By Lauren Knoth-Peterson

Lawmakers are tasked with making decisions about important policy changes. When making these decisions, lawmakers consult a variety of information including discussions with key stakeholders, consideration of public testimony, and analysis of available data. Understanding the potential impacts of a policy change, good or bad, is necessary to make informed policy decisions. Increasingly, lawmakers have access to a variety of impact statements that serve to predict the likely effects of policy changes such as financial impact statements and health impact statements. This report provides an overview of a new type of impact statement – Racial and Ethnic Impact Statements (REISs) – which seek to anticipate the potential impacts of policy changes on different racial and ethnic groups. This report begins with a discussion of the purpose and use of REISs and an overview of the

different characteristics of the processes for producing REISs as implemented in other states. The report then discusses previous work regarding the use of REISs in Washington and provides a look at historical trends of disproportionality in arrests, convictions, and incarceration in Washington. This report concludes with an outline of the processes that the Public Safety Policy and Research Center (PSPRC) intends to use to begin producing REISs for proposed legislation involving criminal justice reforms starting in the 2025 Legislative Session as a service for the Sentencing Guidelines Commission (SGC). Currently, the production of REIS for the legislative session will be limited to the available capacity of the PSPRC. We expect that, in the first year, we will be able to produce statements for 3-5 legislative proposals per legislative session.

Olympia, WA: Washington State Office of Financial Management, Public Safety Policy & Research Center. 2025. 22p.