated people spend in solitary confinement, the form of incarceration that takes more guards and resources to oversee. When the DOC attached that note, the Survivors Opposing Solitary Coalition (SOSC), a nonprofit trying to limit solitary confinement, sent a letter to the House Appropriations Committee opposing the note, saying it had limited the bill significantly from a previous version of it in order to gain DOC’s buy-in.
“In prior years lawmakers and DOC have expressed support for these policy changes but had concerns about the fiscal costs,” the letter said. “In recognition of that concern, and the realities of the state’s budget, the Coalition has introduced a significantly narrower bill this year targeting the disciplinary process, that is intentionally designed to be cost-neutral. We have attempted to engage in thoughtful conversation around this legislative proposal with DOC to identify a workable proposal.”
It asked the committee to deny the fiscal note.
“Given the Coalition’s work to narrow this bill, we were incredibly disappointed in DOC’s initial fiscal note for more than 70 million dollars and we continue to question their new 7 million dollar estimate. We therefore urge you to disregard their assessment and would welcome an amendment that directs DOC to implement HB 1137 within existing resources.”
Rep. Strom Peterson (D-Olympia), who sponsored HB 1137, told RANGE he talked the DOC down from a $70 million fiscal note on the bill — but the department never explained the huge disparity. Peterson also thinks more than $7 million is still too high a price tag and said he has sought clarification from the DOC on how it came to the figure. After all: the bill reduces the number of incarcerated people serving time in the most expensive form of incarceration. (At the time of the interview, he had not received clarification.)
“Isolation, the use of solitary confinement,” Peterson said, “is proven to have very negative effects on a person that is placed into solitary confinement. … The rates of violence go up. The rates of suicides go up. The rates of mental health crises go up when somebody is in solitary. That makes incarceration more expensive.”
Kopriva acknowledged that solitary confinement is more expensive than other forms of incarceration: “Transportation and movement, like your walk from place to place with two or three people — higher custody levels means higher staffing, closer security, things like that,” Kopriva said. “There’s just the higher custody, think of it as more expensive, the more attention you warrant.”
This idea of higher levels of attention costing more money was a theme in the rest of the fiscal notes.
The agency attached a fiscal note to HB 1166 for $36,902,000, partly to hire 103 new full time employees from this year to 2027 to monitor the use of the technology the bill would have allowed incarcerated people to buy. Peacey said the DOC already has people who can do that. The bill also asks for money to fund new proprietary networking, network security and hardware, Kopriva said.
“ There’s a relentless threat of using them for improper purposes,” Kopriva said, noting a recent incident at Coyote Ridge Corrections Center. “A CO came up, and they’d found a phone hidden inside a Super Nintendo emulator.”
Noreen Light, an activist with SOSC whose son has been incarcerated for more than two decades, told RANGE this kind of monitoring is part of a system of control akin to domestic abuse.
“ I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that wheel of power and control and the things that people do to their partners in terms of controlling them,” Light said. Domestic abusers “control their phone calls, monitor their phone calls, monitor their letters, monitor their visits, belittle them, treat them as less than human, physically abuse them, isolate them from legislators and family members. Look at all those things, and you’ll see what power and control really is. You can see exactly the same thing in the correctional facility.”
In legislative testimony on January 29, Bryan Glant, an incarcerated man, said the bill was needed because his access to good educational opportunities was limited.
“Currently, the system is stacked against us,” Glant said. “Transfers can disrupt courses, and even when enrolled, rules require our books to fit within a small cardboard box. The limited programs only offer basic or technical associate’s degrees, which I’ve found to lack rigor and don’t transfer to nontechnical programs at universities like University of Washington.”
The DOC attached another fiscal note to HB 1147 for $23,550,000 to hire 87.9 new employees in perpetuity to do things like monitor meetings between incarcerated people and their legislators, which the bill would establish a right to. But again, the advocates said, the agency already has personnel who can do this. “Why do they need 87.9 [more] full time employees?” Peacey said. “It’s just because they picked a number in the sky that would be so high to try and kill the bill.”
But in a later fiscal note, it did not ask for money, attaching a statement: “Fiscal note not available.” In an interview with RANGE, Kopriva did not know why the second note was filed but said the DOC needs the new personnel to monitor incarcerated people.
The DOC attached another fiscal note to HB 1274 for $3,185,000 to hire 13.5 new employees between this year and 2027 who it says are needed to process new sentences for people who benefit from the juvenile points elimination bill. Under the legislation, the courts would process those cases — the DOC would not have to do that work.
What’s at stake
There is much at stake in these bills. For example, HB 1247 — the bill that eliminates juvenile points — would mean that incarcerated people who are serving terms inflated by crimes committed when they were children but have nothing to do with the crimes for which they’re incarcerated could be released sooner or even immediately.
This would offer them a new lease on life, said Anthony Blankenship, a community organizer in the Policy and Advocacy Department of Civil Survival, a Port Orchard nonprofit that advocates for incarceration reform.
