The center, in the , has released the first in a series of research memos under an initiative called , which seeks to “strengthen the work of frontline human rights organizations in Washington state.”

The memo, first in a planned series, is titled “.” It notes the center’s (thus far unanswered) requests for information from Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — about immigration enforcement in Washington state.

“We need to be able trust law enforcement to keep us safe,” said center director , a professor of international studies and the . “Numerous courts have found that our local police or sheriffs shouldn’t be enforcing immigration law, and for that reason many jurisdictions have barred cops from asking questions about immigration status.

“But if they’re calling ICE to ask the question — and then to haul members of the community away for civil violations — it’s not that different than if they’d done the asking themselves. And it ruptures the immigrant communities’ ability to trust law enforcement.”

The report also describes the center’s survey of scores of police, sheriff and other Washington state agencies on immigration matters and sounds a note of caution about , a California-based for-profit company that provides language used in many, though not all, police policy manuals.

To study how jurisdictions “are defining the limits of local law enforcement collaboration with ICE and CBP” in their policy language, the center submitted information requests to 165 Washington state agencies — 131 city or town police departments, 26 county sheriffs and eight state agencies within the where CBP claims authority to conduct stops.

Studying such agency and other documents, the researchers cited problematic policies now in force:

• Local policy manuals often tell law enforcement officers to call CBP or ICE to the scene even in encounters where no crime has occurred. Once on the scene, CBP or ICE officers ask about the person’s immigration status — which “effectively converts a local law enforcement encounter into an occasion for immigration enforcement.”
• Though most jurisdictions instruct jails not to honor federal ICE detainer requests without a warrant, policy manuals offer inadequate guidance on which types of warrants are sufficient to clear concerns that would prohibit “unreasonable searches and seizures.”
• Also, such policy manuals still instruct jails to notify ICE prior to an inmate’s release. “While this represents an improvement over holding them without cause,” the researchers write, “such information-sharing may still facilitate the handoff of inmates to immigration authorities, including in cases where they have not been convicted of any crime.”

Not all jurisdictions, the researchers note, have adopted policy language based on Lexipol’s guidelines, and they cite Seattle and King County as “positive examples.” King County has an ordinance in place barring ICE detainers unless they are accompanied by a judicial warrant.

The researchers cite what they feel are weaknesses in Lexipol’s taxpayer-paid service to public clients.

The company, they write, promises clients up-to-date, “state-specific” information including best practices and developments in immigration case law. But the report finds that Lexipol’s guidance sometimes results in “worse, rather than better” policy language on immigrant rights.

“Many of the policy manuals legitimatize ethnic profiling by suggesting that cops can derive reasonable suspicion of criminal activity from a person’s ability to speak English and ‘other factors based on an officer’s experience,'” Godoy said. “Courts have condemned such behavior.”

The researchers add that jurisdictions might save money and reduce potential legal liability by skipping Lexipol’s costly service and instead pooling their resources and seeking guidance from Washington state’s attorney general.

“These concerns are not abstract hypotheticals,” the researchers write. “The policy manuals we examined translate into real-life cases of rights abuse, some of which have been deemed unconstitutional by Washington courts.”

In such cases, everyday law enforcement encounters too easily become immigration enforcement cases “because local law enforcement handed off Washington residents to federal immigration authorities in ways that violated their rights.”

Godoy said, “We don’t want people in Washington state to be treated unfairly because of the way they look or the language they speak. It’s wrong.”

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For more information, contact Godoy at 206-616-3585 or agodoy@uw.edu.

On a rainy December afternoon, a group of students in the 91Ě˝»¨’s Law, Societies & Justice program sit in a classroom discussing what elements might be included in a restorative justice program.

The conversation is lively, the comments thoughtful. But this isn’t any ordinary classroom, and it isn’t your usual group of university students. The 91Ě˝»¨students were taking the autumn quarter class on culture, crime and criminal justice alongside 10 male classmates who brought more than theoretical knowledge to the table — all are serving time at the Monroe Correctional Complex northeast of Seattle.

