For inmates who are starting to plan for life after incarceration, delayed or unexpected release dates can scramble job opportunities and housing arrangements. A number of factors can affect release dates, including paperwork issues, miscommunication among corrections staff and changes to the way state corrections departments calculate time served.
Ben Botkin covers criminal justice and health for the Oregon Capital Chronicle. Paul Kiefer is an intern at InvestigateWest. They join us to share more about their recent reporting on how delayed or unexpected release dates can impact inmates’ lives in Oregon and Washington, respectively.
This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. For inmates who are starting to plan for life after incarceration, delayed or unexpected release dates can jeopardize housing arrangements and job opportunities. But a recent report by InvestigateWest found that this happens a lot in Washington. About a third of people who were let out of prison there last year were held beyond when they were told they would be released. A separate article in the Oregon Capital Chronicle focused on one woman’s story of a release that was somehow both two years late and out of the blue. We’re going to hear about what’s happening in Washington and Oregon, today, starting with Washington.
Paul Kiefer is an intern at InvestigateWest and he joins us now. Welcome to the show.
Paul Kiefer: Thank you so much. Nice to be here.
Miller: Can you tell us a story of Antonio Castillo? He is how you start your article.
Kiefer: Antonio Castillo has bounced in and out of jail in Okanogan County – which is in North Central Washington – for quite a while now, since he was a teenager. And back in 2019, after a series of felony charges for, among other things, possessing a stolen firearm and drugs, he was sent to the Washington Correction Center in Shelton to complete a sentence. He had done most of his time pretrial in jail.
When you arrive at the Washington Correction Center in Shelton, you go to what’s called the receiving unit, which is where people who are transferring from county jails to DOC go, where you go if you’re transferring between prisons for men. It’s a men’s prison. He arrived there with relatively little time left on his sentence because, again, he served most of it pretrial in the spring, and after a conflict with a corrections officer, he was put in the Intensive Management Unit (IMU) for inmates who had behavioral challenges. While he was in there, no one told him when he was going to be getting out. His earned release date, which is when most inmates are released, had passed without his knowledge while he was in the IMU.
After a couple of months there, completely in the dark, he sent in a “kite,” which is a letter to request information about his earned release date, and was let out very abruptly without a plan. Again, he had missed his earned release date, so they let him out with no opportunity to make phone calls, to set up housing. He caught a bus to Wenatchee and then hitchhiked back to Okanogan County, and then very quickly wound up back in jail for another relatively minor felony.
He says that had he been released on his earned release date, or had he been given a chance to plan around a release date, he would have gotten out a more stable footing. He could have gone to a sober living home, he could have arranged a job, but instead he was let out late and with no opportunity to plan for a stable landing. So he would be back in Shelton later this year.
Miller: So for him, he very explicitly ties a chaotic release to his own personal recidivism for reoffending and ending up back in custody. How exactly is an earned release date calculated?
Kiefer: An earned release date is calculated based on … you start with your sentence, you subtract the number of days you spent in jail pretrial and good time in jail, which means time that you spent without behavioral challenges. And then there are these multipliers, these earned time percentages that are applied subsequently, once you’re in the DOC, that are based on your offense and the amount of time you’re going to be serving. And you keep that earned time multiplier – this gets a little complicated – if you behave well.
An earned release date is calculated in a very administrative wonky way, but functionally, it’s there to provide an incentive to behave well, both in jail and in prison. So it can knock months or years off of your sentence. You have an earned release date and then alternately, if you miss your earned release date, they have to let you out on something called the maximum expiration date, but most people get out on their earned release dates.
Miller: I did note in my intro, and you found in your reporting, that something like a third of Washington inmates who were released last year were released past that earned or expected release date. How long, on average, are people being kept?
Kiefer: On average, it’s just under a month. So, like you said, about a third of the roughly 5,000 people who were released last year missed their earned release date, and the median system-wide was just under a month.
Miller: Is there recourse? I mean, is this expected release date guaranteed?
Kiefer: No, it is not legally guaranteed because again, it’s there to serve as an incentive to behave well. So there’s no legal recourse, really, though it does create all this chaos for people who are trying to plan their re-entry. It’s not an illegal detention if you’re held past your ERD. It’s just inconvenient, and in Castillo’s case, possibly a set up for failure.
