Pursuing Personal and Environmental Rehabilitation in Whatcom County

Evan Knappenberger is a student at Whatcom Community College and an Iraq War veteran living in Bellingham, Wash. He spent some time with a Whatcom County work crew this summer.

As northwest Washington moves into the second decade of the 21st century, we face a growing number of environmental problems as well as the more familiar social problems that plague our industrialized society. Many of these issues threaten the very fabric of our way of life: our health, our community, and our land and water. By finding and analyzing the common roots of our problems, we can tailor appropriately holistic and interdisciplinary responses that are more effective than traditional approaches to problem solving.

A young, working-class man is caught with drugs. A homeless veteran is arrested for trespassing. A corporate employee is jailed for driving without a license. It happens every day in our community, at an alarmingly increasing rate. There was a 34 percent increase in jail bookings between 2001 and 2008.1

Most people find the criminal justice system to be an uninviting topic. It is an issue rife with aspects of race, class, mental illness and drugs. It is systemically indicative of our failures as a society. Indeed, many people break the law on a regular basis, though few get caught, and fewer still are incarcerated. More often than not, we adhere to the glue of the social contract that binds us to the goodwill of our fellow humans.

Some people, like Henry David Thoreau or Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., feel it is their duty to resist unjust laws, and make a practice of getting arrested. Though the threat of arrest is a powerful motivation to uphold legal standards of action, occasionally even law-abiding citizens will unintentionally step out of bounds.

So it follows that when a person is jailed, they are likely to be stigmatized by some portion of the community. Unfortunately for society (both statistically and morally), criminal justice and rehabilitation is not an issue that should be ignored or brushed aside as aberrant.

According to Whatcom County data2, there was a 70 percent increase in average daily jail population over the last seven years. This means four in 1,000 citizens in Whatcom County are currently jailed either downtown or at the Work Center on Division Street.

At least six out of every 1,000 Washington residents were in state prison as of 2003.3 One in 100 US residents is currently incarcerated in a prison, for a total of almost 2 million prisoners nationwide.4 Another 2 million are on some type of probation.

In his book “Punishment and Inequality in America,” Harvard researcher Bruce Western notes the implicit social injustice of our system, which jails one in nine black men and many poor minorities as well. According to Western, the “tough” or “conservative” approach to dealing with crime has been incarceration.

The Reagan-era criminal justice reform that emphasized harsh penal justice was a reaction by conservatives to the success of the civil rights movement, according to Western. That the majority of those without adequate legal representation, socioeconomic opportunity or employment happen to be those fighting for civil rights is no coincidence, he said. The statistics seemingly bear Western’s theory out, proving that our traditional method of dealing with crime – that is, by locking up the poor – has not been working.

One Whatcom County correctional program is worth noting for its progress of reinventing criminal rehabilitation. The Whatcom County Work Center, a project of the Whatcom County Sheriff’s Office (WCSO), hosts an ecological-correctional partnership that works to improve both the environment and the offender. Unlike the traditional model of criminal justice, the WCSO work program seems to show the promise of a different way of handling criminal offenses.

Every weekday morning around 7:00 a.m. at 2030 Division Street in Bellingham, an average of 30 personnel get suited up for a day of hard work. Spirits are high for the men and women spending long periods of time in custody. Not only are they eager to get some exercise and see the sun, but they also find fulfillment in their efforts. They prepare for long hours of intense physical labor. For some, this is the first time in their lives that they have had real jobs, but they are surprisingly willing to work.

These individuals are inmates at the Whatcom County Work Center, and they are participating in the work crew program, helping to restore the local environment.

The opportunity for those who have failed to live up to society’s expectations to atone for their crimes can be valuable. Working for environmental balance is deeply interconnected to the search for social and personal harmony. By healing an environment degraded by toxic industrial-agricultural society, a person might also work toward healing the personal wounds acquired living in such a society.

Larry Nims is a senior supervisor of the work crew program of the Whatcom County Sheriff’s Office who directly supervised a work crew for 12 years. Nims said the offenders who staff the crews are normal people he isn’t afraid to meet on the street.

There are several crews in the program, each with a different focus.

Two crews are dedicated to working with the Whatcom County Flood Control Zone District and the Conservation District on riparian (streamside) improvement. Another crew works with the Forest Service, or alternately, the city of Bellingham on special projects.

Each crew is outfitted with a donated WTA bus, a trailer, appropriate safety gear and tools. A full-time supervisor coordinates groups of eight inmates, who are housed together in a cell, and rotates five of them to duty each weekday.

A litter crew picks up trash along county roads and highways.

“Lots of trash is concentrated on the on- and off-ramps on I-5. Mostly fast food,” Nims said.

In 2007, the litter crew picked up 69,949 pounds of trash to be sent to landfills. They patrolled an area of more than 759 miles.

