Editor’s note: This story contains descriptions of sexual violence.
When new owners purchased the pale blue colonial in rural Arlington, a century-old house behind a white picket fence, they named it Eagles Nest. Here, they told Snohomish County, they would rent the three upstairs bedrooms to up to nine men for a discipleship program associated with a Kingdom Life Assembly congregation.
The landlord, Pastor Steve Parker, said his mission was to provide housing and spiritual support to people who had a history of sex crimes by “fostering a home environment that promotes a family atmosphere,” according to state and county public records.
The timing was fortuitous.
It was 2012, and Washington’s Department of Social and Health Services needed to house people who were increasingly granted conditional release from its Special Commitment Center. The remote facility on McNeil Island in south Puget Sound detains people who have been civilly committed into state custody because their history of violent sex crimes and psychiatric disorders may make them more likely to reoffend.
A court had ruled that indefinite detention was illegal without treatment and a pathway to release. Eagles Nest became one of more than two dozen homes statewide that the agency has paid to house hundreds of people moving off the island.
Yet amid a growing reliance on supervised housing, the Special Commitment Center uses mostly unregulated providers and operates its community program under a fragmented system of oversight that has compromised resident and public safety, a Seattle Times investigation found.
Residents were placed at homes where they have been able to consistently violate court orders, including absconding from supervision and obtaining drugs and child sexual abuse images or videos, according to inspection records. One man had rope, a knife and a white mask. And DSHS continued to employ someone who was accused of raping a teenager. He later committed a sexual offense against a colleague at work.
The gaps in oversight and state accountability allowed individual home operators to collect payments despite ongoing problems.
This is a critical moment for one of Washington’s most isolated programs. Far more people are now released into the community each year than are committed to the island, changing how and where sexual rehabilitation occurs.
Yet the program continues to operate largely unchecked. Years of proposed legislation, including this session, have only chipped away at the sweeping reforms lawmakers say are necessary to fix a broken system.
While each person on conditional release has a “transition team,” including a corrections officer, social worker, sex offender therapist and often a community chaperone, the homes themselves have little such scrutiny.
Instead, they essentially operate under court-ordered landlord agreements. Without a license or contract, the state doesn’t have the power to set enforceable standards or terminate a placement without going through the courts. In the few cases when the agency has entered into contracts, it has chosen providers with known problems.
“Any system is probably far from perfect,” said Kevin Bovenkamp, assistant secretary for behavioral health for DSHS, “but I think the system is working the way it is designed.”
But Gov. Bob Ferguson acknowledged the program needs improvement.
“(I) know how serious these cases are,” Ferguson, who prosecuted sexual civil commitment cases as Washington’s attorney general, wrote in an email. “It’s a high bar to designate someone a sexually violent predator. It’s reserved for people who are likely to continue to commit sexually violent crimes unless the state intervenes.”
Ferguson declined an interview but wrote, “In my inaugural address I said I’m not here to defend government, I’m here to reform it. One area that needs improvement is the LRA (less restrictive alternative community housing) system. As a new governor, I’m looking forward to taking my experience at the AG’s Office to improve public safety across our state.”
In a placement report for Eagles Nest, the Department of Corrections — which inspects homes before a resident is placed there — told a court it would be an advantageous setting because Parker could be “an active agent in monitoring and potentially responding to concerning behaviors” of residents.
Public records, however, reveal problems mounted as residents moved in. Parker took a $25,000 loan from a new resident. Another resident evaded court-ordered supervision to solicit sex from bikini baristas and massage parlors. And there’s no record of Parker’s nonprofit ever filing required tax documents. Still, DSHS paid him at least $68,000 from 2019 through 2023 to house residents from McNeil Island, state records show.
Only after Parker was arrested in 2023 in a criminal drug trafficking and money laundering scheme, for which he was sentenced to 4 ½ years in prison, did DSHS stop paying him.
“No consistency or oversight”
When Damion Blevins cut off his ankle monitor last September, less than three months after moving from McNeil Island into a supervised apartment in Tukwila, the state had already overlooked warning signs.
