When Auburn Mayor Nancy Backus learned that Kevin Coe, once convicted of a series of rapes in Spokane, had been moved into her city, she had the same questions many residents did: why weren’t we notified?

For the Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS), the move was administrative. For the public, it felt like a secret. The difference lies in how Washington classifies Coe—not as a former prisoner, but as a “civilly committed resident.“

The phrase sounds technical, but it marks one of the most complicated intersections in state law. It describes a system designed to treat people while still confining them, a structure that exists halfway between the criminal and medical worlds.


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McNeil Island: The Place Where Language and Policy Converge

McNeil Island, in south Puget Sound, is where this system lives both literally and symbolically. Once a federal and state prison, it became the Special Commitment Center in the late 1980s. The facility still has the features of its past: fences, guard towers, controlled movement, and a ferry that connects it to the mainland.

When Washington converted McNeil Island, it didn’t just change a building; it changed the vocabulary of punishment. Words like “custody,” “sentence,” and “offender” became “care,” “treatment,” and “resident.” Inside, the people confined there are not called inmates but patients. The state defines the site as a hospital, even though nearly everything about it resembles a prison.


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How Civil Commitment Works

Civil commitment was established by Washington’s Legislature in 1990, following public pressure after a series of violent sexual assaults. The law allows the state to keep holding someone after their prison term ends if a court finds they have a mental disorder that makes them likely to reoffend.

It is not a criminal sentence but a civil order. The people confined are technically not being punished, though they can remain locked up for decades. Every year, they have the right to a review and can petition for conditional release through what’s known as a “least restrictive alternative.” Cue one-way transportation to Auburn.

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The Politics of Safety and Language

Civil commitment exists because no system can fully resolve the tension between fear and rehabilitation.
Our public wants to say we believe in treatment but cannot afford to believe entirely in recovery.

By the nature of Coe’s release, the court had determined that he no longer met the legal threshold of posing a danger to the public. Accordingly, statutory requirements for community notification did not apply as they would for a release from Department of Corrections custody. Yet the response among local officials and residents revealed how little public awareness exists around the framework of civil commitment. The system does not depend on secrecy but on inattention; McNeil Island and its legal authority operate in plain view, yet remain peripheral to public consciousness. Because few outside the involved agencies understand its structure or purpose, the system’s assumptions about risk and confinement persist largely unquestioned.

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