By Sydney Brownstone
The Seattle Times
SEATTLE — After wrongful death claims shuttered one Washington jail last year and threatened to close another, a lawmaker is again trying to create an independent oversight board for the state’s 50 local jails.
Washington already has independent oversight through the state Office of the Corrections Ombuds for its prisons, where people convicted of felonies go to serve their sentences. Jails, which are typically run by counties and cities and largely book people who have been arrested but not convicted of a crime, have no such statewide guardrails.
Little is known of what happens behind many jail walls in Washington state. At least 64 people have died in local jails since 2022, after the Washington State Department of Health began collecting this information. But not all jails report these deaths or the reasons for them to the department.
Nor do statewide mandatory standards exist for jails, which makes Washington among a minority of states — 13 out of 50 — without them, according to a 2022 Washington legislative task force that investigated jail standards.
At the same time, legal challenges have increased costs for jails in smaller counties, which must decide whether they are able to keep operating them.
The chair of the jail standards task force and sponsor of Senate Bill 5005, Sen. Rebecca Saldaña, D-Seattle, said local jails are “not set up to receive people in crisis.” The issue is especially important, she said, now that public safety is at the forefront of many lawmakers’ political agendas.
Under the new legislation, jails would get an accountability system that mirrors the one for prisons. A board made up of corrections officials, an attorney, health care professionals and formerly incarcerated people would set standards for things like housing and health care in jail, investigate conditions and report back to the state.
But Saldaña’s bill could face an uphill battle in a state Legislature staring down a $10 billion to $12 billion budget deficit. She introduced a similar bill last year with a price tag of $4.6 million for the rest of the biennium, and it failed to advance.
Sen. Matt Boehnke, R-Kennewick, opposed Saldaña’s legislation last year because he was concerned about the cost.
“I think we could do a lot more with the current system,” he said.
The Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs opposed Saldaña’s bill last session but hasn’t taken a position on the new legislation. The organization criticized the previous bill for proposing only one corrections official for the oversight board. Saldaña has added a second one in the new bill.
Dr. Marc Stern, a correctional health care expert and former head medical officer for Washington’s prisons, said Saldaña’s bill is “a very good start.” But Stern cautioned that jails currently lacking adequate health care will be difficult to improve without additional funding.
“Whether that funding should come from the cities and counties or the state is something I’m not qualified to comment on, but it has to come from somewhere,” Stern said.
Rising insurance costs
Washington’s city and county jails are seeing costly lawsuits and rising insurance costs, which have pushed local governments to consider whether they can continue operating them. In 2024, two counties weighed shutting down their jails, and one ultimately did.
Earlier last year, the family of Kyle Lara reached a $2.5 million settlement with Garfield County, where Lara died by suicide in a dank, isolated basement cell and wasn’t discovered for 18 hours. As part of the settlement, the county agreed to keep its jail closed.
Klickitat County’s Board of Commissioners also considered shuttering its county jail after the family of Yakama Nation tribal member Ivan Howtopat filed a $20 million tort claim against the county. Howtopat died by suicide while enduring fentanyl withdrawal inside the jail, which his family’s attorney said did not provide him with medication-assisted treatment consistent with the standards of care for opioid withdrawal.
After an uproar over the possibility of closing the Klickitat jail, the county took over the operations of the jail from the Klickitat County Sheriff’s Office and agreed as part of a $2 million settlement with Howtopat’s family to improve medical and mental health care at the jail.
The attorney representing Howtopat’s family, Corinne Sebren, said Saldaña’s bill is a “good foot in the door” to establish more transparency into an opaque and dysfunctional jail system. Change needs to happen immediately, she said.
“We are violating people’s constitutional rights in our jails every single day,” Sebren said.
Saldaña has also said that an oversight board could investigate “many of the systemic failures” related to a 2023 incident in Yakima’s county jail, in which 41-year-old Hien Trung Hua died after being shackled and beaten by guards. Hua’s mother filed a $50 million tort claim against the county, alleging the county attempted to cover up the killing of her son.
The county labeled Hua’s death during a struggle with jail guards “natural” and cleared the guards of wrongdoing. But a Seattle Times investigation later showed that Hua died when he was restrained in a dangerous position that violated the jail’s own policy manual.
Increasingly, cities that run jails are seeing “a rising cost for insurance and greater liability concerns,” said Candice Bock, director of government relations for the Association of Washington Cities.
“When there is an incident, unfortunately that does often result in litigation, which impacts insurance coverage overall,” Bock said. “So that is definitely a concern.”
Derek Bryan, executive director of the Washington Counties Risk Pool, said his organization is “extremely focused on jails and the liability that comes from jails and with them.” From 2020 through 2024, the costs of 24 counties’ insurance premiums rose from $4.8 million to $16.3 million, according to Bryan’s organization.
Jails are short-staffed, Bryan said, and with tight budgets, they likely “end up lowering some of the standards that would have prevented some individuals from becoming employed.” Jails were also never meant to deal with the scale and intensity of addiction and mental health issues they currently see, he said.
“Typically, people with mental health or drug issues need to be taken somewhere else with professionals who are experienced with that,” he said. Jails, he said, are “being asked to do something they should not be asked to do.”
In response, the risk pool has hired its own law enforcement analyst to look at liability for jails and other law enforcement responsibilities for the 24 counties in the risk pool. The risk pool has also received training and created grants to fund in-cell cameras and bracelets that monitor the vitals of people incarcerated in jails.
Bryan said he doesn’t think a lack of state standards is the problem.
“I understand the idea of the board, but I feel like that can sometimes be a Band-Aid if you can’t figure out the staffing and the drug issues and mental health,” he said.
But if counties and cities can’t run jails adequately with the resources they have, they should consider merging them or not have their own jails, said Sebren, who represented the Howtopat family.
“If that means we have to consolidate some of our smaller jails because they cannot operate constitutionally, then that’s what it means,” she said. “Counties need to take their own financial responsibility for the operation of their jails, and they need to budget appropriately.”
Saldaña also defended her decision not to propose new funding for local jails through the oversight bill. The bill doesn’t impose new costs on jails, she added.
“We don’t want to throw money at programming where there are not standards,” Saldaña said. “I think it’s important first to create the oversight and the commitment and accountability.”
Disbanded oversight
Washington state once had an oversight board but disbanded it in 1987 after a budget committee recommended eliminating it and left oversight of the jails to the cities and counties running them.
Lawmakers passed legislation in 2021 that required counties to investigate their own jail deaths and report them to the state. But in early 2023, The Seattle Times found that just four counties had reported jail deaths to the state since the law was passed, while independent reporting showed 31 deaths occurred across 15 jail systems in that same time frame.
In Yakima County, it was jail officials who handled the state-mandated review of Hua’s death. They determined their guards had acted appropriately. Months later, reporting by The Times led the pathologist who conducted Hua’s autopsy to relabel the death “negligent homicide.”
"(The law) lacks independence because the departments are investigating their own in-custody deaths,” said Ethan Frenchman, an attorney with Columbia Legal Services and co-chair of the 2022 jail standards task force.
Saldaña’s bill would ensure a representative from the state board helps investigate local jail deaths.
“Washington has no independent system for jail oversight, and there’s no transparency or accountability for what happens inside of jail,” Frenchman said. “And oversight, I think, is a first step.”
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(Reporter Daniel Beekman contributed to this story.)
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