DES MOINES, Wash. — The South Correctional Entity, known as SCORE, is a misdemeanor jail. Close to dense woods, homes and schools, the facility on 16 acres doesn't even have barbed wire surrounding its entire campus.
Some corrections professionals at the King County Jail, which is not affiliated with SCORE, believe the Des Moines jail puts people in south King County at risk. “The SCORE facility was built to house low-level misdemeanants; instead it’s housing high-risk felons” former King County council member and current lobbyist for the King County Corrections Guild, Chris Vance, told KIRO 7 Reporter Amy Clancy recently. “That’s a danger to the community.”
SCORE opened in 2011 and was funded by seven south King County cities --- Auburn, Burien, Des Moines, Federal Way, Renton, SeaTac and Tukwila --- to house people who commit low-level crimes, such as a first-time DUI, or shoplifting. According to the facility’s Unclassified Use Permit from 2006: “SCORE applied for the UUP to allow for the construction and operation of an 830 bed correctional facility to serve the misdemeanant detention needs of the seven member jurisdictions.”
But for the past two years, the facility has been accepting felons. Randy Weaver, president of the King County Corrections Guild, believes SCORE is illegally expanding its contracts to accept felons in order to fill beds. He claims the 7 SCORE cities are losing money. “It was going to ruin their (the cities’) budgets, so they started reaching out and taking, just grabbing contracts,” Weaver said.
KIRO 7 investigated who is housed at SCORE. Earlier this week, reporter Amy Clancy started skimming through the roster of nearly 500 current inmates alphabetically, and did criminal background checks. After searching through only the first few dozen, Clancy found the roster names of four convicted sex offenders housed at SCORE whose criminal histories include child rape, child molestation and failing to register as a sex offender. Norah West with the Washington State Department of Corrections confirmed the DOC has contracted with SCORE for “more than two years to provide short-term jail stays for offenders who violate the conditions of their community supervisions.” West said, 185 DOC offenders are currently on stays of no more than 30 days at SCORE, mostly from King and Pierce counties.
The fact that any felons at all are behind bars at SCORE concerns Jordan Bishop, a father of three who’s also an officer at the King County jail in downtown Seattle. "(It's) because I know what felons are capable of. I know how they act,” Bishop told Clancy. “These are violent, dangerous people” he said. Bishop is planning to file a lawsuit against SCORE for failing to comply with its use permit.
SCORE Director Penny Bartley admitted to Clancy that nearly half of the approximately 500 current inmates have previous felony charges, but says that's not why they're at the facility. “We’re not holding felons,” Bartley said. “They’re not being housed here for those (felony) charges. They’re being held here as a misdemeanor charge,” Bartley told Clancy, most often for theft, driving with a suspended license or misdemeanor assault. Bartley also said the average stay for all inmates is about 10 days, after which the inmates are taken back to the communities in which they were arrested. She said they are not released in Des Moines.
KIRO
