WA confined hundreds for sexual violence. Then it quietly began releasing them
Just before midnight, Paul Harell drove to a stranger’s home near a riverside town in Maryland. He found the basement door unlocked and, taking a paring knife from the kitchen, entered the bedroom.
A 74-year-old woman awoke with Harell’s hands constricting her throat and the weight of his body on top of her.
It was a crime that echoed how Harell had raped women and girls decades earlier on Washington’s Whidbey Island. And one that Washington spent years, and millions of dollars, to prevent.
It was not an anomaly.
One in 4 people the state has committed and released from the nation’s first program to rehabilitate so-called “sexually violent predators” have been arrested for new crimes, a Seattle Times investigation found. One in 7 — like Harell — reoffended in a serious manner; half involved sexual violence.
Washington justifies detaining and treating people at the Special Commitment Center as necessary for the “preservation of the public peace, health, or safety.”
The Department of Social and Health Services, which runs the center on McNeil Island, 3 miles into Puget Sound, does not track the people it releases nor whether they commit new crimes. The agency does not track whether its legally mandated treatment program improves public safety. It is not required to.
Unlike other behavioral health treatment programs run by the state, the Special Commitment Center has no regular independent audits or enforceable state or federal standards for the quality or efficacy of its care.
DSHS’ per-person cost for the program currently averages $440,000, making it one of the state’s most expensive forms of institutionalization. But the agency has not examined whether its 34-year experiment in civil commitment is helping the people in its custody — or the public.
This lack of scrutiny by DSHS and lawmakers has allowed the state the convenience of saying the money and time it spends treating residents works, without the responsibility of looking at what happens off the island.
Yet Washington continues to send a small number of people to McNeil Island each year while rapidly releasing many more, according to a Seattle Times data analysis. Today, more people the state once labeled sexually violent predators live off the island than remain on it.
DSHS and the Attorney General’s Office stated in 2019 that Harell had been successfully treated for his history of sexual violence and agreed to his release despite concerns by a corrections officer that his compliance with supervision “appeared to be deteriorating” in the months prior, including lying to his therapist, records obtained from the Department of Corrections and Island County Superior Court show.
But when Harell moved back to Maryland where he’d grown up, Washington did not watch as he continued to decline, at times sleeping in his car with a colostomy bag attached to his body.
It did not know if he had an address to register as a sex offender, or when he got a job with a cleaning company, which allowed him into the home of the 74-year-old woman. And it did not track when he returned two days later with the intent, a Maryland jury later found, to commit a new crime.
Serious sex offenses, rising releases
To understand what happens after people are let go and whether Washington is fulfilling its promise to protect public safety, The Times built a database using state and national court records and police reports to identify new crimes committed after people are released. DSHS does not have this information. It wasn’t until 2018 that the Special Commitment Center even had a data department.
The state and county Superior Court judges and juries who oversee special commitment cases have released 179 people from DSHS oversight since the program began, according to DSHS records. Most of those releases occurred in the past decade.
Of those who were released and reoffended, more than half — 27 out of 50 — involved serious crimes, some reminiscent of the types of sexual violence that originally landed them on McNeil Island, including assault, rape, possessing child sexual abuse materials, attempting to solicit a minor for sex and sexual abuse of a child. The rest involved lower-level crimes, including drug possession and failing to register as a sex offender — offenses that can be related to mental health issues, substance abuse disorders and homelessness.
For nearly three-quarters of those released, The Times found no record of an arrest for a new crime. (The Times did not include minor traffic incidents as new crimes.) However, for about a dozen people, the news organization was not able to find any record of them. A handful died soon after release.
Many have gone on to live without incident — holding jobs, joining religious communities and, according to interviews with former residents and their attorneys, finding better treatment off the island than on, for substance abuse, mental health issues and sexual disorders. One former resident of the island now advocates for criminal justice reform in Olympia.
DSHS acknowledges that releasing people directly into the community without oversight is a more dangerous option than supervised release.
Critics note that Washington state government is liability-averse and by not tracking releases, the state has distanced itself from the financial responsibility and potential impacts to public safety.