The river crews have successfully rehabilitated more than 40 miles of waterways in Whatcom County in the last decade as well. They have also done maintenance on levees and public lands, including emergency flood management during times of major crises. The Work Center keeps a greenhouse on its property that grows native plants for the river crews, saving money for the county. Many times crews will cut willow starts from an area that they previously planted and use them as a resource in another area.

The various undertakings of the other crews are ambitious and substantive. They range from maintenance of county property – cutting grass, removing noxious weeds and planting flowerbeds – to building trails. There are several local trails that have recently been improved, including in remote areas such as Glacier. Labor is intensive and includes building footbridges, wheelchair access ramps, and even the occasional outhouse shelter. Nims’ program offers weekly classes to inmates in a grounds maintenance certification program meant to help them find better jobs in the civilian world.

“The program isn’t much different from having a real-world job,” Nims said. “The workers have a lot of pride. An impressive amount of them will bring their families out to show the work they did while on [the program].”

As to bettering the inmates, Nims holds a philosophy in line with that of his crew bosses: respect the workers and they will reciprocate.

“My supervisors are encouraging, which is important. They show respect. They expect respect. We don’t look at a workers’ past, and they really appreciate being treated respectfully,” he said.

This attitude of respectful equality helps inmates to build a positive self-image for themselves. The mutual pride of supervisors, project managers and workers teaches a lesson about the value of the environment to the community and about the correctional value of physical labor.

“We have people come in here who have never worked in their life. We have to help them learn to work, and the majority of them would rather work than sit around anyway,” Nims said.

For offenders who are deemed non-violent and low-risk, the offer of work crew is a great benefit. Working and displaying good behavior can reduce a sentence by up to one-third. But more than this, the opportunity to have time outside of the limited cement and cinderblock jail is a blessing.

Conditions in the downtown jail are cramped and overcrowded. The Work Center on Division Street offers slightly better circumstances, and there are skylights from which natural light filters down. However, jails are noisy places regardless of the time, and there is little chance for exercise or reflection as they are now.

The chance to dress in civilian clothes and to retreat into a quiet outdoor setting is a godsend to people who have been kept indoors for weeks or months on end. The natural setting of the healthy human being is not in a cement cell, and mental and emotional well-being can only deteriorate in a noisy, confined place.

Allowing inmates a measure of physical freedom forces them to internalize their confinement and confront the causes of their imprisonment. Their labor is a release, and given a proper understanding, can facilitate meaningful growth.

Perhaps this is why a program of work rehabilitation based on mutual respect, outdoor physical labor, and environmental rehabilitation is so valuable: it maintains a degree of place in the world for marginalized or unlucky offenders.

“Most of these guys tell me they won’t ever come back, but they usually thank me,” said Nims. “There are always some that will be back.”

Nims does not keep data on work-crew recidivism, but he said often the contextual difficulty of returning to society after confinement poses problems for some offenders. There is a healthy recidivism rate at the Work Center, but it is definitely lower than that of the downtown jail. According to a 2002 report by the Alternative Corrections Program of Whatcom County,5 there was a 38 percent recidivism rate of offenders released from the work program. This is about half that of the general jail population recidivism rate, which is 75 percent.

Not everyone supports the program, Nims said.

“There is always some resistance by the community to what we do. Ten years ago there was a lot more,” Nims said. “But once they see what we’ve done, [the community is] happy to see them back out there. People will call the sheriff’s office and ask us to pick up their particular roads.”

Altogether, there is a vast amount of work being done behind the scenes for Whatcom County by people who happen to be incarcerated. The implicit irony of using criminal work programs to rehabilitate agricultural environments that in many cases have been lawfully and negatively impacted by an industrial system should not be lost.

Because of an outdated conceptualization of justice and an implicit prejudice, as Western demonstrated, the poor and vulnerable elements of civilization often end up in jails instead of in treatment. For a small number of forensic criminals, imprisonment may be a solution, but to the vast majority it is a hindrance that cannot replace drug rehab, psychiatric treatment or social work.

Until the criminal justice system can be re-conceptualized to be more just and equitable, a gap will exist between minor crime, major punishment and rehabilitation.

This is a niche that programs such as the Whatcom Sheriff’s Work Center fit into well.

By utilizing the healing labors of otherwise uselessly incarcerated people, we can encourage a resolution to some of these problems. By taking an interdisciplinary approach as these institutions have done in the Work Center arrangement, multiple solutions can be reached simultaneously. Our Whatcom community stands to benefit from such an improvement in its thinking.

We must rethink our approach to crime while we continue to build a sustainable environment. §

1. Whatcom County Health Department, Behavioral Health Plan, July 2008. US Census Estimates, 2008.

2. Ibid.

3. WA Institute for Public Policy, 2003. http://www.wsipp.wa.gov/rptfiles/SentReport2002.pdf

4. NY Times, 2-28-2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/us/28cnd-prison.html

5. Jail Industries Meeting minutes, July 2002, http://www.jib.wa.gov/meetminutes/071302.html