This bill creates a new four-year pilot program by adding a section to chapter 72.09 RCW. The Department of Corrections is required to run the pilot at the Washington State Penitentiary east complex to improve communication between correctional officers, DOC staff, and incarcerated individuals and to reduce recidivism. The department must select “contact officers” to act as mentors and coaches, train correctional officers in “dynamic security tactics,” allow certain officers to receive specialized competency-based individual and team crisis de-escalation training, and pursue facility and program improvements (examples listed include staff decompression rooms and painting and planting programs). The department secretary must adopt any rules and policies needed to implement the section. The bill establishes reporting and time limits: the department must report annually by December 1 to the governor and the legislature in compliance with RCW 43.01.036 on participation and project summaries, patterns and effects on behaviors and participation, differential outcomes comparing participants and nonparticipants, and recidivism outcomes for participants (including arrests, charges, and convictions). The added section is set to expire on June 30, 2030. This is an administrative and procedural change establishing a pilot program and reporting duties; it does not create a new crime or change penalties. Important details are not provided in the extracted text: the pilot’s start date, funding or appropriation, eligibility or selection criteria for contact officers or incarcerated participants, specific curriculum or standards for the trainings, and other implementation, performance metric, or oversight details.

If enacted, the Department of Corrections would run a four-year pilot at the Washington State Penitentiary east complex that assigns selected correctional officers to new mentoring roles, provides staff training in relationship-focused "dynamic security" and crisis de-escalation, and makes on-site improvements such as staff decompression rooms and painting/planting projects. DOC leadership would need to create rules, pick and train contact officers, carry out facility changes, and deliver annual reports by December 1 to the governor and legislature on participation, behavior measures, and recidivism; the pilot is set to expire June 30, 2030. These actions will increase DOC administrative work and create additional training and facilities costs, and correctional officers chosen for the program will assume ongoing mentoring responsibilities while incarcerated people at the east complex would experience different day-to-day interactions and programming. Who is most affected are DOC administrators (more rulemaking, reporting, and implementation duties), correctional officers selected as contact officers (new duties and training), and incarcerated individuals at the east complex (subject to participation). Important details are missing from the text provided—there is no start date, no identified funding or appropriation, no eligibility or selection criteria for participants, and no detailed training standards—so the timing, scale, and true cost or effectiveness of the pilot are uncertain and could delay or limit implementation.