MONROE – Jim Spalding’s new job is taking him back to a familiar place.
In the 1970s, he walked through the big yard at what was then called the Washington State Reformatory in Monroe as the deputy warden.
State prison officials on Friday announced that Spalding will return as the new superintendent of the Monroe Correctional Complex. He will supervise operations at the reformatory, plus the three other state prisons at Monroe.
The complex now houses more than 2,500 inmates, making Monroe the state’s largest lockup.
“I’m really looking forward to it,” said Spalding, 63, of Olympia. “I still have friends up there. There are people working (in Monroe) whose dads worked for me.”
Spalding, who starts his new job Sept. 27, replaces Gary Fleming, who has served as superintendent in Monroe for about a year. Fleming was assigned new duties at department headquarters in Olympia.
Spalding is coming out of semiretirement to take the Monroe job. He served 30 years with the state Corrections Department, helping design parts of the Monroe complex before taking a job as director of corrections in Idaho. He held that position for more than seven years, retiring in 2000.
Since then, Spalding has worked as a consultant for prisons in Arizona, Colorado, Washington and Wyoming. A recent assignment took him to Monroe, where he investigated the reasons for high turnover among the 1,100 staff members there. Part of the inquiry involved interviews with nearly everyone working at the Monroe prisons, he said.
Kit Bail, regional administrator for the Corrections Department, said Spalding was chosen to take over at Monroe because of his long experience dealing with challenging prison issues. The Monroe complex, like all of the state’s 15 prisons, is filled with more offenders than it was designed to hold.
“It’s time for a change,” Bail said of the decision to put a different person in charge.
Fleming, who has been with the Corrections Department for 30 years, will work as chief of classification and treatment for inmates in the state prison system.
The person occupying that job, James Thatcher, has been moved to a newly created position. Thatcher will oversee the state’s efforts to reduce prison crowding by contracting to place inmates in county jails and prisons in other states that have room to spare.
The state’s adult prisons are now filled to 110 percent of capacity. Snohomish County officials are exploring renting space to the state at its new jail now under construction in Everett as one way to defray the costs of its operation.
Reporter Scott North: 425-339-3431 or north@heraldnet.com.
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