DSHS, defense attorneys and prosecutors often recommend that people are first released conditionally, either into state-run transition facilities or into supervised housing known as “less restrictive alternatives” — group homes where they continue state-funded treatment under strict conditions, like wearing a GPS monitor and avoiding contact with minors.
But Department of Corrections records show even supervised releases have been fraught with problems. Since 2016, there have been at least 725 violations — twice as many as the number of people released conditionally during that time — resulting in roughly a dozen court-ordered returns to the island annually. Violations range from minor incidents to evading supervision, resident abuse and harm to staff.
The public and lawmakers have been more focused in recent years on supervised releases, in part because they now require public notice. Neighborhoods with these group homes have seen heated protests.
Last spring, not long after protests in Enumclaw and Tenino, Keith Devos, the CEO of the Special Commitment Center, stood on the Steilacoom dock about to board a ferry to McNeil Island and pointed to a faded yellow line painted on the concrete.
“When they’re here,” Devos said, looking toward the distant island, “we’re treating them.”
“But the reality is, many can and will be released. And then once they’re on this side —” he pointed beyond the yellow line, toward the historic town of Steilacoom, where American and Washington state flags hang from every lamppost, “we don’t have oversight of them anymore. … They can live anywhere they want.”
A new public safety experiment
Boats cannot dock on McNeil Island. Tourists cannot visit, even to glimpse great blue herons, harbor seals and beaches etched by salt marshes and sea grass. Besides staff and prescreened visitors, the only way to board the state-run ferry to the island is through the civil commitment process.
At the island’s edge stands a former federal and state prison, now hollow and abandoned. Beyond it, past rolling green hills and boarded-up homes, the Special Commitment Center is a small campus of low, barracklike buildings, contained inside rows of spiraling razor wire.
Today, 131 people remain within total confinement on the island, down from a peak of 285 in 2011. Residents live in spare, individual rooms with possessions that must be approved by the state. Inspirational posters and hand-drawn pictures haphazardly hang on white brick walls.
Civil commitment, or involuntary commitment, has long been used by governments to temporarily detain people in a hospital or institution because of their risk to harm themselves or others. Most psychiatric holds are intended to span days or weeks, with regular court review. If not, the state gets sued for violating people’s civil liberties.
But two heinous sex crimes in the late 1980s forced an expansion of civil commitment in Washington. A young woman was murdered by a man on work release from prison. Months later, another man, who had a history of serious mental illness and serial sexual violence, raped and mutilated a boy in the South Tacoma woods.
State lawmakers passed the Community Protection Act of 1990 to hold people after their prison sentence if there was reason to believe they might reoffend in a sexually predatory manner, making Washington the first state to indefinitely institutionalize people on the basis of sexual violence.
The law relies on a specific risk equation: Do a person’s criminal history and underlying personality disorder or “mental abnormality” (a broad legal term used by Washington state and not recognized by the American Psychological Association) mean they are 50% or more likely to commit new predatory acts if not detained?
DSHS’ website states the law was created “to protect public safety and to provide care, control and custody for the civilly committed residents.” The law also established one of the first statewide sex offender registries; a federal registry was created four years later. More than a dozen states followed Washington’s lead, creating civil commitment programs and sex offender registries.
Experts say the law had the unintended consequence of giving the public the perception that the worst offenders were far away on an island, and that it obscured the reality that most people who commit sex crimes live in — or have returned to — their communities.
Nearly 3,300 people are incarcerated for sex crimes in Washington state, and an additional 3,500 people are on parole from prison for such crimes, the vast majority male, according to the department’s data. More than 20,000 people are required to register as sex offenders in Washington, according to a recent state policy report. But the people sent to McNeil Island — about 515 in nearly 35 years — make up less than 3% of those currently required to register.
Earl Shriner, the man who mutilated the Tacoma boy, never went to the Special Commitment Center. He is serving a 131-year sentence for rape and attempted murder.
At the time the special commitment law was created, release was an afterthought. The only way people were freed was through showing they had changed, either through success in treatment or physiologically because of stroke, dementia or advanced age. But the belief among lawmakers and law enforcement in the late 1980s and early ‘90s was that most people with such sexual deviancies were untreatable and few would ever leave.
