SEATTLE – After wrongful death claims shuttered one Washington jail last year and threatened to close another, a lawmaker is again trying to create an independent oversight board for the state’s 50 local jails.
Washington already has independent oversight through the state Office of the Corrections Ombuds for its prisons, where people convicted of felonies go to serve their sentences. Jails, which are typically run by counties and cities and largely book people who have been arrested but not convicted of a crime, have no such statewide guardrails.
Little is known of what happens behind many jail walls in Washington state. At least 64 people have died in local jails since 2022, after the Washington State Department of Health began collecting this information. But not all jails report these deaths or the reasons for them to the department…