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Apparently, our region’s prisons are running out of space:

Starting in 2012, King County plans to no longer house most drunken drivers, prostitutes, small-scale drug users and other misdemeanor offenders, prompting cities south and east of Seattle to start planning to build new jails in their communities.

Officials in Snohomish, Pierce and Spokane counties may follow suit and keep misdemeanor offenders from being booked into their main county jails. Although King County’s two jails in Seattle and Kent still have room for offenders, projections show the jails reaching full capacity in about a decade.

The region’s cities currently contract with the counties to house many of their misdemeanor offenders, but will soon be faced with the expense of building more jail space of their own. Or… perhaps we might want to consider not locking up misdemeanor, nonviolent drug offenders?

Whatever you think about the dangers of illicit drug use, few would argue that the “war on drugs” is working. Drug use is primarily a public health issue, not a criminal one, and studies show that it would be much more effective and less expensive to treat it as such. And apart from the obvious ill effects of smoking, there is little science to suggest that casual marijuana use is any more dangerous to the individual or society than casual drinking.

Cities pay King County $197.23 for each misdemeanor inmate booked into the jail, plus $103.17 per inmate, per day; drug treatment, by comparison, is a relative bargain. Throughout the state, over 70-percent of each county’s general fund is spent on their criminal justice system, and politicians who have made a career of railing against high taxes and wasteful government spending, are also typically the first to demand a “tough on crime,” “lock ’em up and throw away the key” approach to all sorts of social ills, real and perceived.

But if prison overcrowding is an issue of both supply and demand, it might behoove us as a society to examine both sides of the equation.

From their press release:

Today a slate of leading environmental organizations announced their endorsements of Roads and Transit. The package will provide more transportation options while improving our quality of life and the environment. The organizations announcing their endorsement are: Transportation Choices Coalition, Washington Conservation Voters, Futurewise, Environment Washington, Tahoma Audubon, and Washington Environmental Council.

With the passage of the joint ballot this fall, voters will give regional transit the biggest boost in state history bringing new light rail, improved service and more transit to Snohomish, King and Pierce counties. “This is a groundbreaking expansion of transit – the largest ever in the state. It is a once in a generation opportunity to change the way we move people and goods,” said Jessyn Farrell, Executive Director, Transportation Choices Coalition.

But what about global warming?

The majority of global warming emissions come from the transportation sector in Washington State. New transit projects will help combat climate change and reduce global warming emissions by giving commuters additional choices. “We must give people better alternatives to driving if we have any chance of combating climate change,” said Bill LaBorde of Environment Washington.

You can’t get people out of their cars unless you give them options that are attractive. I don’t think this endorsement will allay the concerns of the Erica C. Barnett/Kemper Freeman Jr. bloc, but it will present this package to the voters as a balanced one.

Tonight on “The David Goldstein Show”, 7PM to 10PM on Newsradio 710-KIRO:

7PM: The Stranger Hour with Josh
The Stranger’s Josh Feit joins me for the hour for a round-up of the week in state and local politics, including bikes, developer loopholes, and pot, plus

8PM: President Dick Cheney?
President George Bush underwent a colonoscopy today, which meant that for several scary hours, Dick Cheney was acting president. What did they find in Bush’s colon? Is Tehran still standing? Also, old-line Republicans warning we need to impeach Bush/Cheney now, or risk becoming a “dictatorial police state.” Scared yet?

9PM: Do you want to recycle Richard Conlin?
Seattle City Councilman Richard Conlin joins me for the hour to talk about the city’s new mandatory food waste recycling program, and to take your calls.

Tune in tonight (or listen to the live stream) and give me a call: 1-877-710-KIRO (5476).

In the Seattle PI this week, AP writer David Pitt shares some sobering statistics:

DES MOINES, Iowa — Blacks in the United States are imprisoned at more than five times the rate of whites, and Hispanics are locked up at nearly double the white rate, according to a study released Wednesday by a criminal justice policy group.

The report by the Sentencing Project, a Washington-based think tank, found that states in the Midwest and Northeast have the greatest black-to-white disparity in incarceration. Iowa had the widest disparity in the nation, imprisoning blacks at more than 13 times the rate of whites.

For years, this disparity has continued to worsen, even as the numbers of people we send to prison in this country reach record levels. A public official from Iowa demonstrates the typical blind spot for the why this is happening:

Paul Stageberg, administrator of the Iowa Division of Criminal and Juvenile Justice Planning, said the results are not surprising, but the causes are subject to interpretation.