“The Legislature left open the possibility that [a person] could document that they were cured,” said Phil Talmadge, a former senator involved in creating the law. Community release, he said, was expected to be “a rare event.”
But not releasing people, courts soon ruled, made the law unconstitutional.
A challenge, then rapid rise in releases
The first lawsuits began almost immediately. Richard Turay, the sixth person admitted to the Special Commitment Center, sued in 1994, alleging the lack of mental health treatment violated his constitutional rights. A jury agreed.
The special commitment law skirted the line of double jeopardy: potentially punishing people for the same crime after their criminal sentence. Without treatment that could lead to rehabilitation and release, there is “a belief by residents … that their confinement amounts to a life sentence,” the federal judge in Seattle found in the Turay case.
Ultimately, courts ruled that the possibility of release, combined with sex offender treatment, is what allows the Special Commitment Center to legally operate. So for over a decade, the state was placed under a federal injunction while it worked to comply with the requirement to both provide adequate mental health care and release people.
The injunction was lifted in 2007 with DSHS’ assurances that residents would have a way to transition into the community. If the department violated that, it knew it could be sued again. DSHS opened two state-run transition facilities where people could be sent before returning to the community.
For years, the people committed to McNeil Island rarely left. Then the state and courts slowly began releasing residents, first at a trickle, then at a rapid clip. Only one person was unconditionally released in 2007. By 2012, Washington was quietly releasing more residents into the community, with and without supervision, than were admitted.
The state set a record last year, releasing 68 people, with and without conditions.
Releases became more common in part because new research found Washington and other states had been inflating the degree of dangerousness of people who commit repeated sexual offenses, particularly after age 60.
As a result, forensic evaluators in Washington determined that some people previously considered high risk were less likely to commit new crimes and thus were eligible for release.
However, advocates for sexual assault survivors say that because crimes are underreported, the rate of repeated sex crimes will also be underreported. Less than 1% of all sexual assault cases result in a felony conviction, according to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network.
Shannon Reid, a criminology professor who reviewed The Times’ analysis, affirmed the news organization’s recidivism methodology but said crime statistics have gaps. More than half of all crimes are never reported, and police can be more likely to surveil people with a known criminal history, she said.
“Whenever you are dealing with justice-involved individuals, you are only going to be getting a snapshot of what is going on,” said Reid, who teaches criminal justice and criminology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
DSHS officials say the agency has not made any policy changes that have influenced the rapid rate of releases — and that it’s the courts, not the state, that ultimately determine when someone is released. “We do what the court asks us to do,” said Sjan Talbot, deputy assistant secretary for DSHS’ Behavioral Health Administration.
But half a dozen court officials statewide who handle special commitment cases said in interviews that their role has limits.
Judges are often generalists and depend on the information they are given by the state, the prosecution and the defense, said Supreme Court Justice G. Helen Whitener, who oversaw sexually violent predator cases on Pierce County Superior Court and represented committed residents as a defense attorney.
“By the time [a person] gets to the court for that release, it really favors heavily for the individual to be released,” Whitener said.
And the pressure to provide people a path to freedom has only continued.
Disability Rights Washington sued in 2017, accusing the state of virtually “warehousing” vulnerable residents with cognitive disabilities, allowing them to languish in solitary confinement with no access to treatment they could understand or any way to be released. This again placed the state at risk of violating residents’ constitutional and civil rights.
Almost a decade later, the state is still under a settlement agreement with the advocacy group to improve care for people with cognitive disabilities on the island.
Costs soar, population drops
Amid ongoing concerns over disability rights and releases, the state’s special commitment program has been hemorrhaging money even as it cares for fewer and fewer people.
Since 2014, the Special Commitment Center program’s budget has increased by more than 115% while the number of people civilly committed has fallen by more than 35%. The average per-person cost has tripled in the same period. State budget documents and legislative policy reports show ongoing concerns over the rising costs — and proposals to study moving more people off the island, explicitly older residents and those with developmental disabilities and psychiatric conditions, or relocate the whole facility.