For the inmates, the “mixed-enrollment” course held at the prison was a rare chance to study alongside fourth-year 91Ě˝»¨students in an academically rigorous setting. For the 91Ě˝»¨students, it was an equally rare opportunity to get a sense of how issues discussed in class play out in real life. To meet with their classmates, they had to undergo security checks, pass through metal gates and walk by an outdoor recreation area secured with razor-wire fencing.

“We talk about mass incarceration — we talk about 2.2 million people in the U.S. imprisoned — but getting to know these people, that’s completely different,” said 91Ě˝»¨student Meron Fikru.

“We’re taught to fear prisoners. We’re taught to distance ourselves from them,” she said. “But these guys are brilliant. They’re funny and they’re humble and they’re so respectful. It’s been a really humanizing experience.”

Classmate Becky Womelsdorf plans to attend law school and said the course provided something a traditional classroom setting could not.

“It’s really beneficial to learn about these issues from a perspective that’s different from what we’re usually exposed to,” she said. “This is not something you can get anywhere else.”

The class was taught by , a 91Ě˝»¨professor and director of the program. It’s the third mixed-enrollment class that Herbert, a past recipient of the UW’s distinguished teaching award, has taught at the prison. The topics have varied, but all have been fourth-year courses.

Herbert’s goal is to provide an intellectually stimulating experience for all students, and he said the 91Ě˝»¨students are often taken aback at how prepared their prison counterparts are.

“They’re very good classmates,” he said. “There’s a very clear expectation that the students are meant to carry the load of the conversation, and the [prison] students are very well-prepared.”

Hannah Schwendeman welcomed the challenge. “You need to be prepared for class,” she said. “Having partners for learning who are so passionate and so informed has been great.”

Inmate Noel Caldellis, 28, had no college education when he came to prison in 2008 on a first-degree murder conviction. He’s now working on a bachelor’s in history and said taking Herbert’s classes instilled confidence in his abilities.

“It’s helped me understand just how close we are to college students who are on the outside,” said Caldellis, who is scheduled for release in 2029. “Besides circumstance and education, we are just as capable of doing college-level work.”

The 91Ě˝»¨class is offered through , a Seattle nonprofit that provides college courses for prisoners. The organization offers about 30 classes at the in Monroe, including a Saturday night arts and lecture series, college courses for students pursuing associate degrees, and non-credit courses.

The 91Ě˝»¨courses are made possible through the , named in honor of a Law, Societies & Justice alum who was impassioned about prison issues. They are non-credit, since the university’s tuition fees would be out of reach for inmates. Washington law currently prohibits using state funds for higher education courses in prison, but state lawmakers have considered a bill that would eliminate the ban.

University Beyond Bars aims to address educational inequity, improve inmates’ chances of employment after release and reduce recidivism rates. A 2013 found that inmates who participate in prison education programs have 43 percent lower odds of returning to prison than inmates who do not.

The 91Ě˝»¨classes emulate a regular classroom experience as closely as possible, with the same expectations and course load for everyone, said Stacey Reeh, University Beyond Bars’ executive director.

“Our students want to be held to the same standards,” she said. “Our goal is to recreate the university classroom, and these classes really do that. They really feel like they are taking a 91Ě˝»¨ class.”

Prison is often a racially segregated environment, Reeh said, but the classes bring together inmates from diverse backgrounds. Students learn skills that are important on the outside, she said, like critical thinking and effective communication. Some become leaders across the prison, communicating with upper-level administrators and even state legislators.

Devon Adams, who is serving time for first-degree murder, sits on the program’s 19-member . He works as a UBB teaching assistant and tutors fellow inmates in college prep math courses. He’s just two courses away from completing a bachelor’s degree through Ohio University, but it’s been a long road to get there.

In his early days of imprisonment, Adams said, he saw no path forward. Education gave him something positive to focus on. He first took an English class, and to his surprise, got a B.

“I was used to Cs and Ds and barely passing, so I thought, ‘man, maybe I can do this,'” said Adams, 36, who is scheduled for release in 2024. “I began to build this confidence, and now I’m thinking about what possibilities life has to offer.”

