John Braun: Shorten prison sentences to reduce state spending? No thanks, Democrats
Friday, January 31, 2025
A question regarding a bill introduced by a group of Democratic state senators early in this legislative session: What price do you put on public safety?
For a fourth straight year, Republicans are working to pass a bill that would help cities and counties rebuild their depleted ranks of law-enforcement officers. We are greatly encouraged by the support it is receiving this year from Senate Democrats and Governor Ferguson.
The $100 million cost represented in Senate Bill 5060 is substantial — but as the saying goes, freedom isn’t free. Neither is having more officers to respond to community-safety concerns.
Meanwhile, some of our Democratic colleagues are again proposing legislation that seeks to give incarcerated felons a break on paying their debt to society.
What’s different is how their “judicial discretion” bill — Senate Bill 5269 — paints this wrongheaded notion as a way to reduce government spending.
Here’s how the bill spins it: “Because the cost of long-term incarceration is substantial and the state must use its resources responsibly, providing judges the opportunity to modify lengthy sentences in the interests of justice will result in significant cost savings to the state.”
Republicans are always interested in policy changes that result in significant cost savings. However, this idea is no more credible as a cost-saving move than the “defund the police” movement was. Both are about something else.
We know this year’s legislative session needs to produce a new state operating budget that overcomes a self-inflicted deficit of around $7 billion. “Self-inflicted” refers to the fact that on average, Democrats increased state spending by nearly 17% in each budget they’ve adopted since one-party rule returned to Olympia in 2018.
But there’s a reason people receive lengthy prison sentences. The more heinous the crime, the longer the sentence. It’s an affront to their victims for anyone to advocate reducing those sentences as a way to reduce government spending. What price do Democrats put on public safety?
If passed, the phased-in approach of the judicial-discretion bill would allow a growing range of incarcerated felons to seek a shortened sentence.
For instance, someone imprisoned for an offense committed when they were 18 to 24 years old would initially be unable to seek a “modification” without having served at least 20 years already. But just one year later, the minimum time served would fall to 13 years, and two years after that, it would drop to only 10 years.
Although this sweetheart deal wouldn’t be offered to those convicted of aggravated first-degree murder or labeled as persistent offenders, meaning the three-strikes group serving life sentences, think of all the other violent criminals in Washington prisons who would love to see SB 5269 become law.
If it did, a few years from now someone who gets a 25-year sentence for a violent crime committed at age 23 conceivably could be freed after serving just 10 years. That’s because the bill refers only to a minimum number of years served and ignores the length of the sentence imposed, unless it’s life without parole.
Imagine the sponsors of SB 5269 trying to convince the victim, or the victim’s loved ones, that slashing the offender’s prison sentence by 60% was not only in the “interests of justice” but also was justified by the cost savings it enabled.
In their proposal, our Democratic colleagues also make the claim that an “expansive body of research demonstrates that persons who are granted early release before finishing lengthy sentences are less likely to recidivate.”
Crime is up in our state, so let’s see that data. Either way, I’ll counter with how policy proposals like this make it less likely that our communities and cities will be able to retain the law-enforcement officers they manage to hire.
The $100 million grant program in SB 5060, the Republican prime-sponsored bill to hire more local police officers, is geared primarily toward compensation. Still, a good salary and benefits aren’t necessarily enough to make up for feeling that your work is being devalued.
If Democrats go ahead and create a law that could empower an activist judge to basically transform a violent felon’s lengthy sentence into a get-out-of-jail card after just 10 years served, it would clearly signal that Washington doesn’t value public safety and doesn’t respect the work of law-enforcement officers.
But let’s get back to the rhetoric about this judicial-discretion bill producing significant cost savings.
SB 5269 is correct about one thing: the state must use its resources responsibly. Republicans have plenty of sensible ideas for achieving real savings in ways that won’t jeopardize the safety of our communities or demoralize law-enforcement officers across our state.
What we need is for legislative Democrats to work with us, the way Governor Ferguson has committed to work with us on ensuring the new budget includes that $100 million for hiring more law-enforcement officers.
Although the number of adult inmates in state custody is expected to tick upward by about 400 over the next two years, it’s still around 4,000 below pre-pandemic levels. Shrinking the statewide prison population further, by shrinking the sentences of violent felons, is not where legislators should focus their cost-saving efforts. To say it again, what price should be put on public safety?
The need to reduce state spending is real. So is the need to reinvigorate the law-enforcement sector in our state. But the only people who would truly benefit from the Democrats’ judicial-discretion dream would be felons — not taxpayers, and certainly not crime victims or their families. This is not the way to make our state better.
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Sen. John Braun of Centralia serves the 20th Legislative District, which spans parts of four counties from Yelm to Vancouver. He became Senate Republican leader in 2020.
https://chronline.com/stories/john-braun-shorten-prison-sentences-to-reduce-state-spending-no-thanks-democrats,374657?