DSHS said its budget has grown because of increasing wages, older residents’ medical needs and the expense of operating the aging island facility. Overseeing people in transitional housing in less-restrictive alternative placements in the community has also become much more expensive, said Devos, the CEO of the Special Commitment Center.
When a resident is released, however, the cost to DSHS is zero.
Talbot, DSHS’ deputy assistant secretary, maintains that the money spent by the state directly correlates to public safety.
“We have to spend the money because we have to provide the necessary services to try to help people become successful,” Talbot said in an interview at the agency’s office in Steilacoom.
Over the past several years, the Sex Offender Policy Board, which advises the governor and the Legislature, recommended a review of the entire special commitment system and noted the state’s aversion to releases because of increased liability.
The board “has heard of more and more cases where state agencies avoid making decisions or offering opinions to change conditions of supervision, especially for registered sex offenders in community placement,” the board wrote in a 2016 report, recommending “an examination of how liability concerns have interfered with state agencies employing effective case management and stewardship of state resources.”
When a state agency takes on more oversight, “liability increases for the state substantially,” the board noted.
Talmadge, the former senator and now an appellate attorney, said the law only establishes liability when a “special relationship” can be established between the state and the perpetrator or victim.
“The battle for lawyers is does the state owe people a duty?” he said.
No sex offender treatment for 1 in 5 residents
Despite years of sex offender treatment in Washington, Harell is now serving a life sentence in Maryland for attempted rape, burglary and other charges after the 2021 attack. Even as Harell cut the blade into the woman’s neck and chest, she was able to press a medical alert button, court records show, causing him to flee. He was arrested the next day.
The quality and amount of DSHS’ sex offender treatment has been criticized for years by residents, defense attorneys and advocates.
Treatment at McNeil Island is intended, according to DSHS, to provide individuals with coping skills and tools through group and individual therapy to prevent them from reoffending.
Yet even though mental health services must be offered to keep the program on the right side of the law, DSHS offers few other psychiatric services outside of sex offender treatment and only an hour of individual therapy a month.
Clinician vacancies and frequent turnover have also created instability in therapeutic care.
Last year, most residents received a weekly average of 5.25 hours of treatment, up from just 2.25 hours in 2022. Residents with cognitive disabilities received less than three hours a week. One in 5 McNeil Island residents receive no treatment at all because DSHS can’t mandate they take it.
Calvin Malone never underwent treatment at the Special Commitment Center. But after seven years on McNeil Island, he was released.
“One day I was labeled as a sexually violent predator with the potential of being there for life, and the next day, I wasn’t,” he said. “It was miraculous. I never took a day of treatment.”
Malone, who was convicted of child rape and other sex crimes in the late 1980s and early 1990s, said he declined treatment on McNeil Island because he had more comprehensive sex offender treatment while in a Washington prison and any information disclosed during treatment on the island can be used against residents in court.
“I recognized there was something wrong with me on Day 1 of entering Walla Walla,” he said. “I needed to do something. It was a gradual transformation. It was like a peeling of the onion skin to get to the center of the issue of my dysfunction, and that required a lot of examination.”
But the help he had in that process came from people who reached out to him from the community and his Buddhist practice, he said. “It had nothing to do with what DOC or DSHS offered me.”
He has had no new arrests since his 2019 release.
“We were all detained at the same place under the same circumstance,” said Malone, 73, who has spoken at state legislative hearings on prison reform. But “some [people] were released and we all looked at each other and said, ‘How did he get out?’ Because we know each other and the behaviors that are hidden or not. Sometimes we are baffled by the decisions that are made.”
Devos said numerous factors go into determining whether he supports someone’s petition to be released from the island, including a forensic evaluation, which every resident undergoes annually, and his clinical judgment review, which can contradict the forensic evaluation.
Devos acknowledged that 14 to 20 hours of treatment per week is considered best practice and that the state could do more to expand what it offers.
A survey of 17 of 21 state and federal commitment programs similar to the Special Commitment Center found that in 2018 most offered at least six hours of sex offender treatment weekly and an additional 12 to 16 hours of therapies each month, according to the Sex Offender Civil Commitment Programs Network.