Blevins had a history of drug abuse and assaulting women, and his new housing was located in an area known for crime, drug abuse and prostitution. For years, DSHS and Washington courts have also been warned about the fallibility of the GPS monitors Blevins and others are court-ordered to wear: The devices are not completely accurate and can misfire.
The housing provider, the Journey Project, was paid $2,100 monthly by DSHS to house each person from McNeil Island. The operators also had a history of sex crimes — one had been committed to McNeil Island — and had trouble keeping track of residents. At least four civilly committed people have been flagged by corrections officers multiple times for evading court-ordered supervision while living at the apartments.
None of these problems prevented Blevins’ placement there. And when he disappeared, 24 hours passed before anyone noticed. He was found in Portland after a three-day multistate search.
A spokesperson for the Department of Corrections said the September incident is under investigation for possible misconduct.
When the state passed the Community Protection Act in 1990 and enshrined the concept of civilly detaining “sexually violent predators” after a conviction or charge, lawmakers thought few people would ever be allowed to return to the community or that the state might one day be responsible for housing them outside an institution.
In turn, meaningful oversight of community housing went largely unaddressed.
Over the next decade, lawsuits and a federal injunction found the state was failing to provide basic civil rights including the right to live in less restrictive settings.
The state needed to provide the option of living outside an institution, if it was in the best interest of the committed person while still ensuring public safety. Each person has the right to an annual review and to petition for release. Washington built two state-run facilities and opened the door for other community placements. But few regulations or standards were created for these homes.
Nor did the state require the homes to be licensed, and most are not. But many other forms of adult care providers, like adult family homes and nursing homes, must maintain a license to operate, which dictates requirements like staff training and building and safety inspections.
By 2020, the Sex Offender Policy Board, which advises the governor and Legislature, said the resulting housing system had “no consistency or oversight.” It added that those looking for housing for McNeil residents “are often forced to use currently existing sex offender housing. This housing is often poor quality or clustered in certain communities.”
In an attempt to fix this, lawmakers in 2021 passed a bill that required DSHS to take over planning for each release, saying the agency was better poised to work with housing providers than were defense attorneys, who for years bore the burden of knocking on landlords’ doors to find housing for their clients.
But neither the Legislature nor DSHS have adopted regulations to ensure the safety of residents and the public in line with other adult care facilities. To date, there are no state or federal health, safety or staffing requirements for homes that accept civilly committed individuals, despite many residents’ complex mental health, medical and disability needs.
The only requirement for being paid to house someone from the Special Commitment Center is for the Department of Corrections to conduct an inspection of the residence and for a landlord to agree to follow court conditions. The home must be 500 feet or more from child care facilities and schools.
DSHS produces an annual report on violations at the two state-run facilities. The only other oversight comes from the courts and a settlement agreement with Disability Rights Washington over care for residents who have cognitive disabilities.
DSHS had long distanced itself from any role in community supervision of McNeil Island residents and the associated liability. But in the past few years, the agency has increasingly sought control, supporting bills that would require all housing providers to contract with DSHS to accept residents from the island.
Keith Devos, the CEO of the Special Commitment Center, said in an interview last year that contracts allow the agency to have more power over the providers, including the ability to inspect homes at will and control costs. But DSHS still can’t fine contracted providers when problems occur, he said.
However, the Special Commitment Center has never independently inspected any of its six contracted homes, according to DSHS.
Instead, DSHS has used contracts to shield itself from potential legal action if something goes wrong. The contracts also give the agency unique control to decide what information a housing provider can share.
Members of the public in King, Kitsap and Thurston counties who have protested the group homes in recent years say the state has not been transparent about risk or the nature of violations. People have pressed for more information about releases and greater public input and at times, sought to stop anyone from leaving McNeil Island, which has been found unconstitutional.
“There were no assurances of, ‘This is how we are protecting your community,’ ” said Rachel Grayless, a parent in Tenino, Thurston County.