He said the state’s disproportionately high black arrest rates are likely linked to high poverty rates among blacks and lower educational achievement.

He’s completely wrong. The disparity does not result from any characteristic of the black community itself. It results from the way drug laws are enforced. I know I sometimes sound like a broken record on this front, but this problem is both well-known among those who study this and widely ignored by everyone else. And it’s long past due that we focus on the real reasons why our prisons are bursting at the seams and dispropotionately filled with minorities.

The chart at his link is from arrest data from 1996. It shows the number of individuals per 100,000 sent to prison for drug offenses – broken down by race. It’s important to recognize that surveys have repeatedly shown that there’s no difference in drug usage rates between different races. The difference lies in whose usage is targeted by the police and whose usage is ignored.

In the years since, things have actually gotten slightly better, but the disparity is still alarming. A report from Human Rights Watch in 2003 notes:

African-Americans are arrested, prosecuted, and imprisoned for drug offenses at far higher rates than whites. This racial disparity bears little relationship to racial differences in drug offending. For example, although the proportion of all drug users who are black is generally in the range of 13 to 15 percent, blacks constitute 36 percent of arrests for drug possession. Blacks constitute 63 percent of all drug offenders admitted to state prisons. In at least fifteen states, black men were sent to prison on drug charges at rates ranging from twenty to fifty-seven times those of white men.

[emphasis mine]

The disparities we see today do go beyond just drug offenses. Violent gang activity also leads towards a higher number of minorities going to prison. But what’s rarely ever made clear whenever these reports surface in the media is how our eagerness to put young black people in jail for drugs also leads to that outcome. Teenagers and young adults in black communities, who are doing things that most white teenagers get away with, are sent away to prison even if they have no prior record of violence. But instead of being “reformed” behind bars, they go in the opposite direction, making gang connections, becoming bitter at the lost opportunity they have, and returning to the world much more likely to commit a violent crime. Our drug laws have served to create a criminal class among African-Americans. We used to believe that stronger enforcement of drug laws in black communities were a benefit to them. Now we clearly understand that their enforcement does little more than just reinforce the stereotypes about the inherently criminality of blacks in our society.

Talking about these issues politically can be extremely difficult. The notion that blacks are more prone to crime and therefore require more strident policing finds acceptance among both liberals and conservatives. The myth that drug prohibition keeps us safe and that criminalizing drug use is necessary continues to eat away at our society in complete silence.

On Thursday night, I joined SeattleJew at an anti-violence vigil at Pratt Park in Seattle, led by Pastor Robert Jeffrey. Just as in other major cities, Seattle’s black community has fallen victim to this modern day incarnation of Jim Crow. At the end of Jeffrey’s passionate sermon, individuals lit candles and got up to speak about those who’ve been lost in the crossfire. Some were wearing T-shirts of the lost loved ones they mourned, while others spoke of brothers and sisters whose lives ended too soon. Not surprisingly, drugs were a common theme among the stories. Those who used drugs in this community were always in fear of being arrested.

As someone for whom illegal drugs were always nearby throughout college and afterwards, in both college towns and wealthy white suburbs, I don’t have stories of friends being killed and no one I personally know of has ever been arrested. Money certainly plays some role in that, but race plays a much bigger one. Our drug laws and the racial bias in their enforcement have created two entirely separate justice systems in this country that divide us in ways much more extreme than any of the ways we divide ourselves. And hopefully the next time grim statistics from our prison system make people scratch their heads and wonder what’s going wrong, the media will have more of a clue as to where to point the finger, rather than simply asking those in our criminal justice system who don’t have the courage to look into their own role.

Over at the Seattle Weekly (yeah, the Weekly,) Aimee Curl has been digging through recent PDC filings, and they don’t look so good for state House Republicans. Sixteen months before the next election, the House Dems’ official campaign committee already has over $450,000 in the bank, compared to the Republicans’ measly $40,621. Wow.

The organizing committees are the party machines that give campaign funds directly to candidates. “It’s amazing how big the disparity has become,” marvels former state Republican Party Chairman Chris Vance. […] Vance credits this year’s Democrat cash explosion in part to House Speaker Frank Chopp’s machine. “In terms of Olympia that’s the shadow that looms over everything,” he says, adding that Republican challengers are as good as on their own in 2008.

“The financial advantage is so massive it will put the Republicans completely on the defensive,” Vance says. “The Democrats can force the Republicans to have to worry about their incumbents. Now you have to take whatever money you’ve got and defend them and you’ve got no other money to help challengers.”

