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WA Budget 2015-17: High Degree of Difficulty
When writing about the budget it’s important to share good news as well as bad. First the good: (it’s short) the revenue forecast picked up a little bit. The bad is that we face one of the most difficult budget cycles of my time in the Legislature, and perhaps worse than we’ve seen in many…
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Visiting Prisons
I’ve been trying to visit everywhere we spend a billion dollars or more per biennium, and the prison system definitely makes the list. This month I got a chance to visit McNeil Island, a very creepy place. We have a treatment facility on the island for dangerous sex predators, and a former prison. We closed…
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Possible Budget Choices – Criminal Justice Costs
For the past 15 years we’ve been on a trend of increasing the number of incarcerated people. We now lead the world in the percentage of people in jail. It costs the state an average of about $30,000 per year to put someone in prison, plus all the costs of the courts and police/sheriff. Sometimes…