Update: Criminal punishment is already dead in the WA state legislative session
Update: The 2025 Washington State Legislature session is already over for us
Washington state’s legislative session isn’t over yet, but meaningful opportunities for criminal punishment reform are. Ralph Dunuan walks us through the bills we were following at CHOICES Media, and what it means for folks on the inside and outside of prison walls.
Transcript
Elizabeth [00:00:17] Welcome to CHOICES, the podcast that dives deep into real issues surrounding the currently incarcerated and survivors of mass incarceration. We're here to help share the stories of those navigating the challenges of life inside the Washington prison system, focusing on struggles, transformations and rehabilitation. Join us on CHOICES to hear voices for a liberated purpose, presenting and archiving issues that impact indigenous peoples and communities of color on both sides of the walls.
Ralph [00:01:01] What's up, everyone? This is your host Ralph Dunuan
Megan [00:01:04] And Megan Ybarra.
Ralph [00:01:05] With you From The Inside Out by CHOICES Media, coming to you from the Washington Corrections Center. It has been really exciting putting together our podcast, and we're not done yet with this first season yet. As we continue to work on getting the rest of our first season out to y'all, we thought we would drop a quick update. Recent times have shown that House representatives have been more willing to explore more meaningful strategies when dealing with carceral practices in Washington state. However, let's be clear. Bills that have had anything to do with changes to the criminal punishment system have consistently been shut down. But at least some bills pass their side of origin, which is usually the House side. In 2025, this matters a lot because Washington state runs on a biennium. If a bill would have passed on the House side, but got stalled out in the Senate, organizers can pick up where the bill left off the following year in a short session. A short session means that a bill has only half the time to make it through the process. So, this outcome affects not only 2025, but it means that in 2026, the commission will have a longer time for advocates to get the work done. For the first time in years, Washington state legislators have failed to pass any legislation that would significantly promote rehabilitation or change the slave state mentality.
Megan [00:02:33] Okay, Ralph, when you say slave state mentality, what does that mean for you behind bars and what might have changed it in terms of the laws we were looking at this year?
Ralph [00:02:46] Yeah, so what it looks like for those of us on the inside is that when a facility has an overbearing presence from Correctional Industries, it requires us to work rather than choose, say, academic programming or rehabilitative programming like the Alternative to Violence Project. This session, we had House Bill 1233, which was the wages bill. It still would have written into law that incarcerated people would be guaranteed a dollar per hour wage with a cap of $200 a month. It also gave incarcerated folks the choice of a work program or choose an academic career for their future. Essentially, this would have taken a huge toll on the slave mentality that the prison industrial complex that's holding a lot of people away. Which was also shut down, by the way.
Megan [00:03:41] All right, and then we had a few bills that we sort of have already highlighted in this season that we identified as offering meaningful opportunities for currently incarcerated people to have at least the opportunity to request resentencing, to think about getting free due to their youthfulness, due to rehabilitation or other circumstances. Remind us what those bills are and what happened.
Ralph [00:04:03] Uh, I think folks on the inside were prioritizing three major bills in sentencing reform. One was house bill 1125, and then there was House Bill 1274 and then House Bill 1317. House Bill 1125 was the Judicial Discretion Act. This bill would give judges the tools necessary to derive the second look at a person's sentence and whether or not it serves the interest of justice. Through rehabilitation or consideration of youthfulness. This bill would have reduced harms committed by racially biased sentencing practices and provided a cost savings which in part would have supported victims’ services. Then we had House Bill 1274, which would retroactively eliminate the use of juvenile points in sentencing. This bill would have reinforced a current law which removed the actions committed as a juvenile to be used against a person in an adult sentencing hearing. Historically, communities of color have had their youth targeted and caged within a juvenile facility. And then we had House Bill 1317, Emerging Adults. This bill would have given incarcerated people with a life and long sentence that committed the crime prior to their 21st birthday an ability to petition the Indeterminate Sentencing Review Board, or ISRB, for an early release based upon the youthfulness brain science that a lot of states are currently looking at. All three of these bills were shot down before they could ever pass the House, or hit the House floor.
Megan [00:05:42] Yeah, I think that's really hard. We're used to at least one making it through the House side. And I think some of the messaging we heard was that we had to... You know, essentially, people were pitted against each other and told, pick one bill and we'll pass that one through the House side. And then instead they chose to just not put any of them to a vote. For all those folks on the inside and all of the family members and community members on the outside who were looking for recognition and an opportunity for a second look at their sentence, this year has been a real blow. Even beyond that, there were other bills that would positively affect people's lives and reduce the harm of living in a cage. What were some of the bills that you and I were tracking and what happened to them?