Progressives like me sometimes question Chopp’s willingness to use his near-super majority, but we have no qualms about his ability to build and maintain it. Folks smarter than me about these things tell me that House and Senate Dems have stretched the limits of attainable majorities given current electoral realities, but I wouldn’t expect a GOP comeback in 2008.

Still, I’m not entirely comfortable with Chopp’s incrementalist approach, and can’t help but wonder if he took away the wrong lesson from the Republican landslide of 1994. Conventional wisdom asserts that voters punished state Dems for overreaching during the previous session, and it is hard to argue that this didn’t play some role, at least in the rhetoric of the 1994 campaign season. But I think that the important lesson to learn from the “Republican Revolution” of 1994 — and the Big Blue Wave of 2006 — is that electoral politics can shift dramatically, seemingly overnight, and sometimes for reasons apparently beyond your control.

If Chopp thinks Dems can sustain a working majority indefinitely, he’s deluding himself. And even if he does maintain control of the House, that’s no guarantee that the Senate or the Governor’s mansion won’t suddenly fall into GOP hands. Sure, there’s no compelling reason to toss out Gov. Gregoire in 2008, but in this notoriously fickle and ticket-splitting state, voters don’t need one. The Dems are always just one bad campaign away from finding themselves mired in gridlock… or worse.

I suppose one can imagine a rosier political scenario than the one currently facing state Dems. But one would be foolish to expect it.

My building has a parking strip that is reserved for tenants and the businesses in the building. It’s only a handful of spots, maybe ten or so. At night on the weekends, club goers sometimes see an empty spot and decide to park. Maybe they get lucky and the spot’s owner is out of town. But other times, a tow truck has to be called to remove the vehicle.

While it’s nice to see vehicles removed, I’ve never had the chance to actually see the look on someone’s face when they realize their car has been towed.

Today, I got that chance. And it was awesome. After a night of partying, it’s got to suck big time to come out of the club to find your car gone. But, fuck ’em if they can’t read the signs.

This week the Seattle Times finally acknowledged that Rep. Dave Reichert is conservative, “maybe too conservative for his district,” and that was brought home again yesterday when Reichert voted for a Republican-backed amendment that would have cut off Title X funds for Planned Parenthood. The amendment was defeated 231 to 189.

“Congressman Reichert was one of 189 House members voting for this mean-spirited amendment,” said Karen Cooper, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Washington. “The Title X program provides birth control to low-income Americans and Planned Parenthood clinics play a key role in actually delivering those services,” Cooper said. “There are already a number of restrictive policies in place that ban any federal money from being used to pay for abortion care, and the notion that law makers would also try to deny low-income people birth control is very troubling,” she added.

“Millions of Americans rely on Planned Parenthood clinics for basic health care services every year,” said Cooper. “I find it unconscionable that Reichert and his anti-choice cronies in Congress tried to single out an organization that provides cancer screening, breast exams, and birth control and target them for a ban on family planning funding just because some Planned Parenthood clinics also provide abortion care,” she said.

“Reichert’s vote in favor of the Pence amendment was just another reminder of how truly out-of-step he is with the pro-choice voters of the 8th Congressional District,” Cooper said. “It is clearly time for a change,” she concluded.

I’ve been told that polling conducted in the wake of the 2006 election showed that a substantial proportion of pro-choice 8th District voters were not aware of Reichert’s staunch anti-choice/anti-birth control stance on reproductive issues. I’m guessing voters might be better informed next time around.

Shaun from Upper Left:

Recipients of contributions from military personnel and veterans:

Ron Paul 26.23%

Barack Obama 24.02%

John McCain 18.31%

Hillary Clinton 11.08%

Bill Richardson 5.59%

Mitt Romney 4.05%

John Edwards 2.63%

Rudy Giuliani 2.44%

Mike Huckabee 1.84%

Tom Tancredo 1.63%

Duncan Hunter 1.05%

So, of the top five campaigns receiving contributions from military folks, four of them are anti-war? I’m not too surprised. The GOP is in the process of ruining the military in Iraq, so why wouldn’t people in uniform get active in politics?

You can’t smoke in-flight, but the Transportation Security Administration has decided to lift its two-year ban on carrying cigarette lighters on airplanes.

“Taking lighters away is security theater,” [TSA assistant secretary Kip] Hawley said. “It trivializes the security process.”

And yet I still can’t carry on a fucking bottle of water!