“An 18-year-old serving 25 years or a life sentence, their life has been thrown away before you even got the opportunity to start,” Blankenship told RANGE. “It is a really important bill, especially in a state that doesn’t have parole.”
(People incarcerated before 1984 can be eligible for parole, but Washington largely abolished parole that year.)
An assessment by the Washington Office of Public Defense estimated that the average reduction in prison terms for incarcerated people who would be eligible for resentencing under the juvenile points bill would be 107 months. In other words, the points applied to their sentences based on crimes they’d committed as children — before their brains were fully formed — added up to an average of almost nine years in extra prison time.
Before 2023, if an underage person was convicted of a crime, that stain would live on their record after they became an adult, said Daniel Landsman, the vice president of Policy for Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a Washington DC nonprofit that lobbies for prison reform across the country, including HB 1274. After becoming an adult, Landsman said, those convictions became “points” that could be added to later sentences based on the person’s “offender score” if they were convicted of a different crime as an adult. Based on this larger score, judges would apply longer sentences.
Prison reform advocates have long pointed out that brain chemistry research shows a person is less impulsive and less likely to make bad decisions — including committing crimes — after they turn 25. Because of this, they argue it’s unfair to lengthen prison sentences for adults based on crimes they committed when they were younger — which in Washington are crimes they’ve already paid for in the juvenile justice system.
“We’re starting to understand how the brain develops,” Light said.
With that new understanding, the state got rid of the juvenile points system in 2023, saying such points would no longer be applied to sentences for adults with juvenile sentences. But there was a problem with that legislation: it’s only for future cases. “So for all the people who are still in prison serving lengthy sentences, they don’t get to go back for resentencing,” Light said.
HB 1274 would apply the 2023 law to currently incarcerated people, allowing them to ask for a resentencing that doesn’t account for the points the state had applied to their record based on the crimes they committed as children.
The bill is scheduled for an executive session hearing in the House Appropriations Committee on February 26.
Some believe that before prison reform can happen, perhaps fiscal notes also need to be changed. One incarcerated prison reform advocate who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation from the DOC, said these allegedly inaccurate fiscal notes are evidence the fiscal note process needs to be reformed, too.
“We have agencies that are actively working unethically to clog up our legislative process,” said the incarcerated activist, who’s been lobbying for reform from prison in 2011. “Maybe at some point we need to ask, ‘Should someone take responsibility for fiscal notes for an agency that is struggling doing their job in putting out a fiscal note for the task at hand?”
Several prison reform bills making their way through the legislative process this year have large “fiscal notes” — basically an estimate of how much a bill would cost the state or an individual agency — attached to them. Activists say some of these notes dramatically overstate the cost and ask for unneeded items. They worry the notes might kill the bills. Here’s a breakdown of four such notes, attached to bills by the Department of Corrections, that RANGE analyzed.
- HB 1137:
- Title: “Establishing uniform policies and procedures within department of corrections facilities relating to disciplinary proceedings and administrative segregation”
- What it does: Creates new standards for segregating incarcerated people from the general prison population
- Where it’s at in the House: Appropriations Committee
- Fiscal note: $7,033,000
- Why it may be inflated: Activists say segregation is one of the most expensive forms of incarceration, so reducing it would save money
- What you can do: Share your testimony on this bill here.
- HB 1147
- Title: “Supporting civic engagement for incarcerated and institutionalized individuals in state custody to promote inclusion and rehabilitation”
- What it does: Creates a right for incarcerated people to interact with their lawmakers
- Where it’s at in the House: Appropriations Committee
- Fiscal note: $23,550,000
- Why it may be inflated: Activists say the personnel DOC wants to hire with the money already exist in the DOC
- What you can do: Share your testimony on this bill here.
- HB 1166
- Title: “Establishing the providing effective education for reentry success act”
- What it does: Creates a right for incarcerated people to purchase electronic equipment for educational purposes
- Where it’s at in the House: Dead in committee
- Fiscal note: $36,902,000
- Why it may be inflated: Activists say the personnel DOC wants to hire with the money already exist in the DOC
- HB 1274
- Title: “Concerning retroactively applying the requirement to exclude certain juvenile convictions from an offender score regardless of the date of the offense”
- What it does: Creates a process for currently incarcerated people to be resentenced without a consideration of crimes they committed as minors
- Where it’s at in the House: Appropriations Committee
- Fiscal note: $3,185,000
- Why it may be inflated: The costs of the bill would be the responsibility of courts, not the DOC
- What you can do: Share your testimony on this bill here.
Read more of RANGE’s legislative session coverage here.
Clarification: This story has been revised to say a quote from DOC spokesperson Jim Kopriva was in reference to HB 1166, not HB 1147. We also added that the DOC wanted money for technology purchases for HB 1166, not only for hiring personnel for monitoring.
