Brothers to Brothers executive director recounts tour of the Whatcom County Jail and outlines future priorities.
Ed.: The essays, analyses and opinions presented as Community Voices express the perspectives of their authors on topics of interest and importance to the community and are not intended to reflect perspectives on behalf of Salish Current.
In 2023 I took a formal tour of the Whatcom County Jail.
I want to tell you what I saw. What I smelled. What I felt standing inside that building. Because everything that’s wrong with how this county is about to spend your tax money starts right there.
The jail is a long concrete building. No softness anywhere. No curves. No color. Nothing that suggests human beings live inside it. Just a shotgun corridor of concrete and metal that keeps going. The kind of place that reminds your body, not your mind, your body, that you are contained.
The recreation yard is a metal cage. Concrete with just enough of a gap at the top to let some light fall in. Not warmth. Not air. Just light. Enough to remind you the outside world still exists somewhere. But it’s not touchable.
It smelled of urine.
The jail was beyond full. People were being booked and released not because they were cleared, but because there was physically nowhere to put them. Others were still sitting there, not sentenced, just waiting. In that smell. In that corridor that goes nowhere.
Most of the people inside were visibly struggling. Addiction. Mental illness. The kind of pain that doesn’t hide itself when there’s nowhere to go.
I asked one of the officers what was the most frustrating part of the job. He didn’t hesitate. He said they didn’t have the right training and resources to actually help anyone.
That jail is not an accident of architecture. It is a philosophical argument manifested into the physical. Hard. Unforgiving. Designed to contain. Never to heal.
That jail sits on occupied land. The Lummi Nation and the Nooksack people were here long before any of this concrete was poured. They built entire ways of living on this land, ways of caring for each other and for the earth, rooted in the understanding that the health of a people and the health of the land are the same thing.
Today, they are disproportionately represented in that jail. On their own land. Behind concrete and metal. With nothing inside to help anyone.
We built a cage on stolen ground, and we keep filling it with the people we stole from.
I am an Afro American man. This country has taken from our culture and sold it back to the world. But taking from our culture and knowing our people are two very different things. What this country has done, consistently, efficiently, at enormous scale, is lock us up.
The Lummi and Nooksack people know this feeling. Different history. Same concrete. Same system deciding that their bodies were problems to be managed rather than lives to be supported.
And recently, the Supreme Court gutted what remained of the Voting Rights Act. An hour after the decision came down, Florida was already redrawing its maps. The same system that filled that jail with Black and brown and Indigenous bodies is now making it harder for those same communities to vote out the people and systems that keep building more jails.
The colonialist project is not past tense. It is present tense. It is working exactly as it was designed.
Whatcom County voters passed a tax in 2023 with a written, public promise, 50% of the revenue going toward behavioral health, diversion programs and the infrastructure that keeps people out of that building in the first place. That was the deal. That’s what finally got it passed after voters said no twice before.
Then March 2026 came. The county presented four budget scenarios. Four chances to honor what they promised.
Every single one overspent on incarceration and gutted the services.
They want to build a newer version of what I walked through. Bigger. More modern. Still on occupied land. Still concrete. Still no softness. Still no resources to help anyone.
That is the playbook. It has always been the playbook. Make the promise. Deliver the cage.
Maybe you cannot reform a system that was never designed to do what you’re asking it to do. Maybe it needs to look at the people whose land this actually is and ask what they knew about taking care of each other before we paved over all of it.
We have that chance right now. The vote has not happened yet. We can hold them to what they promised, services first, care first, people first.
CTS Whatcom has a petition. Fund services first. Sign it. Make noise. Hold them to it.
Because if we let them break this promise, we are not just losing a budget fight. We are choosing what we believe people deserve.
I already know what that choice looks like when it gets made without accountability.
I stood inside it.
It smelled like urine.
—By Erik McFrazier
Erik McFrazier is a true West Coast kid who first fell in love with Bellingham in 1994 and has been drawn back ever since. Originally from South Central Los Angeles, his journey took him through Seattle, over to Maui for a decade and finally back to Bellingham in 2017 with his family. He serves as executive director of Brothers to Brothers and as a member of the Whatcom Racial Equity Commission and was honored with the 2025 Whatcom Dispute Resolution Center’s Peacebuilder Award.