Second probe confirms bungling at Corrections
A Senate Republican investigation into the Department of Corrections bungling that freed some 3,200 inmates early over 13 years is finally done. The Senate’s report supplements a previous investigation by two retired federal prosecutors hired by Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee to figure out what went wrong.
The 65-page GOP report suggests that former Corrections secretary Bernie Warner’s hands-off management style contributed to an agency culture that didn’t recognize the urgency of public safety as an overriding agency mission.
Inslee’s probe came to much the same conclusion about agency culture, but the Senate inquiry takes specific aim at Warner. It calls him a poor communicator, says he failed to make timely decisions and frequently was absent while attending out of state and international corrections events.
The Senate report even suggests that Warner should be held accountable after leaving the agency perhaps by having the governor put a letter of reprimand in his personnel file.
Investigators, who were acting under the direction of Republican Sens. Mike Padden and Steve O’Ban, get credit for dredging into concerns of DOC staff and some 71,000 pages of documents unearthed through records requests.
Though the probe’s taxpayer cost and the GOP’s political motivations may be in question in an election year, it’s clear that the Legislature has an oversight role to play in government, and the Senate Law and Justice Committee was playing that role to the hilt.
The report offers some reasonable suggestions for cleaning up the mess left by Corrections employees since 2002. That was the year that a court ruling clarified that DOC needed to calculate good time credits for certain offenders differently. The agency then programmed an incorrect assumption into its software, which did not get discovered until 2012 and was not finally addressed sufficiently until late 2015.
By the time it was fixed, two of the released offenders allegedly committed acts that killed two Washington residents at a time they should have been behind bars.
Big problem. Big scandal. Nasty business.
There is an implication left by the investigation — that because Warner had a relationship with Inslee’s then-chief of staff — that DOC staff were perhaps afraid to bring to light a massive internal failure at the agency.
The governor’s office was aware of that relationship at the time and the Governor’s Office set up a special chain of command in 2014 so that someone else in the office handed issues from the DOC, Inslee spokeswoman Jaime Smith says.
The report suggests that a governor should know about such relationships and that the agency head should in those cases report directly to the elected executive. That’s worth considering.
Other recommendations worth weighing include a review of IT and records-office staffing in the agency, an annual report to lawmakers on how the agency is managing its backlog of IT projects, and a deeper look at a sole-source contract for a technology project that the GOP says went to a friend of Warner.
Inslee’s administration has been working to clean up the Corrections mess. But, the GOP — especially with the fodder the report gives to its campaigns — has given fresh incentives for the Inslee administration to quickly improve the management and performance of Corrections.
This story was originally published May 31, 2016 at 6:46 PM with the headline "Second probe confirms bungling at Corrections."