Grayless and others began digging into information on community placements and grew concerned by gaps.
Each Department of Corrections investigation of a placement lists schools, churches, bars, bus stops, parks and playgrounds near the home. But the inspection for an Enumclaw placement listed some businesses in the wrong towns, and the closest school wasn’t listed at all, Grayless said.
“When we are not being informed about known risks that the government is putting into our community, it is challenging to trust the government,” she said.
When asked about the inspection reports, Rachel Ericson, a Department of Corrections spokesperson, said, “To our knowledge our reports have been accurate.”
Cathy Dahlquist, a former state lawmaker and president of Save Our Children Enumclaw, a group formed to oppose placements, said a lack of trust in DSHS makes it difficult for neighbors living near supervised homes to feel safe.
“Our biggest concern is we don’t have any metrics,” she said. The public doesn’t know “whether the treatment program is actually working or not.”
Tyler Hemstreet, a spokesperson for the Special Commitment Center, said,
“There have been no hands-on offenses while people have been on LRA” in community housing.
“The evidence is just stacking up”
After the Department of Corrections inspected a Grace and Hope Adult Family Home in Tacoma in 2021 for a new resident, it warned DSHS and courts for the fourth time that the home might not be a good fit. “The DOC is aware of several incidences where residents have been potentially placed at risk of violating their conditions due to Grace and Hope staff errors.”
Soon after moving in, the new resident was written up for violating court conditions that included speaking to a child at a bowling alley. Another resident was found with inappropriate images of children.
As a licensed adult family home, Grace and Hope has been cited for violating numerous state licensing requirements and for failing to run background checks on its staff, which DSHS officials knew before signing the contract.
Staff failed to properly administer medication and did not keep incident logs. One resident’s chart indicated they should be swallowing pills, even though they were on a feeding tube.
Still, state leadership has consistently not prevented problems or provided necessary care, records show. At DSHS’ two state-run facilities, in King and Pierce counties, residents have been able to obtain contraband including cigarettes, drugs and child sexual abuse materials. Numerous floppy disks labeled “kid pictures” were discovered in June in the King County facility. During a room search, a resident admitted he had the disks and turned them over to staff, saying he’d had them for years.
Residents have also been found “cultivating a predatory relationship” with more vulnerable residents and female staff, according to incident reports. And, just as at group homes, state-run facilities have failed to prevent residents from being in the community without court-ordered supervision.
DSHS’ vision for the future of the Special Commitment Center program lies in significantly expanding the number of state-run facilities to other counties, but the agency has been unable to secure new sites.
The Sex Offender Policy Board told the Legislature that when the King County location opened in 2005 it was described as “one of the most despised public projects in recent local memory.” The board said in 2020 that it expects finding a new location to break ground “will be just as controversial.”
The cost of housing all civilly committed people, on or off McNeil Island, has soared nearly 50% in the past five years. Housing in the community remains the cheapest bed option within the program, accounting for $8.8 million of the Special Commitment Center’s $81 million budget for fiscal year 2024. But costs have varied widely, from $775 to more than $26,000 per person per month, depending on the home and care or supervision needs, according to a 2022 state-commissioned study.
Seven housing providers last year wrote to DSHS that they are unwilling to allow the agency unfettered access to their properties without a contract and said the agency has not offered contracts “sufficient to include this level of control over our private properties.”
While Devos said last year that contracts would save the state money, records indicate otherwise. DSHS did not make Devos available for an interview for this article.
In the past decade, DSHS spent at least $9.1 million on contracted placements compared with $15 million paid to uncontracted housing providers, according to agency financial documents analyzed by The Times. Yet the uncontracted homes have served more than twice as many residents as the contracted homes.
DSHS agreed to pay one provider more than $30,000 per month per bed, which included nursing and supervision costs, according to a state contract reviewed by The Times. It was one of the costliest community placements, with or without a state contract.
Records of the agency’s accounting show significant gaps, making spending difficult to track, according to a Seattle Times review of 10 years of financial records. Nearly $12 million in expenses paid in the past decade are categorized as “not specified,” “unknown” or “other” and have no vendor name or number associated with the expense.
