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The race to be Spokane County’s next elected prosecutor has narrowed to two names on the November 3 ballot, and the contest is less about personality than about a single, decades-old headache: what to do with an overcrowded county jail that has been over capacity since the 1990s.
Interim county prosecutor Preston McCollam faces independent challenger Danny Tarkenton in the general election, the Spokane Spokesman-Review reported September 21. Both are, as the paper noted, members of the same generation — a detail that made headlines mostly because it marks a departure from the office’s recent past, not because it says much about how either candidate would actually run it.
McCollam is not new to the seat. Spokane County commissioners voted 5-0 in September 2025 to name him interim prosecuting attorney after Larry Haskell resigned, following an earlier appointment as acting prosecutor that July, according to KHQ and the county’s own records. He was Haskell’s criminal division chief before that. Tarkenton, a Spokane native and recently admitted attorney, has worked in the prosecutor’s office as a deputy prosecuting attorney and, before that, as a student intern under a limited practice license. Both advanced out of the August primary — McCollam took just over half the vote, Tarkenton the rest — and because only two candidates filed, no one was eliminated.
What separates them is what they would do about the jail. Spokane County’s downtown detention facility was built in 1986 to hold 462 people. County records show it has been running well past that for most of its history, with an average daily population above 600 over the past 15 years and, by some recent counts, dozens to more than a hundred people over its rated capacity at a given time. The county’s own materials say the crowding is severe enough that some people booked into jail are released within hours simply because there is nowhere to hold them — a public-safety problem that cuts against the “lock them up” instinct the jail debate often invites.
McCollam’s platform leans toward capacity: he has backed a regional justice center concept that would pair a modernized jail with medical, behavioral-health and drug-treatment services on site, and says he would push the Legislature to reinstate felony-level drug possession charges, arguing the current gross-misdemeanor approach isn’t deterring the addiction-driven crime his office sees daily. Tarkenton has staked out the opposite ground, arguing that a countywide sales-tax increase — the same funding mechanism the county has floated before for jail construction — would do more good repairing the existing jail and funding community-based treatment than building something larger. Tarkenton has also argued the office could ease crowding simply by being more selective about which cases it chooses to prosecute, rather than assuming more beds are the fix.
It’s a real disagreement, not a talking-point exercise, because Spokane County voters have been here before. The county has floated a dedicated 0.2% sales tax for criminal-justice facilities in past election cycles, and commissioners have wrestled publicly with jail-expansion timelines for at least two years without landing on a final plan. Whoever wins in November inherits both the caseload and whatever a decades-long deferred-maintenance problem has become by January.
Neither campaign has released detailed costing for its jail approach, and this desk found no independent polling on the race as of this week. Tarkenton has picked up endorsements from labor and veterans’ groups; McCollam, a Republican, ran first through the county GOP’s nomination process last year before being seated. Whether either fact moves votes in a nonpartisan county row office remains to be seen — Spokane County has elected prosecutors from both parties’ backing over the past two decades.
What’s largely absent from the coverage so far, notably, is any detailed accounting from either candidate of what victims’ advocates or public defenders — chronically understaffed themselves in Spokane County courts — think a busier or leaner prosecutor’s office would mean for how quickly cases actually move. That’s the piece of this race voters won’t get from a campaign mailer.
Ballots go out in October ahead of the November 3 general election.
Sources: The Spokesman-Review, KHQ, Spokane County Elections
