Tim Burgess' City View

How Seattle Avoided Spending Millions to Build a New City Jail

The Council will vote in early September whether to approve a new jail services contract with King County through 2030. If approved, the new contract will save Seattle taxpayers approximately $200 million in jail construction costs and multiple millions more in operation costs. Here's the story on how we got here.

In 2008, my first year on the Council, I joined some of my colleagues and told then-Mayor Nickels that we didn't want to build a new City owned and operated jail for our misdemeanor prisoners. At an estimated cost of $200 million, building a jail wasn't a desirable use of our limited resources, especially when we believed that King County should continue to be the region's primary provider of jail services.

Roadblocks to Prison Reform

Michelle Alexander strikes a cord in this piece in The New York Times.  Money and vested interests block real reform of our mass incarceration senselessness.  I especially like Alexander's reference to the Martin Luther King's 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail where he chastizes white pastors for their cautious indifference to racial injustice.

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’ ”

King continued: “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.”

I've written about the need for prison reform before; you can read it all here.  

On Public Education, Transportation, Collaboration, Marijuana and Tim Harris

CR Douglass covered a host of subjects in this edition of City Inside/Out.  I was on with my colleagues Councilmembers Sally Clark and Bruce Harrell.

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On Marijuana and the War on Drugs

A journalist sent me an email last week asking for my position on the legalization of marijuana.  That question actually relates to a much larger and more profound debate we should be having in our city and country . . . should we continue our policy of mass incarceration?

So, on the legalization of marijuana I say "yes," it should be legal, regulated and taxed.  Much more after the jump . . .

Michelle Alexander at Mt. Zion Baptist Tonight

The author of a provocative book on America's experiment with mass incarceration will speak tonight at 7 p.m. at Mt. Zion Baptist Church at 19th and East Madison Street.  The event is open to the public.

I have read Alexander's book.  It's listed in my current reading column at the left side of my blog.  I'm going to hear her and will be writing about this topic much more in the near future.