Miller: What needs to happen on the Department of Corrections end for inmates to leave state custody, in terms of paperwork that has to be handled, or various bureaucratic hurdles that have to be jumped over?
Kiefer: On some level, the things that are in the DOC’s hands are holding the staff who are responsible for release planning accountable to the timeline set in DOC policy. Anecdotally, from people who work in counseling and reentry navigation in the DOC, that doesn’t always happen. And WCC – the Washington Correction Center in Shelton – is particularly notorious, both among counselors and inmates. There are also challenges with workspace for counselors. In the receiving units at WCC where Castillo was, some counselors don’t reliably have a place to do their jobs, so if they need to help inmates do housing interviews, that is tricky if you don’t have a reliable desk space.
Then, for people who are released after really short sentences, like in Castillo’s case, a year and a day, who have done most of their time in county jail and then have to be transferred to the DOC to do their release planning process, there is an alternative. It’s something called a “paper commit,” which is essentially beginning your release planning process while you’re in county custody, so that by the time you’re finally sentenced, you don’t have to transfer to DOC and get caught in this backlog in Shelton. You can be released directly from the jail with cooperation from the DOC.
But that requires coordination between the DOC and the county jail, which is difficult right now, with a lot of records being handled either in systems that aren’t compatible, or through paper – things getting mailed in manila envelopes. So there is streamlining to be done to make sure that “paper commits” are possible, and that would affect something like one in six late releases, if these were more standardized and ubiquitous.
Miller: What did you hear from people who work with inmates, either before they’re being released or post-release, about what they see as the biggest reasons for these bureaucratic delays?
Kiefer: I can divide it into two categories. In fairness to the DOC, there are some reasons that are out of the DOC’s hands. It is very hard to find housing in Washington, period, especially if you are releasing from prison. So, a shortage of affordable housing options or housing options that are willing to take you if you have a sex offense, or especially an arson conviction.
There are other reasons that are within the DOC’s hands. The release process involves quite a bit of bureaucracy. If you are going into community custody, which is a little bit like probation, you need to have an approved release address. And if your counselor drags their feet on approving a release address, or the community corrections officer drags their feet on visiting the address to make sure that it’s all squared away, you could miss your earned release date. If you, at some later stage in the process, put out a “victim notifier,” which is necessary for people who’ve been convicted of violent or sex crimes, the “victim notifier” has to go out a month before you’re released. So if the DOC does not release that notifier on time, and you have an address lined up, then you have to sit in prison for an extra month and the housing you’ve arranged might fall through because they can’t hold a bed for you for a month, etc., etc.
If any of these deadlines get missed, the problems can snowball. And for the people who I talked to, who either have gone through this themselves or who work with inmates who have, that is a significant contributor – missed deadlines snowballing.
Miller: In addition to the lost freedom and the chaos that seems unnecessary, that can follow from being in prison for longer than the state has said that you need to be, there’s also literally the extra cost to taxpayers. What’s the estimate for how much the state is spending imprisoning people who state officials have deemed no longer need to be behind bars?
Kiefer: The most recent DOC estimate that I could get my hands on was from 2022, and that was about $5,300 a month per inmate. [That] means that in fiscal year 2023, which is the most reliable data I have for releases, that would be somewhere in the realm of $7 million spent holding people past their ERD. But those numbers have to be taken with a grain of salt because they vary greatly from inmate to inmate or facility to facility.
Miller: Just briefly, what kinds of solutions did you hear – either from the state or from advocates?
Kiefer: The state, or the DOC mostly, did not speak to solutions. Obviously, everyone’s going to advocate for more housing options from state lawmakers … Well, really from Senator Claire Wilson, who introduced legislation last year that was partially vetoed by Governor Inslee, that would have extended release planning timelines out 12 months before someone’s ERD. Even though she was unaware of the scale of the late release problems at the time she introduced it, I heard that proposal would have, indirectly at least, mitigated this problem.
Then from advocates themselves, it would be hard but, firmer enforcement of deadlines, planning deadlines for counselors, and bringing county jails and the DOC onto the same computer system so that they could exchange sentencing, charging documents and judgment documents more easily without having to worry about mail delays. [It] could streamline this process, particularly for people serving shorter sentences. Those are the general solutions.
Miller: Paul, thanks very much.
Kiefer: Thank you.
