The doors in the Olympic living unit at the Maple Lane School in Centralia stand open, exposing a pair of empty cells, last December, shortly before the nearly century-old facility was shut down. It currently stands empty, its future use uncertain.
While the future of the Maple Lane correctional facility has been uncertain for years, it will be a few more months before legislators even begin discussing the future of the now-vacant campus.
One option for the former Grand Mound juvenile correctional facility was detailed in a recent independent report on cost-effective incarceration in Washington. The report, by Criminal Justice Planning Services, of Olympia, was released in the beginning of October. It addressed how the state could handle the forecasted increase to the state’s inmate population.
The report concluded that the DOC, which houses more than 16,000 inmates at any one time, will need to increase capacity by more than 1,000 offenders during the next decade, and that solving the capacity needs will require millions of dollars and years to accomplish. Doing nothing however “will make the Washington prison system look more and more like the broken California prisons — a violent system currently under court order to reduce crowding,” according to the report.
One of the areas where the shortage of space is predicted to occur is at the DOC’s reception center, which is where inmates go for the first several weeks of their sentence.
The report did not make a specific recommendation for solving the issue, but instead presented three possible options for solving the DOC’s capacity needs. The options included keeping the reception center where it currently is, at the Washington Corrections Center in Shelton, using existing buildings and expand capacity elsewhere. The second option is keeping the reception center at the Washington Corrections Center by demolishing three inefficient buildings and constructing new ones in their place, in addition to expanding elsewhere. The third option is to build a new reception center at the Maple Lane facility and repurpose the Washington Corrections Center as a multi-custody prison.
The reported concluded that the third option, involving the transformation of Maple Lane into a reception center, is the least expensive to build, as well as the least expensive to operate. It also would be the quickest option to implement.
Currently, this is the only option that the consultants put forward for the possible future use of Maple Lane, said Adam Aaseby, the DOC’s director of executive strategy, planning and accountability.
The governor is currently working on her capital budget proposal that she will release in mid-December, and a piece of that budget proposal will consider the conclusions of the report, Aaseby said. The governor’s proposed budget will then be considered by the Legislature during the upcoming session.
During that time, Aaseby said the DOC will continue to work with the Legislature, and then afterward with the newly elected governor.
Overall, he said, it will be months before a decision is finalized.
In the meantime, no offenders will be housed at Maple Lane, Aaseby said. The maintenance of the facility and the grounds will be done by supervised offender work crews from Cedar Creek Correctional facilities.
Maple Lane, which opened in 1914 and formerly housed 300 juvenile inmates with a range of mental health issues, has been vacant following its closure last December. The juvenile population formerly housed at Maple Lane was moved over to Green Hill School at the end of 2011, which now acts as a school for two distinct groups of offenders; one with a range of mental health issues and one without.
