Fewer Cells, Bigger Bills

On any given day, the Washington State Department of Corrections holds roughly 14,000 people in custody. Fourteen thousand feet is considered the milestone altitude for mountain peaks to most passionate hikers, a common height for skydiving jumps, and when considered in the span of population, roughly the size of Snoqualmie. My point is, it’s a big number.

These 14,000 incarcerated Washingtonians are spread across ten state prisons, supervised by a staff of more than 8,000 (who oddly never seem to be doing all that much), and confined under sentences that almost none of them will leave early due to good time. The system that holds them costs Washington close to a billion dollars a year, an amount that has gone up sharply over the past five years even as the population behind the wire has gone down.

For a frame of reference to the few non-billionaire readers in the audience, in recent years Washington has spent that same amount of money on:

• the Climate Pledge Arena renovation — technically private money, but roughly the same hole in the ground.
• half of Bertha — the tunnel-boring machine that got stuck under Pioneer Square and is now in a museum.
• two and a half new hybrid-electric ferries, one of which would presumably break down within the first month of service.
• eleven years of the Washington Student Loan Program, the one the legislature eliminated in 2024 because it cost $89 million a year.
• one thousand mental health treatment beds.

And, the most ironic of them all:

• the new $947 million, 350-bed forensic psychiatric facility being built at Western State Hospital to clean up after the criminal-legal system.

A previous Concrete Truths essay laid out the national picture and treated Washington as a local lens. This one zooms further in. Same column, same goal: numbers without commentary, organized so the shape of the story stands up on its own.

A system smaller than it used to be

Washington’s prison population has been declining for the better part of a decade. The Department of Corrections reported 13,867 people in custody at the end of 2024, down from a 2019 peak that sat closer to 18,000. The pandemic accelerated the drop due to early-release initiatives in 2020 that cut roughly 4,000 people from the prison bunks in a matter of months. Yet population growth between 2021 and 2023 ate back some of those gains. Washington was, according to the most recent Bureau of Justice Statistics data, one of only eight states in the country to add at least 500 prison admissions in 2023 compared to the year before.

The number of facilities has shrunk too. In 2023, the state closed Larch Corrections Center, a minimum-security facility north of Vancouver, citing the falling population. In September 2025, it closed Mission Creek Corrections Center for Women in Belfair, consolidating the entire women’s prison division into the Washington Corrections Center for Women in Gig Harbor, a facility that now operates at about 80% against an operational capacity of 738 individuals.

What remains is a system of ten state prisons:

• Monroe Correctional Complex, the largest by design capacity at 3,100. The most recent population reported was 1,497, a facility built for twice what it now holds, due to the closure of the WSR subcomplex.
• Coyote Ridge Corrections Center in Connell, capacity 2,468. A LEED-Gold-certified campus, the first prison in the United States to earn that distinction.
• Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, capacity 2,439. The oldest prison in the state, opened in 1886, three years before statehood. The site of every execution Washington ever carried out, until the state Supreme Court ruled the death penalty statute unconstitutional in 2018.
• Airway Heights Corrections Center, west of Spokane.
• Stafford Creek Corrections Center, near Aberdeen.
• Clallam Bay Corrections Center, on the Olympic Peninsula.
• Washington Corrections Center, in Shelton, known as the system’s main intake facility.
• Cedar Creek Corrections Center, near Littlerock.
• Olympic Corrections Center, in Forks.
• Washington Corrections Center for Women, in Gig Harbor.

Twelve work-release and reentry facilities operate alongside the prisons, most contractor-managed, scattered across the state from Bellingham to Wenatchee.

What remains is a system of ten state prisons built for many more people than it now holds.

What Washington built, and what it built it for

Washington didn’t accidentally arrive at this system. The structure that now produces these numbers — long determinate sentences, no parole board for most people serving time, a sentencing grid that pins outcomes to offense scores rather than rehabilitation prospects — was a deliberate construction. It started in 1981.

That year, three years before the federal Sentencing Reform Act, Washington became one of the first states in the country to abolish parole and shift to determinate sentencing. The Washington State Legislature passed the Sentencing Reform Act, codified at RCW 9.94A, which took effect for crimes committed on or after July 1, 1984. The Act replaced a system in which the Board of Prison Terms and Paroles had discretion over when someone would actually be released, with one in which the legislature set the sentence length by formula and the prisoner served it.

Two things about the SRA matter for the numbers that came after.

