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King County’s four-year-old, $200 million Judge Patricia H. Clark Children and Family Justice Center on 12th Ave will remain open through and beyond a promised 2025 deadline as officials pursue establishing “a network of diverse community care homes” in a quest to change how Seattle moves forward on youth detention and addressing its disproportionate impact on communities of color.
King County Executive Dow Constantine’s office is pursuing only three of six recommendations from an advisory council formed to examine the “future of secure juvenile detention” and what changes should be made at the relatively new youth jail facility at 12th and Alder. None of the recommendations currently being pursued by Constantine’s office, according to a final report from the advisory council, include a 2025 end of secure detention at the facility.
Black kids continue to be disproportionately detained in King County, making up about half of the population housed at the facility or on home detention.
The new youth jail opened in the winter of 2020 with 16-cell living halls designed to look like dorms but secured for incarceration with electronic locks and state of the art surveillance systems, new classrooms, and an expanded visitation areas where youth offenders can meet with family and lawyers. There is a Merit Hall where detained kids can earn TV time and officials repurposed an “interview room” as a video game room. And there are courtrooms where legal proceedings can be carried out.
“As we move toward zero youth detention, how we can repurpose space?” one official said at the time. “As our population decreases, we can move our secure perimeter.”
The 2025 goal toward “zero youth detention” was born out of the 2020 Black Lives Matter Protests in Seattle and followed years of protest against the construction of the new youth jail facility about a block south of Seattle University.
“Today I commit King County to converting the remaining youth detention units at the CFJC to other uses as quickly as possible, and no later than 2025,” Constantine said that summer in a series of updates on social media in response to a leaked memo on the plan. “I will also be proposing additional investments to help create healthy and community-based solutions that address the needs of youth & families in King County,” Constantine said.
Critics of potential changes point to a changing criminal landscape. “In 2023, there were 177 violent felonies committed by juveniles, including murder, gun violence, drive-by shootings, domestic violent, rape, and residential burglary. Juvenile violent felony filings are up 57% from 2022, and up a shocking 146% from 2021,” reads a press release from King County Councilmember Reagan Dunn who opposes the end of secure detention by the county.
And the Constantine administration has backed off the 2025 timeline. In the report on the advisory council’s recommendations required under a King County proviso on youth justice spending, the executive’s office is, instead, pursuing three initiatives hoped to change the way the county handles youth incarceration while maintaining the youth jail.
The first recommendation being pursued is providing more funding and resources for programs supporting kids when they leave the jail and “return home to their
families or are placed in kinship care with extended family members.”
A second is to boost educational and social programs and facilities that provide “culturally responsive and linguistically relevant, developmentally appropriate, and youth-and family-centered supports that address their identified needs.”
The most concrete would be an initiative to “create, contract, and provide oversight to a network of diverse community care homes where youth would stay while their court case proceeds if they are unable to go home because of safety concerns.”
The report does not include details of how soon the recommendations can be implemented.
In the meantime, King County kids continue to be incarcerated without a path to “zero youth detention.” More than 40 juveniles are typically being held in secure or standard detention, on electronic home detention, or in group care in King County at any given time.
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“Black kids continue to be disproportionately detained in King County, making up about half of the population housed at the facility or on home detention.”
The passive language here is insane. You know male kids tend to be disproportionately detaining King County making up about 90% of the population house at the facility or on home detention. Anybody outraged about that too? Are we going to make plans to even out that too?
Doesn’t meet the narrative. What’s so weird is if you don’t do the crimes, you don’t get in trouble with law enforcement – regardless of demographic.
The short answer to your question is that boys and men simply commit more crime and resort more often to violence than girls and women. This is true worldwide, in every nation and culture, for a variety of deep-seated reasons (including physiological ones) that no local jurisdiction can do much to change. But the disproportionate punishment of people of color (particularly Blacks) vs. whites for similar behavior is the result of a long series of deliberate policy choices and can be rectified, or at least mitigated, at the local level. I hope that helps.
Raze it for housing
It’s already housing. Just because you don’t like the sort of housing…
Paradoxically it appears to provide much better conditions than most of seattle public schools.
That’s a foul comment. My child goes to Garfield which is an outstanding school. Please return to Mercer Island where you will eventually expire from boredom.
Bullet holes in the windows there
Lol
that’ll go well I’m sure
The alternative to this being that we are going to send more children to adult lockup where we will protect them by putting them into solitary confinement?
Obviously the humane option.
Those “community-based options”, i.e. privately operated jails?
This translates into far fewer options for monitoring how these kid’s rights are being violated. I am sure when you add up the total costs it will be cheaper to operate.
Justin, could you be more specific about what you’re saying in the last paragraph of this story? It’s clear that the county has not sufficiently developed the alternatives to detention at this facility, but that kind of incarceration is very different from house arrest or group care. Do you know how many kids are typically in each? For the whole county, spread across those categories, 40 (or “over 40”) seems pretty low, actually!
Unfortunately, there is no serious theory of change that will quickly lead to zero youths out of about 450,000 in the county ever committing violent crimes. Unfortunately, a disproportionate percentage of teenagers arrested for violent crimes are people of color. Unfortunately, some teenage violent offenders don’t have a home situation that allows for some assurance they’ll stay out of trouble, show up to court, etc. Where should they go, so that they are prevented from further violence until their day in court?
My point is, how many are actually in detention at the youth jail at any given time? What are they plausibly charged with doing, and what was the reason they weren’t released to a guardian? The answers to these questions might show that incarceration is being overused, but they might also show that it’s being used only as much as necessary given individual circumstances, or something in between. The specifics matter (or at least they should!), so can you give more detail?
Can’t avoid the reality that some juveniles have demonstrated violent compulsions and reactivity, and the community does need physical protection from them. Should they be in insecure gentle group housing, sent home with an ankle bracelet, or slammed into adult jail? No. Hence juvie lockup. Can’t get around it. Should it be humane? Yes. Should it provide as much as possible rehabilitation, substance abuse treatment, educational remediation, counseling, family assistance? Yes.
The only sure way to reduce the disproportionate presence in incarceration of ethnic minorities is to reduce American culture’s racism and economic inequality. It’s more about economic class than race than we’ll admit in this Reagan Grifter’s Paradise. Look at the wealth around you. Who has it?
Some youth commit heinous crimes, so there will ALWAYS be a need for juvenile detention. To think otherwise is just naive.
There will always be evil people in the world, and they don’t just wake up one day at age 42 and become evil. They start young. And they need to be removed from society.
I’m curious about the constant mention that a disproportionate number of those incarcerated are black. That’s the reason why they want to eliminate juvenile hall? If this wasn’t the case would they leave it as is?
What could go wrong? Haven’t we done enough non-enforcement and non-consequences here to see what happens? I suppose we won’t learn until it gets even worse.
I spent my entire adult life until the last 4 years as a progressive, but I am throwing in the towel because progressives have demonstrated that don’t have the political will to govern. The progressive social experiment has failed. Dow should resign over this $200,000,000 debacle. Why did he build the juvenile detention facility here rather than at a much cheaper site outside the city? Why wasn’t this massive centralized site used for housing? Why did he propose to abolish juvenile detention right after it was finished? What is the alternative for protecting the community from violent offenders that doesn’t involve magical thinking?