The Special Commitment Center’s finances have not been independently audited for over a decade. Previous audits found that the agency was overpaying employees, paid a contractor who never performed services and violated state contracting laws.
“I worked really hard on 5163 (the 2021 bill) to put DSHS in charge because we anticipated they would do better. They have not done a good job,” said Sonja Hardenbrook, a longtime defense attorney for civilly committed individuals in Washington.
Now, she said, “the best thing about the whole system are the parts the Special Commitment Center doesn’t control. The parts they control are horrid, and the evidence is just stacking up.”
Failing their own measure of success
Without external oversight or accreditation, Devos said last year, the Special Commitment Center measures success by how well residents do in their community placements.
By its own measure, though, the state is failing.
Rather than succeeding in their placements, people who are sent to live in group homes are informally returned to the island nearly half of the time, according to a Seattle Times analysis of state data. DSHS, the Department of Corrections or a treatment provider can recommend a return.
Being returned to the island “is very damaging,” said Krishan Hansen, a sex offender treatment provider for several McNeil Island residents. “There is limited opportunity for them to act differently, for appropriate sexualization, for appropriate relationship development.”
A community placement can be a first step in learning to live a normal life, and when that is pulled away, he said, “All the progress that is made can quickly be undone.”
When civilly committed individuals have access to stable housing and community support, they are less likely to reoffend in a sexual or nonsexual manner, according to a 2020 study of California’s sexually violent predator laws.
Only a court can officially revoke a resident’s right to be housed in the community, but DSHS says it can remove people for any reason, however minor.
Since DSHS was given more control over release planning by the Legislature in 2021, the agency and the Department of Corrections have returned an increasing number of people to the island, either for violating court-ordered conditions or for unrelated issues ranging from criminal conduct by landlords or other residents to minor mental health episodes, records show.
In the past four years, 86 people were returned to the island, a 36% increase over the number returned in the four years prior.
DSHS also cannot measure success or failure of its program after residents are unconditionally released from commitment because the state does not track where they go or what they do. A Seattle Times investigation last year based on state, court and criminal records found that 1 in 4 people who have been released from civil commitment have gone on to commit new crimes, including driving violations, failing to register as a sex offender and rape.
At Tacoma home, residents “come and go as they please”
At a small gray apartment building in central Tacoma, only an alley and a chain-link fence divide the building from a playground and two low-income housing complexes with space for up to 68 families, according to an inspection report.
For years, Department of Corrections officers have said these apartments were less than ideal for people on conditional release from McNeil Island.
Residents are able to “come and go as they please” with no one to monitor their activities, a corrections officer wrote in an inspection report. The building’s owner “has no means of verifying what’s going on.” By law, it’s up to state officials, not the landlord, to monitor residents.
Yet it has been a common placement for people from the island. DSHS told the Legislature in 2023 it was hoping to enter into a contract with the provider, who has multiple properties, but said recently there were concerns one of the homes was not quite 500 feet away from a school. The state has paid the provider at least $680,000 since 2016.
Emergency responders have been called to the building 37 times in the past five years, including to provide medical and psychiatric aid, for reports of a suspicious person and for a suicide attempt. One resident, who had been convicted twice of raping children before his commitment, was returned to McNeil Island after showing a kitten to children in the parking lot, violating his court conditions. Some group homes have had more than 70 emergency calls in the five-year period.
The Seattle Times found such warnings are regularly raised in Department of Corrections inspection reports yet are often overlooked or ignored by DSHS and courts.
When warnings have gone unheeded, residents have been able to have contact with minors, travel in the community without chaperones, use unapproved cellphones and view sexually explicit videos.
DSHS’ Bovenkamp said, “It’s my understanding the courts make the decisions on the … placements. That’s not a decision DSHS gets to make.”
But retired Judge Jeanette Dalton, who handled civil commitment cases in Kitsap County, said if DSHS “felt an individual was too dangerous to be released, then they have the opportunity to persuade a judge to that effect. We don’t make decisions willy-nilly.”