First, it was explicit about its philosophy. The Act formally rejected rehabilitation as the goal of incarceration in favor of a stated policy of punishment and proportionality (while maintaining antiquated definitions of proportionality). A 1991 issue of Prison Legal News captured the on-the-ground experience of the transition: “SRA prisoners (convicted after July 1, 1984) may argue about the SRA’s merits, however, pre-SRA prisoners do not argue as much. They are sullen and exhausted.” Today, more than four decades after the law took effect, Washington still holds a small population of pre-SRA prisoners — fewer than a thousand — serving indeterminate sentences under the old parole-board system.

Second, the SRA shifted sentencing discretion away from judges and parole boards and toward prosecutors (arguably the biggest mistake, especially when considering human bias). University of Washington researchers have identified the offender-score calculation at the heart of the SRA — which weighs prior convictions to set sentence ranges, as one factor — as the major driver of Washington’s prison population growth over the four decades since. The state did not, by this account, end up with the system it has because crime got worse. It ended up with the system it has because the legislature wrote the formula that produces it.

The cost inversion, in more detail

The headline number from the previous Concrete Truths essay was Washington’s per-prisoner cost: $75,576 per person per year as of 2024, an 84% increase since 2019. The more granular curve looks like this:

• 2019: about $41,232 per person
• 2022: about $63,626 per person
• 2024: $75,576 per person

That works out to roughly $207 a day. Older or higher-security facilities can exceed $115,000 per person per year. Incarcerating elderly or seriously ill people can run three times the system average — and Washington’s incarcerated population is aging. A DOC study published in 2020 found that the population of incarcerated individuals over 50 had grown sharply between 1998 and 2018, a trend the department flagged as a major driver of medical and operational costs. The system’s geriatric infrastructure is, in plain terms, a downstream consequence of the long determinate sentences the SRA put in place. Speaking from experience, I swear 75% or more of the individuals I remember seeing over 3.5 years of incarceration looked elderly, and I would be surprised if they made it to their release date.

The aggregate bill is approximately $1 billion a year. State and local corrections spending combined ran $2.15 billion in 2021, which works out to roughly $278 per Washington resident. The Department of Corrections sits around the seventh-costliest line item in the state budget, behind public schools, Medicaid, social services, and a few other things you’d hope a state would spend money on before locking people up…

The state did not end up with the system it has because crime got worse. It ended up with the system it has because the legislature wrote the formula that produces it.

Recidivism — the part where Washington looks like it’s working

If the cost picture is grim, the recidivism picture genuinely is not. Washington’s three-year return-to-prison rate has been falling for two decades, and in the most recent reporting it sits at a level well below the national average.

The DOC measures recidivism as re-incarceration within three years of release from confinement. By that measure:

• The peak was 34.8%, for people released in 2003.
• It fell to 31.1% for people released in 2006.
• The rate continued to decline through the 2010s and early 2020s.
• In May 2022, the three-year rate was 27.4%.
• In June 2023, the most recent year for which a full three-year follow-up window has closed, it was 22.2%.

For comparison, the national three-year re-incarceration rate sits around 40% depending on the cohort and measure. Bureau of Justice Statistics data on a thirty-state cohort released in 2005 found that 68% had been re-arrested within three years and 83% within nine. DOC Secretary Cheryl Strange characterized Washington’s 22 percent rate as “a 35 percent improvement over the national average.”

About 8,000 people are released from Washington prisons each year. According to the department, 96% of incarcerated individuals eventually leave — a useful counterweight to the lay assumption that prison is a holding system for people who never come back. Most people in prison are not staying there. The “incarcerated” label, the assumption of permanence, applies to four percent of them.

Who Washington locks up

A previous essay covered the national figure that Black Americans are incarcerated at roughly five times the rate of white Americans, and noted that Washington’s Black-white disparity (5.7x) sits just above the national average. The Washington-specific story that the wide overview did not have room for is the Indigenous one.

Indigenous people make up about 2% of Washington’s general population and 5% of its prison population. The incarceration rate disparity between Indigenous and white Washington residents has roughly doubled over the past decade. In 2010, the rate for white people in Washington was 437 per 100,000; for Indigenous people, 1,427. By 2021, those figures had dropped to 149 and 981, respectively. The white rate fell by about 66%. The Indigenous rate fell by about 31%. The ratio between them widened in the process.

Washington’s Indigenous incarceration rate is considerably higher than the national average. A 2022 state Office of Financial Management budget request found that 48% of Washington’s Indigenous population experiences poverty, compared to a 25% national figure for Native Americans broadly. The disparity tracks, in other words, with a series of upstream disparities that the criminal legal system does not invent but does amplify.