Ralph [00:06:28] Yeah, so we had House Bill 1196, which was potentially allowing incarcerated people to regain their voting rights. This bill would have given incarcerated people the right to vote while housed within the Department of Corrections facility, meaning that there would be more reason to engage in a pro-social environment. And then we had House Bill 1192 standard of proof. This deal would have forced the Department of Corrections to use a standard of proof for infraction evidence, rather than an opinion or hearsay for rule violations, which results in most times, the loss of good time, which they tend to recognize a lot of the times, and even on appeal of these infractions, you end up doing a sanction, even if you beat the infraction. So, this next bill has a little bit of overlapping language. House Bill 1137 is an Administrative Segregation Placement Standards Bill. This bill changes the standard for administrative segregation, solitary confinement, by the Department of Corrections, and how long a person can be held in solitary confinement, creating a more humanistic approach towards the quality of life within a facility. Here, this bill kind of overlaps with 1192, where it also has a burden of proof standard, but actually the only difference between 1137 and 1192 is that, it's primarily targeting placement in a major certification for solitary confinement. So 1192 was needed as well in order to make sure that's held across the board and that all infractions give us full standards of proof.
Megan [00:08:25] Yeah, I think what's really striking about some of these bills is they really didn't have any kind of appropriations or financial impact. It just said, hey, if you work for the Department of Corrections, you can't just stack a bunch of charges on people without any kind check on whether or not the evidence you're using meets a minimal standard. And largely it seems like the legislators and DOC were able to reject that. So there's no real checks on DOC's power, which I think is particularly important in terms of solitary confinement. And as you can tell, Ralph thinks it's really important in terms like how long people's effective sentences are gonna be. So altogether, we had a lot of really good opportunities to come together and make some small, but meaningful change to how people are locked up and when they might be able to get out. And none of those really came through. It's a tough time, but it's also one of those moments that's been making us, a lot of us, rethink our relationship to legislators, to nonprofits, to the inside and outside community. And I think, you know, I just wanna say I really hope that this is not, where we try to reinstate that kind of carceral mentality where we look for the one person who fucked things up and blame everything on that one person. But think about this as a broader process of discernment and accountability so
Securus [00:09:48] You have one minute left.
Megan [00:09:49] We can do right by each other.
Ralph [00:09:51] Allright, let me call back.
Securus [00:09:54] Hello, this is a prepaid collect call from... An incarcerated individual at Washington Corrections Center. This call is not private. It will be recorded and may be monitored. If you believe this should be a private call, please hang up and follow facility instructions to register this number as a private number. To accept charges and consent to this recorded call, press one. To review, thank you for using Securus. You may start the conversation now.
Megan [00:10:26] Okay, ready when you are...
Ralph [00:10:30] Yeah, and these are just the bills we at CHOICES Media have been paying close attention to. But they are not the only ones. Unfortunately, they all died before even reaching the halfway mark of the 2025 legislative session. What does that say about the legislative body of Washington state? You know, we've been thinking about this a lot on both sides of the wall. With the George Floyd uprising, it seemed like folks were really beginning to ask the right questions about the criminal punishment system. Today, it's hard to keep track of all the crises that are currently happening. There's children dying from measles in Texas, US AID getting closed down, and the US is deporting people due to what it calls an administrative error and refusing to bring them back. And these tariffs being implemented, which might lead to a global recession.
Ralph [00:11:21] If you're not locked up or know somebody who is, maybe it's easy to forget about people on the inside. Maybe it's harder to know what's happening, If it's not in the news. Like New York prison guards, going on a wildcat strike, and the suspension of rules that would mitigate the harms of solitary confinement. Bringing the National Guard into state prisons, having multiple incarcerated people die, and now crowding out local jails. At CHOICES Media, we decided to take a minute to reflect internally on how to understand and address all these changes that are both complex and simply capitalism, settler colonialism and white supremacy. We hope you take time to check in on your friends, your family, and community. We know only we keep us safe, especially in these threatening times. And we wanted to let you know that we are still here and we still have our agenda to get us free. We will be back with the last two episodes of this season and maybe even a bonus episode. As we start to think about the next steps here at CHOICES Media, we would love to hear from you. Check us out on Instagram, @ChoicesMediaPodcast, or online at www.choicesmedia.org.
Ralph [00:12:36] From the Inside Out, this is Ralph Dunuan…
Megan [00:12:38] and Megan Ybarra
Ralph [00:12:39] Sending out our best to all, and in solidarity for liberation and the communities we want.
Credits
This episode was hosted by Ralph Dunuan, produced by Megan Ybarra, and edited and mixed by Anvar Hassanpour.
