June 28, 2023 Dena Jensen

So far, I have made it through watching the first three hours of Whatcom County Council Members’ 10:30 a.m., June 26, 2023 workshop on the draft copy of an ordinance for a sales tax that will potentially fund a new Whatcom County Jail and behavioral health services. I still have a couple hours left of their full workshop that day to finish watching.

I was watching the meeting live over Zoom. When I got to the part of the discussion where Council Member Elenbaas called on Sheriff Elfo to confirm that there were a couple thousand outstanding warrants locally because of the current capacity of the existing Whatcom County Jail and the Sheriff gave his response, I quickly put together an email to send to Council Members, and sent it before their hour-long break for lunch, after which they would return for more work at 2:15 p.m. that day.

In my email, I used most of a Facebook comment I had made as a response that was likely related to the same individual Council Member Elenbaas referenced having spoken of those warrants during public comment at one of the Council’s meetings. I wanted my perspective on the reasons why a bigger jail is not the answer to a backlog of outstanding warrants to be on the public record and available to the Council members.

Council Member Elenbaas’ remarks during that first portion of the workshop were frequent and sometimes relatively prolonged and/or repeated arguments both supporting the perspectives of people he has decided are the ones in his district who he claims as his community, and for greater control of input and funding by elected leaders. At one point, Elenbaas, serving as the County’s District 5 Council representative, through his conditional acceptance of compassionate actions and his stated mistrust of the Whatcom County Incarceration Prevention and Reduction Task Force‘s expertise and agenda, gave the impression that the Task Force is a body whose focus is simply to find ways to be nice to people rather than put them in jail or hold them accountable.

Meanwhile, by comparison there seemed to be a deficit of remarks from other Council Members who were supporting amendments being made. To me, this gives the appearance that they don’t understand the gravity and purpose of some of the calls for destructively absent services in our community and/or don’t want to spend time on voicing it.

It’s true that actions are important, however bringing forward critical points and explanations that help educate some community members and uphold the informed voices and perspectives of others is important too.

Regarding Council Member actions that day, while making some amendments to help ensure increased oversight of jail and social service projects/spending by services providers and disproportionately, negatively impacted community members, Council Members did fall short of taking numerous critical actions needed to support services in their amended version of the draft ordinance. They did accept one amendment from Sheriff Elfo that can favor increasing jail capacity, and from their discussions, it seems apparent that we are likely to be subjected to a proposal for a more significant increase in jail beds that what the latest cost estimates have addressed.

Below is the email I sent. Contact information is at the bottom of this post an I am providing some links in the email, in case people reading it want more information on some of the details:

Sent: Monday, June 26, 2023, 12:44:01 PM PDT

Subject: Related to arguments that we need a larger jail

Dear Whatcom County Council:
I wanted to address arguments, such as Sherrif [sic] Elfo’s, which promote the idea that we need a much larger jail than the one cost estimates have been provided for at this point, ignore how the need to utilize the jail would change should we ever sufficiently prioritize and fund amply accessible and supported services. This means not only discussing services, figuring out what deficiencies and gaps we have, more widely bringing in voices of those who come up against deficiencies and gaps, planning services and ways to eliminate barriers, but also actually, promptly, funding and providing resources to drive them forward.

Jails are predominately for short-time stays. Even with a big list of folks that booking restrictions aren’t allowing in jail, with backlogs cleared, most of those folks should be in there quick, and then be assigned means to address their violations, whether recovery or restorative courts, community service, electric home monitoring, etc., and they then should move on.

The fact that we have so many pre-trial folks being held indefinitely is an abhorrent anomaly. It’s the same with those needing competency restoration. And we currently have officials and community members working to address these mistreatments. As a community we need to be making sure mistreatments don’t ever happen again – including those, for example where mold is not cleaned in the jail to keep it within health department standards, or delaying access to clean in-tact sleeping mats* to jail residents until mats are in a shredded condition, or not promptly providing evacuation routes/proceedures, or not promptly taking action to make identified life-safety renovations –  because when we talk about people violating people’s rights, threatening their safety, and needing to be held accountable, these are instances of state and local officials violating people’s rights, threatening their safety, and needing to be held accountable.

When services are deficient or there are high barriers to accessing those, it is much more likely to require coercion and detention to try to force them to choose to endure things that seem impossible for folks suffering instability and mental and physical challenges to endure.

So it stands to reason, if we don’t focus on services that help people become stable and able to be a part of wellbeing in their community, then bigger and bigger jails and longer stays are all we can look forward to. And sadly, a town like Ferndale could end up being laden with that burden and disgrace.

The whole process for the Justice Project was supposed to be, at the very least, about balancing the needs for services and a jail. The current implementation plan and ordinance hasn’t pulled that off. The scale is tipped early and financially for the jail and that leaves us with deficient and delayed resources for the things that will diminish the amount of people entering incarceration and diminishing their length of stay there.

Not repeating history means moving away from what hasn’t worked. Nationally it’s easy to see that the war on drugs, locking people up, and putting all that before trying to get people what they need to be successful, stable, and healthy are among those things that haven’t worked. We need to keep pushing forward in the work we do together to do things differently.

Sincerely, Dena Jensen

Birch Bay, WA

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* The link provided for the phrase “delaying access to clean in-tact sleeping mats” is to the May 24, 2023 Whatcom County Town Hall Listening Session, where someone commented they had a friend in the jail who talked about sleeping on mats that were in shreds. There was a later comment during the town hall by someone who worked in the jail in some capacity who said that those mats had since been replaced.

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This email was sent to the following addresses:

To: council@co.whatcom.wa.us <council@co.whatcom.wa.us>; Barry Buchanan <bbuchana@co.whatcom.wa.us>; Kaylee Galloway <kgallowa@co.whatcom.wa.us>; Todd Donovan <tdonovan@co.whatcom.wa.us>; Carol Frazey <cfrazey@co.whatcom.wa.us>; Tyler Byrd <tbyrd@co.whatcom.wa.us>; Ben Elenbaas <belenbaa@co.whatcom.wa.us>; Kathy Kershner <kkershne@co.whatcom.wa.us>

Cc: Satpal Sidhu <ssidhu@co.whatcom.wa.us>; iprtaskforce@co.whatcom.wa.us <iprtaskforce@co.whatcom.wa.us>; Health <health@co.whatcom.wa.us>; ccmail@cob.org <ccmail@cob.org>; mayorsoffice@cob.org <mayorsoffice@cob.org>; phab@co.whatcom.wa.us <phab@co.whatcom.wa.us>