Some specific geographies inside the state make the pattern sharper. Incarceration rates on certain Washington reservations — Skokomish, Squaxin Island — exceed 1,000 per 100,000, a figure higher than that of nearly any. country. in. the. world.

What the numbers add up to

Washington has a smaller prison population than it did five years ago, lower recidivism than most of the country, a facility drop from twelve to ten, and yet a per-prisoner cost that has nearly doubled in the same window. It built its modern sentencing system on a 1981 statute that explicitly chose punishment over rehabilitation, and it has lived with the downstream effects — long sentences, aging populations, expensive geriatric care, prosecutorial leverage over outcomes — for forty years.

What that adds up to is a system that is, on the indicator most people would point to first, performing better than its peers. It is also a system that is performing better while costing more, that produces some of the country’s worst Indigenous incarceration disparities, and that was constructed by people who said clearly that they had no intent to rehabilitate anybody. None of these facts cancel each other out. They are simultaneous.

This column will return to all of them.

Sources

• Washington State Department of Corrections — facility list, capacities, population snapshots, recidivism methodology, and the aging-prison-population study. doc.wa.gov; Aging Prison Population Trends in Washington: Offenses, Custody Levels, and Recidivism, 1998–2018 (200-RE003); WADOC Recidivism Measure (400-RE010); Prison Facilities directory.
• Washington State Standard, January 2026 — per-prisoner cost of $75,576; 84 percent cost increase since 2019; close to $1 billion annual corrections spending; state and local corrections spending combined at $2.15 billion in 2021.
• OPB / KNKX, April 2024 — cost trajectory from 2019 through 2022; aging-population cost driver; Larch Corrections Center closure reporting.
• Washington State Standard, September 2025 — Mission Creek Corrections Center closure and consolidation into WCCW.
• Washington Sentencing Guidelines Commission — Sentencing Reform Act: Historical Background. SRA passage in 1981, effective July 1, 1984, codified at RCW 9.94A; population of pre-SRA indeterminate-sentence prisoners. sgc.wa.gov.
• Washington Prison History Project, March 2026 — analytic background on the SRA’s explicit rejection of rehabilitation, the shift in sentencing discretion to prosecutors, and on-the-ground accounts from the transition period. waprisonhistory.org
• Prison Legal News, 1991 — contemporary account of the SRA transition, quoted via Washington Prison History Project.
• Washington Statistical Analysis Center, 2024 — Long-Term Recidivism: Race and Sex Differences in the Washington Prison Population Returns to Prison. Hernandez & Georgoulas-Sherry. Documented decline in three-year return rate from 27.4% (May 2022) to 22.2% (June 2023).
• Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prisoners in 2023 — Washington among the eight states with at least 500 more admissions in 2023 than 2022; national racial-share figures; thirty-state cohort recidivism data.
• Prison Policy Initiative — Washington state profile; Where People in Prison Come From; updated racial-disparity charts. prisonpolicy.org/profiles/WA.html
• InvestigateWest / Washington State Standard, August 2025 — Indigenous incarceration rates in Washington (981 per 100,000 in 2021 vs. 149 for white residents); historical 2010 baseline.
• Washington Office of Financial Management, 2022 — budget request data on Indigenous poverty rates in Washington.
• Tacoma Weekly, April 2024 — DOC Secretary Cheryl Strange interview: 22 percent recidivism rate framed against the national average; 8,000 annual releases; 96 percent of incarcerated individuals eventually leave prison.
• Lund Report, May 2025; Spokesman-Review, November 2025 — $947 million capital budget for the 350-bed Forensic Center of Excellence at Western State Hospital; construction timeline (completion 2027–2029); DSHS confirmation that the project remains on scope, schedule, and budget.
• Washington State Standard, July 2025; NWPB, August 2025; Seattle Times, May 2021 — comparative cost references for the snark list (hybrid-electric ferry program at $1.3 billion for three vessels; Bertha and SR 99 tunnel at $2.15 billion for the tunnel within a $3.3 billion project; Climate Pledge Arena renovation at $1.15 billion privately funded).
• Washington State Standard, January 2026 — elimination of the Washington Student Loan Program at a stated cost of $89 million annually.
• Seattle Times, April 2019 — Inslee proposal estimating $1 billion to overhaul Washington’s mental health system and add approximately 1,000 treatment beds.