Adams has taken two of Herbert’s classes and plans to pursue a graduate degree. He wants to be a positive role model for his daughter, who is graduating from high school in the spring and hopes to attend UW.

“I can tell her, ‘This is what your daddy’s doing,'” he said. “I’m not in here squandering opportunities away and disregarding the pain I put my family through,” said Adams.

“A big part of my rehabilitation, a big part of my transformation, has to do with wanting to make my family proud of me in some way. That’s really a motivating factor for me,” he said.

At the end of the class, the last of the quarter, the students gather to share their suggestions for developing a restorative justice program. Then 91Ě˝»¨student Nathan Bean presents the inmates with cards their classmates signed that morning.

“It’s an understatement to say that these are the very least we could provide for you,” he said. “This experience is going to stay with us, and it means a lot more than these cards are going to convey. It has been an honor for us to be here and learn alongside you.”

Stricter state sentencing laws in Washington have swelled the ranks of inmates serving life sentences to nearly one in five.

And some lifers who opted to go to trial are serving much longer sentences than others who committed the same crimes and plea-bargained — raising questions about equitable treatment of prisoners.

Those are among the findings in a new analysis by undergraduate honors students in the 91Ě˝»¨â€™s program, who sought to determine the number of lifers in Washington prisons, the legal processes that lead to life sentences and the cost of housing those inmates, many of whom will die behind bars.

Washington largely eliminated its parole system after the state’s Sentencing Reform Act was enacted in 1984. The SRA was intended to increase consistency in sentencing and shift the goal of sentencing from rehabilitation, which research at the time indicated did not reduce crime, to punishment.

“At the time, the conventional wisdom was that rehabilitation didn’t work, and that parole boards were making arbitrary decisions,” said , a professor in the Law, Societies & Justice program and the Department of Sociology, who oversaw the students’ research.

The upshot of the SRA was that except for a few categories of inmates — juveniles, certain sex offenders sentenced to life and prisoners sentenced before the law was enacted — most prisoners would never go before a review board, have their sentences reconsidered or have a chance at early release. Ever.

Two consequent voter-approved initiatives caused the numbers of lifers in Washington state to increase dramatically over the past two decades. The so-called “” law of 1993, the first of its type in the nation, mandated life without parole for three serious felony convictions. The initiative followed two years later, requiring mandatory sentence additions for crimes involving guns. The report mentions one prisoner who was sentenced to 83 years due to weapons charges alone.

The students analyzed data for all felony cases sentenced in Washington state from July 1985 to July 2013, more than 600,600 in total. They found that:

• Almost one in five (19.3 percent) of inmates in Washington are serving life sentences.
• Of Washington’s prisoners, 11.3 percent are serving life with parole — most are sex offenders eligible for review, and a few are inmates sentenced before 1984 — and 8 percent are serving official life without parole sentences or “de facto” ones of 470 months or more, based on the of a life sentence.
• Nationally, one in nine prisoners is serving an official life sentence.
• De facto lifers make up almost half the state’s life without parole population.
• African-Americans comprise only about 4 percent of Washington’s population, but make up 28 percent of prisoners serving life without parole.
• The average life without parole sentence costs taxpayers $2.4 million per prisoner. Before 1984, when lifers were often released, the average cost was $767,895 per prisoner (in 2014 dollars).
• Half of those serving life without parole sentences were sentenced under the three strikes law, and almost 20 percent of de facto lifers are serving sentences of 39 years or more solely due to additional weapons charges.

The students also found widespread discrepancies in the life sentences given for identical crimes committed by inmates who opted for trial compared with those who accepted plea bargains. Prisoners who were tried for homicide, for example, got sentences 9.6 percent longer on average than their counterparts who plea-bargained, the students found.

The gap was even greater for less serious offenses. Inmates convicted of first-degree assault through trial got sentences 45.3 percent longer than those who accepted plea bargains. Two-thirds of life without parole sentences were handed down after trials, the report found, while only 5 percent of cases resulting in other sentences had gone to trial.