While a judge has the authority to approve or deny a placement, this is based entirely on the information submitted by state agencies and attorneys, Dalton said.
Thurston County Judge Carol Murphy said, “I don’t think I have ever gone to and observed what an LRA looks like before ordering it. So I rely on what the parties put in their pleadings.”
For anyone labeled and required to register as a sex offender, all of this is complicated by the scarcity of housing and difficulty of finding a willing landlord. Homes have been targeted for violence. In 2005 and 2012, four men were shot at their homes after being identified through sex offender registries.
Still, in 2018, six out of seven units at the Tacoma apartment building were rented to men who had committed sex offenses and were supervised by the Department of Corrections. The seventh was rented by a working mother with three girls under age 6, according to inspection reports. (The mother was aware of her neighbors’ affiliation with McNeil Island and did not have a problem with it, the reports said.)
It was also one of the last homes where Paul Harrell lived while still civilly committed. Harrell, whose case was examined in The Seattle Times’ investigation last year, was routinely able to drive by himself to unallowed locations and failed to comply with court-ordered monitoring. After he was unconditionally released and left the state, he attempted to rape a 74-year-old Maryland woman.
When a corrections officer investigated the Tacoma apartment building again in 2021 for another McNeil Island resident, they noted “elevated levels of prostitution and drug activity” and concerns about the resident’s behavior on the island. “It makes living in this area a high-risk situation,” the officer wrote.
The family of a child the man molested asked that he not be released to Tacoma, where their child, now an adult, lived.
“As parents we don’t want our child now — adult or not — to face the potential of new or renewed trauma that might ensue” from a chance encounter, the family wrote to the state.
“What is acceptable risk for the children of the Tacoma community vs. the freedom of an individual who has a strong likelihood of re-offending,” they wrote. “Will there be a next victim?”
The resident moved in soon after.
“They all agree it’s broken”
For years, lawmakers, state officials, attorneys and other stakeholders have grappled with how to reform the Special Commitment Center’s community housing program.
“The system currently isn’t working in the way that the public expects it to, and it certainly does not elicit public confidence,” said Rep. Mari Leavitt, D-University Place, who introduced a bill that passed the House in March and the Senate this month and now awaits the governor’s signature.
The bill expands the office of the attorney general’s ability to obtain personal records it can use to inform a new sexual civil commitment case. It also stops people from earning parole credit while in the Special Commitment Center program.
Most lawmakers involved in sexual civil commitment legislation acknowledged the handful of bills introduced this year were just a piece of the larger issues that need to be addressed. None of the proposals would have created independent oversight or addressed the fundamental questions of whether the program is ultimately improving public safety or resident rehabilitation.
Leavitt’s bill was among several supported by DSHS and the attorney general that, if passed as written, would have given the state unprecedented control over community housing off the island.
But as Leavitt’s bill advanced, DSHS’ push for more control was stripped out. The original version gave the agency unilateral authority to decide where a resident is housed, to prevent intervention by defense counsel and eliminate uncontracted housing.
“DSHS just wants to commandeer the whole process,” said Rep. Roger Goodman, D-Kirkland, chair of the House Community Safety Committee, who opposed the proposal along with prosecutors and defense attorneys. “DSHS frankly has not done such a good job.”
Leavitt’s revised bill adds only piecemeal amendments to parts of sexual civil commitment law.
“This is a very, very difficult topic to legislate,” Goodman said. “You can have all the most well-intended laws in place, but McNeil Island doesn’t have enough staff. That makes it difficult to implement any reform or to assess whether we are doing well enough now.”
Rep. Dan Griffey, R-Allyn, who co-sponsored a bill supported by DSHS, said stakeholders are often at odds over how to fix the system. His bill failed to advance earlier this session, but he intends to reintroduce it next year.
“They all agree it’s broken,” Griffey said. “There is a problem. There is just significant disagreement on what the solution is.”
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