Texas offers six hours of sex offender treatment weekly and 10 hours of therapeutic work, plus weekly Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous groups. Neither of those groups is offered on McNeil Island.
Data methodology
To understand what happened to the 179 people who have been released from civil commitment for sex crimes, The Seattle Times reviewed records obtained from DSHS, the Department of Corrections, Washington and national court and police records to build a database of charges and/or convictions after each person was released. The data spans people released since the program’s inception, some of whom have been free for over a decade, others just a few months.
Devos says the facility’s treatment is rigorous because the agency is charged with protecting public safety.
“We have a huge stake, not only in their success within our program, but when it comes to public safety, our families are impacted, right?” he said. “I go to restaurants, my kids go to restaurants. … And so do the residents who are unconditionally released.”
Unlike other state-run psychiatric facilities, the Special Commitment Center does not have to meet state or federal treatment standards, in part because it does not take Medicaid or Medicare funding. Other facilities undergo regular inspections and can be fined — or lose federal funding entirely, as occurred in 2018 at Western State Hospital.
The only routine oversight report on the McNeil Island program is conducted by the “Inspection of Care” team, three out-of-state experts hired and paid by DSHS. It was their 2023 report that identified the facility’s average weekly treatment hours. The team has long suggested the state improve its treatment program, but there is no requirement DSHS follow the team’s guidance. Nor can it levy fines against the agency.
“I just want to let U know I’m 13”
Institutional life was regulated in shades of gray, but when Malone was released from McNeil Island, the outside world overwhelmed him. The smell of popcorn, women’s perfume and Starbucks coffee induced panic. Bright colors glared from every surface, blended with the blare of sounds from electronics that hadn’t existed when he entered prison.
For some, Malone said, abrupt freedom has the potential to result in new tragedy.
Harell was released just months before Malone and had been committed for a year longer.
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Additional information about this reporting
This reporting was informed by hundreds of pages of psychological records, court files, victim testimony and interviews with people who have been subject to or convicted of violent sex crimes. What is evident from these records, and the stories they inform, is that sexual violence not only inflicts trauma but is sometimes borne from it. Many survivors of sexual assault do not report the crimes or ever give voice to them in a way that can be formally documented. Still, the enduring harm of sexual violence ripples through communities.
Jennifer Ritchie, chair of the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office’s Sexually Violent Predator unit, said civil commitment provides an additional opportunity to offer treatment, and when people are conditionally released with supervision to group homes, there is more ongoing oversight as they transition into the community.
“I say this every time I unconditionally release someone,” Ritchie said: “‘Mr. Johnson, I hope I never see you again. Because if I see you, that means there’s a problem with community safety, that means you either hurt someone else or hurt yourself. I hope to never see you ever again.’ But I do tell the court we’ll be watching.”
Ritchie added that her office sees new police reports or arrests when they occur, but ultimately, “When this person is unconditionally released, they are the only one that can hold themselves accountable.”
Mathew Jagger had been unconditionally released from McNeil Island for six years when a protective order was filed against him in Snohomish County in 2017. It alleged he coerced a 32-year-old woman with developmental disabilities into sex.
The woman believed Jagger was wrongfully convicted of past crimes, including a child rape conviction that led to his commitment to McNeil Island, and had been encouraged by Jagger, who was homeless, to sleep with him outside, the protective order states.
The case was ultimately dismissed and the woman died, unhoused, two years later in King County.
Not long after, Jagger was arrested in Lynnwood for exchanging sexually explicit messages with an undercover police officer he believed to be a 13-year-old girl.
The officer, pretending to be “Sara,” wrote on a messaging app:
“I just want to let U know I’m 13 but still want to hang out with u … I just want make sure your good wit that.”
“Yes I am hun,” Jagger responded with an emoji, according to the prosecutor’s affidavit. He later asked “Sara” when her mom would be out of town and if she would have sex with him in the back of his van, before agreeing to meet in a parking lot in Lynnwood.
Jagger is currently in prison in Aberdeen, appealing his conviction.
This story was originally published August 19, 2024 at 5:00 AM.