Two years ago, a political firestorm hit Enumclaw as residents rallied against the state and the opening of a home for a “high-level sex offenders.”

That struggle, and the struggle of other communities dealing with similar issues, is now on the big screen — and is coming to The Chalet Theatre on March 4 at 6:30 p.m. The screening of the movie, “The House”, is free.

The award-wining film was directed by Saint Martins University business instructor Troy Kirby, and features both Enumclaw residents and law experts as well as experts in the field of sex offender incarceration and treatment — he said the film takes no sides.

“That never gets anything done,” he said in a recent interview.

That said, “There is a pattern of [the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services and the Department of Corrections] that is pretty wild,” he continued, alleging a lack of communication and transparency with the public, which included walking out during a public meeting in Poulsbo back in 2019.

DSHS spokesperson Jim Mumford said that he could not speak to the contents of the movie or previous events back in 2019, but said the department is committed to transparency and public service.

“What I can speak to is DSHS’s commitment to transparency and public service. This agency has a robust process in place to ensure we work closely with communities when siting new facilities, including behavioral health, assisted living and outpatient treatment centers,” he said. One example of our commitment to transparency can be found in the efforts to reach out to legislators, including hosting several of them at the Special Commitment Center in recent years to show them first hand the work that happens there.

ENUMCLAW AND BEYOND

Here’s a summary of what happened in Enumclaw.

In early 2023, the DSHS opened what’s known as an Less Restrictive Alternative home for a McNeil Island Special Commitment Center resident who was given leave from the island. The LRA, called Garden House, was located off SR 167, outside city limits.

The public caught wind quickly despite the lack of requirements for the state to notify communities that a sex offender is being relocated to its area — which was a large complaint — and a large crowd showed up at a Feb. 9 meeting to hear from DSHS and the DOC about special commitment laws, the LRA, security, and more.

A grassroots group, Save Our Children — Enumclaw, organized protests against the LRA and raise money for a legal fund to challenge the legality if its location.

But before any lawsuit was filed, the resident of Garden House was moved back to McNeil Island, and Garden House has remained empty of sex offenders since.

Kirby though his project would just be a short about the issues in Enumclaw, Pouslbo, and Tenino, but the more he dug, the more the project snowballed into a film-length feature that covers not just the cities’ issues, but the history of sex offenders, the legal system they face, and the evolution of extra-judicial special commitment and sex offender treatment on McNeil Island.

“There’s a lot of stuff that goes into it,” he said. “It’s a big film.”

If there was a running theme in these incidents, he continued, is that if the government is not transparent to communities — on purpose or no — communities will dig

“When you lie to citizens and citizens, and citizens find they can access the records, everything changes,” Kirby said. “Everything goes out the door.”

“The House” has won several independent film festival awards, including “best documentary” at the Roco Rancho Film Festival.

“That was quite the film,” film festival organizer John Roco said in a recent interview; Roco became familiar with violent juvenile sex offender cases when he interned at the former Maple Lane Juvenile Detention Center in Chelalis in the 1990s for his Masters degree in counseling psychology. “I knew that Washington State was at the forefront of treatment of predators… but he really went into it, in terms of the degree to which Washington State is involved in other states… but also the degree to which, with these LRAs and community facilities, that people are being endangered with unsupervised individuals who have served their prison time, but are now… being placed in the community basically in a facility that has extremely little supervision.”

Kirby thanked The Chalet for agreeing to show the film for free as a public service for the community.

“He should get recognized more than I do,” he said.

Courier-Herald editor Ray Miller-Still is featured in the film.

To watch a trailer of “The House”, go to youtube.com/watch?v=wqbPZPPJQVE.

FILM SYNOPSIS

Rural small town America becomes a flashpoint for national conversations on private prisons, sex offender recidivism and community safety. Private adult group home operators start signing state contracts to house McNeil Island’s notorious “worst of the worst” sexually violent predators. The CEOs ignore security protocols such as bad GPS signals, shrug off needs for cameras or alarms, and lack detention authority. The state agencies site these houses near playgrounds, bus stops and schools, shrugging off conflicts of interest cash cow schemes where each adult family home can earn up to $1 million dollars annually for housing a sexually violent predator.

Despite a local public outcry, state officials evade community notification laws, hide behind third-party contracts, fabricate death threats to avoid accountability or simply walk out of meetings with residents altogether. The 2023 rural communities faced with these private LRAs quickly inform themselves of the dangers, coordinating information between each group, in an effort to halt state agencies from illegally conducting housing with greedy private operators and without community notification.

This film examines the state of Washington’s 1990 Community Protection Act, which has since affected 28 state laws on civil commitment and secured an 8-1 U.S. Supreme Court decision. All sparking from the 1988 murder of a young woman by a sexual psychopath of unmonitored state supervision that sparked a movement of alarmed parents across the state.

The film also looks at the 2004 fight to end the state’s “Talk & Walk” practice of giving first-time child molesters a maximum of six months in jail, along with the dumping ground of sexually violent predators in Spokane, Washington, where some of the most incurable deviants include the state’s sole female SVP, Laura McCollum.