I understand why restaurant operators might object to King County’s new labeling rules as a bit too onerous. As a consumer, I look forward to having the nutritional information, but as a restaurateur I’m sure I would chafe at the expense in time and money. Still, I found at least one of the arguments against these new regulations to be less than convincing.

Chris Clifford, a Renton resident who said he’s owned several restaurants in King County, said very few customers need labeling to know that a 16-ounce steak rolled in butter is fattening.

“I have a six-letter word to describe them: It’s ‘stupid!’ ” Clifford told the board. “You can’t help stupid people.” Instead of menu labeling, Clifford suggested a “warning label” on the restaurant door: “Eating here is fattening and could kill you.”

Yeah… I want to eat at the restaurant where they think I’m stupid. Anybody know what restaurants Clifford owns, so that I can be sure to avoid them? Or perhaps the council should have taken him up on his suggestion and mandated a warning label on Clifford’s doors.

Little debating tip here Chris: if you’re gonna argue against health regulations, perhaps you shouldn’t display such utter contempt for the health and wellbeing of your customers.

My first ride on my new (to me) bike was short and interesting:

Riding in traffic is hard. It’s tough to get used to cars whizzing by while I’m trying to avoid a panic attack.

Bike shorts might be a good investment. I went only about 2 miles, but my taint is killing me.

Shifting. It’s not as easy as I thought it would be.

I’m going for it again this weekend, so wish me luck.

Wow. Apparently, I live in a $1.5 million home. So how does a semi-impoverished blogger like me afford a mansion like that? Well it all depends on how you The Seattle Times does the math.

Zillow.com “zestimates™” that the modest, South Seattle home I purchased ten years ago for $187K would now set you back a cool half-million bucks, but according to the math wizards at the Times, that number is completely meaningless. No, rather than using present day dollars to calculate the cost of my house — you know, the actual purchase price — the Times insists on valuing my home in terms of “year of expenditure” dollars, ie the principal borrowed plus every penny of interest over the course of the loan.

At least, that’s how the Times insists on calculating the cost of the light rail portion of the Roads and Transit package headed to the ballot this November. Rather than simply reporting the $10.8 billion price of the rail proposal, they insist on presenting a $30 billion price tag after 40 years of interest and inflation is worked in. Likewise, a half-million dollar mortgage at 7-percent would total about $1.5 million in principal and interest over the course of a 40-year loan. See how that works?

But of course, I don’t live in a $1.5 million house. I live in a half-million dollar house. That’s about what it would fetch on the open market, and that’s about what it would cost me to replace it with a comparable house in the same neighborhood. To claim my house is worth three times that price would be just plain silly. And misleading.

The same holds true of light rail.

According to an editorial in today’s Seattle Times…

Reichert is a conservative — maybe too conservative for his district.

Reichert a conservative? Who knew?

There are so many things I’m itching to write about, but a quote the other day from Rep. Dave Reichert (R-Sheriff’s Department) keeps sticking in my craw. The Seattle Times’ David Postman asked Reichert about his unwavering support for the president’s strategy in Iraq, and the congressman’s choice of words was telling.

Reichert still firmly supports President Bush. The congressman is a former sheriff. When he talks about the war he frequently relates it to police work.

Of course, Reichert always relates everything to his police work. I’m told a waiter once asked him if he needed a few more minutes to decide, and he snapped back something about “looking Gary Ridgeway straight in the eyes.” (Did I mention Reichert is a former sheriff?) But I digress…

And in this case he sees parallels between the criticism aimed at Bush and his most famous case, the hunt for the Green River Killer.

“During Green River we were just hammered on by the press and the community and I got hammered by people and criticized and I just feel some of the same pressures are being applied to the president.”

So, um, what the congressman is really telling us about the war in Iraq is that President Bush is the real victim here? … Just like Reichert was during the 18 years of the Green River Killer investigation?

How incredibly narcissistic. Dozens of young women were brutally strangled by Gary Ridgeway — some, years after Reichert personally dismissed Ridgeway as a suspect, early in the investigation — but ultimately it was Reichert who was the victim, hammered and criticized by an unfeeling press and an impatient community. How did he ever survive the pressure?

Likewise, it is not the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis or the 3,600 slain American troops and their families who are the victims of the president’s military misadventures… but Bush himself.

I have repeatedly ridiculed the Times for praising Reichert’s “conscience-driven independent streak,” when in fact he has displayed little independence at all. Now I’m not so sure he even has a conscience.