Racial and Ethnic Impact Statements (REIS) provide information related to the potential impacts of a policy change on individuals from different racial and/or ethnic backgrounds. The purpose of these statements is to provide additional information to policymakers to aid in identifying potential unwanted disparities in the criminal justice system. This report provides information the potential impacts of House Bill (HB) 1178: Concerning Sentencing Enhancements, introduced in the 2025 Washington State Legislature.

Lawmakers are tasked with making decisions about important policy changes. When making these decisions, lawmakers consult a variety of information including discussions with key stakeholders, consideration of public testimony, and analysis of available data. Understanding the potential impacts of a policy change, good or bad, is necessary to make informed policy decisions. Increasingly, lawmakers have access to a variety of impact statements that serve to predict the likely effects of policy changes such as financial impact statements and health impact statements. This report provides an overview of a new type of impact statement – Racial and Ethnic Impact Statements (REISs) – which seek to anticipate the potential impacts of policy changes on different racial and ethnic groups. This report begins with a discussion of the purpose and use of REISs and an overview of the different characteristics of the processes for producing REISs as implemented in other states. The report then discusses previous work regarding the use of REISs in Washington and provides a look at historical trends of disproportionality in arrests, convictions, and incarceration in Washington. This report concludes with an outline of the processes that the Public Safety Policy and Research Center (PSPRC) intends to use to begin producing REISs for proposed legislation involving criminal justice reforms starting in the 2025 Legislative Session as a service for the Sentencing Guidelines Commission (SGC).

The global 2020 coronavirus pandemic has had an unprecedented impact on the operations and actions of local, state, and national governments across all areas of criminal justice. The unique characteristics of this pandemic trend toward short- and long-term consequences as significant changes to criminal justice and legal outcomes. To respond to these impacts, the Washington Statistical Analysis Center (SAC) applied for and received the 2022 State Justice Statistics (SJS) grant from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). The SAC sought the grant to increase access to statistical data and create new metrics and indicators to enhance the integrated criminal justice database — the Justice Data Warehouse (JDW) — in efforts to strategically and analytically evaluate the pandemic’s impacts in criminal justice. Through this grant, the Washington SAC leveraged and built upon the JDW to expand the data variables by creating COVID-19 metrics and indicators to help assess and account for COVID-19 impacts in the criminal justice and legal system.

Examines the relationship between the type of sentence received for domestic violence and recidivism

Provides statewide data by county on respondents’ awareness of serious crimes committed in their neighborhoods in 2006

This project aims to connect data from multiple agencies to detail the relationship between arrests, court cases, and corrections.

This project endeavors to assess disparities in the criminal justice system by each decision point.

Provides data regarding race, ethnicity, age, and sentences of juveniles who were tried as adults and those who were tried in juvenile court 

Explores how many juvenile offenders who were sentenced as adults had previous contact with the foster care system

This report reviews disparities in sex offender sentencing in Washington state using a Quantile Regression.