“This suggests that there is a correlation between [life without parole] sentences and the trial process, and raises the possibility that people who take their case to trial are being penalized for doing so,” the authors write.

Alex Lynch, one of the report’s authors, said the data also suggests that the Sentencing Reform Act’s goal of reducing sentencing disparities has failed.

“We ran the data over and over and over,” said Lynch, who graduated this year. “The ranges are remarkable. They speak to the question of how effective the SRA has been.”

Another question is how the death penalty might impact life sentences. Washington is one of 31 states with the death penalty, which was suspended in the U.S. between 1972 and 1976. During that time, Beckett said, many states authorized life without parole sentences as an alternative to the death penalty but retained it even after capital punishment was reintroduced.

Opposition to capital punishment seems to have strengthened life without parole sentencing, she said, as opponents push for it as a more acceptable alternative.

“Opposition to the death penalty has made life without parole seem more normal,” Beckett said.

The study coincides with a growing national conversation about mass incarceration in the United States, which has the world’s largest prison population — about 2.2 million people, according to the . Presidential hopefuls and have made mass incarceration a campaign issue, and other Democratic and Republican candidates are calling for .

The 91Ě˝»¨study makes three recommendations: that Washington create a review board and process that allows every lifer to be re-evaluated after a pre-determined amount of time, repeal the three strikes and Hard Time for Armed Crime laws and expand rehabilitative programs to help inmates reintegrate into society after release.

In February, the state house passed that would ease the Hard Time for Armed Crime law. The 91Ě˝»¨students hope to present their report to the Washington State Sentencing Guidelines Commission, and Lynch said she’s encouraged by feedback the document has received from local stakeholders.

“We’ve gotten overwhelmingly positive support,” she said. “We’ve had a lot of positive interactions with folks that are in a position to make some change.”

The study’s co-authors are Dakota Blagg, Madison Brown, Alison Buchanan, Bryce Ellis, Olivia Gee, Andreas Hewitt, Zoe Liebeskind, Katelyn Lowthorp, Hannah Schwendeman and Nicholas Scott.

Jail stays and costs increase dramatically when federal immigration authorities request that inmates be held under what are called “detainer requests,” according to research by 91Ě˝»¨ sociologist Katherine Beckett.

A detainer request is how , part of the federal , informs local law enforcement authorities of its intention to assume custody of an individual when he or she is released from jail. The requests are meant to lengthen an inmate’s stay by no longer than 48 hours, excluding weekends and holidays.

But in a research study commissioned by the , Beckett, a 91Ě˝»¨professor of sociology and law, and graduate student Heather Evans, studied records of about 33,000 King County jail bookings associated with releases in 2011.

Using a statistical regression method, they found that detainer requests had the effect of extending jail stays by an average of 161 percent and cost the county about $3 million each year in additional jail costs.

They also found that nearly two-thirds of the people flagged in this manner by Immigration and Customs Enforcement were not charged with a felony offense related to their booking, and about one in eight were charged with no crime at all. Beckett said this casts doubt on the government contention that detainer requests mainly target people with serious criminal offenses and histories.

Beckett, who is with the UW’s program, said King County jails are not holding otherwise releasable inmates for longer than 48 hours, but that detainers affect the decisions made by people under arrest. People aware that immigration enforcement is pursuing them might plead guilty to buy time to make family and housing arrangements, she said, and may not post bail, fearing they’d never get the money back.

“So it’s not that people are being held longer than the rules allow, but rather that their decisions about the criminal matter are affected by the presence of a detainer,” Beckett said, adding that court decisions regarding pre-trial release may also be affected by the presence of detainer requests.

The researchers also determined that federal detainer requests have a powerful impact on the Hispanic community, with more than one-fourth of all King County jail inmates identified as Hispanic being transferred to federal custody upon release.

The research proves timely, Beckett said, because the King County Council is preparing to revisit and possibly amend its ordinance dictating how the county will respond to such requests.

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For more information, contact Beckett at 206-543-4461 or kbeckett@uw.edu. A copy of the research is available .