Secure, Washington - by David Lloyd Atkinson (Paperback)

About the Book

Crime.
Homelessness.
Drug and alcohol addiction.
Severely mentally ill people with no support, walking our streets.

Is it folly to entrust elected public officials with the job of devising solutions that actually work?

Book Synopsis

The year is 2039, and as the Independence Day holiday approaches, George Stoltz (best-selling author of the Those Who Made it Happen books) is given a suggestion by his agent for a new entry into that series. As it so happens, July 4th will also mark the tenth anniversary of the opening of Secure, Washington--a hybrid (part prison/part conventional) city owned and operated by the state to permanently house the worst of its misfit citizens: repeat criminal convicts, people who suffer from severe mental illness who lack any means of support, and the homeless (only those who volunteer to live there).
The story begins in late 2018, with the MM Group--which began as a coffee klatch--developing and finally putting forth a citizen's initiative to deal with misfits. I-1719 went on to earn overwhelming approval (76%) by the voters, culminating in the construction of Secure. The state's 282nd city ended up being built on the 1,800-acre site of an abandoned nuclear power plant, which ironically was terminated due to another successful citizen's initiative that passed in 1981.
Mr. Stoltz creates a fascinating portrait of this unique city through numerous interviews, along with personal observations from his unprecedented week-long stay inside Secure. He also provides an eye-opening before/after analysis of what Seattle and the rest of the Puget Sound region look like now that 23,901 misfits (Secure's population during George's stay) have been removed from normal society, with untold numbers of additional misfits choosing to relocate out of state.

About the Author

David Lloyd Atkinson was born on Seattle's Capitol Hill in late 1953, and lived his entire life in the greater Puget Sound region until 2016, when he and his wife Amy moved to Clallam County on the Olympic Peninsula. While the book is fictional, his personal story is told by several of the characters. He lost his left leg and part of his lung to sarcoma cancer in 2018-2019. His earlier unpublished book The Yonder Years--Two People, Two Motorhomes, and Two Years of Travel, Discovery, and Adventure (Volumes 1 through 3) tells the story through text and photos about David, Amy, and their cat Buzzie's adventure throughout the United States between 2014 and 2016 (PDF files of each volume are available at no charge upon request).

Today, David, Amy, and their two cats Lucy and Rita live between the coastal cities of Sequim and Port Angeles.