Miller: Paul Kiefer is an intern at InvestigateWest. He wrote recently about the high number of prison inmates in Washington who are kept behind bars past their earned release dates.
Ben Botkin joins us now here at about one Oregon woman’s related story in the Oregon Capital Chronicle. Ben, welcome back.
Ben Botkin: Thank you.
Miller: You reported on a different but related situation in Oregon – the story of one woman’s release from Coffee Creek earlier this year. Can you tell us what Bridget McDermott had been expecting in terms of her release?
Botkin: In April of this year, Bridget McDermott was expecting to be released in October of this year. So she went to her release counselor to start planning that process of having a release plan in place, which is a lengthy bit of work that takes several months to get rolling. With this expectation in mind, and no real release plan in place, her release counselor came up to her a couple of days after she made the appointment and basically said, “Hey, I’ve looked at your file and I’ve actually found out that you should have been released in July of 2022. You have to leave tonight.” This is what he told her at about 4:30 in the afternoon.
Miller: So instead of assuming that she would be leaving six months from then, she found out that she’d actually spent almost two extra years behind bars that the state said was not necessary. So that’s a huge surprise. The other is, “leave tonight.” What happened?
Botkin: At that point, her immediate response was, “Hey, I don’t have a place to go tonight.” And on top of it, the prison is on lockdown, which means she can’t call anyone. So her immediate response is, “Please, let me stay one more night, call people in the morning and try to find a place to go tomorrow.” Then they told her, “Well, you can stay one more night and let’s try to get it sorted out tomorrow.”
That’s the interesting thing that happened in this case, where you find out, hey, you’ve been in prison 21 months longer than you should. But then the immediate response is, hey, I need to stay here one more night because I have nowhere to go.
Miller: How did this happen?
Botkin: That’s an interesting angle as well. Bridget is still waiting for information on how exactly her case slipped through the cracks, but the genesis of this is, in 2021, a different inmate filed a lawsuit, and this lawsuit challenged a corrections agency policy. It gets a little complicated, but the way it works is, you get earned time credits that are applied to different charges. Now, those credits can get you out of prison earlier. However, those credits can be applied to some charges but not others, depending on the severity of the charges. Things like kidnapping or robbery are not eligible. This case contested that policy, and said, if I’m serving time on two charges concurrently, and one charge is eligible for earned time credits and the other charge is not, then I should get that credit.
The DOC looked at that lawsuit and agreed, and in response, they reviewed 2,500 cases three years ago. Somehow Bridget’s case fell through the cracks and didn’t get reviewed until she started planning her release two years later.
Miller: Does that raise concerns about who else might have slipped through the cracks?
Botkin: It definitely does raise questions in terms of, OK, how did this case get missed? The corrections agency hasn’t really explained that aspect. It’s also very difficult to know which cases are potentially eligible and which are not, because the sentencing is very complex with concurrent charges and consecutive sentencing. So there are still a lot of unanswered questions here as to how many people are potentially impacted and was the agency’s initial review thorough enough.
Miller: Does the Oregon Department of Corrections have a procedure or a policy in place for inmates who, once they realize that they should release somebody … I mean, it’s hard to even know how to think about this. As we’ve been hearing from Paul, there can be real damaging chaos if you’re released without a plan. The flip side is, I think most of us can agree that if the system has decided that you should not be in prison, then you shouldn’t be deprived of your freedom. What’s the policy though?
Botkin: Well, that’s another interesting aspect. There’s currently not a written policy in place for what to do when an inmate is suddenly released from prison. Now, you do have to have things like, get them signed up for Medicaid, get them employment, get them housing, get all these services lined up. Yet, there’s really no written policy in place. That initial 2021 review found five other inmates earlier that were released suddenly as well. So that’s another aspect too.
In Bridget’s case, she went to a friend’s house to stay initially, and then she found out that she couldn’t live there because of parole requirements. So there’s a lot of planning that needs to go into place for this work.
Miller: How is she doing now?
Botkin: She’s doing a lot better now. She is working for a janitorial company, cleaning construction sites, and making plans to be an alcohol and drug counselor. She’s also reviewing with her attorney whether or not to file some kind of lawsuit.
Miller: Ben, thanks very much.
Botkin: Thank you.
Miller: Ben Botkin covers state government for the Oregon Capital Chronicle.
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