Seattle’s King County’s Plan to Reform Juvenile Justice While Removing Racism From It

King County, WA (including Seattle) is one of

Photo by Susan Madden Lankford

Photo by Susan Madden Lankford

many areas which has a distinctive “school-to-prison pipeline,” with policies that propel youth of color from the halls of education to the cells of incarceration. Dilapidated conditions at the King County Family Justice Center eventually caught the attention of county officials, who determined the detention center building was beyond repair. In 2012 voters in King County approved a 9-year property tax increase to pay for the construction of a new facility expected to cost more than $210 million.

When “open house” meetings were held around the county a month after the vote, organizers mobilized intense opposition. They gathered a coalition of self-described youth-prison abolitionists, anti-racist organizers and clergy to fight the proposed “new youth jail.” Their efforts grew into three years of carefully orchestrated teach-ins on the harms of juvenile detention, fiery public forums, strategic protests and—later—meetings with county officials.

Much more than money was at stake. The movement’s most vocal participants were from Seattle’s communities of color, who anticipated it would be their children who would end up inside its walls. And with good reason: Black youth in King County currently make up 50.7 percent of incarcerated youth, despite being less than 12 percent of the youth population at large. All people of color combined make up fully three-quarters of the average daily juvenile population in King County.

Those numbers are worse than national averages, which show African Americans making up about 40 percent of the incarcerated youth population and about 13 percent of the population at large. This is what activists and scholars term “disproportionality”—the over-representation of youth of color within the justice system.

The No New Youth Jail Movement ultimately pressured the county to own up to its failure to create racial equity—and to change its policies in an effort to address the problem. Specifically, officials committed to do something seldom achieved by a major U.S. county: to not only decrease the total number of incarcerated youth, but to reduce the racial inequities of the system at the same time.

The end game of the movement was not only to halt the construction of a new detention center. Organizers also wanted to put a stop to racial disproportionality. At the beginning, they barely registered on local officials’ radar.

Pamela Jones, the director of the King County Youth Services Center, said:

I felt that we did our due diligence and received community input but there was obviously a vocal group who didn’t believe that to be the case.

The county’s proposal to replace the existing Youth Services Center with a new facility called the Children and Family Justice Center, which like its predecessor includes detention facilities, was approved in 2012, with groundbreaking scheduled for the spring of 2016. While outcry ensued during the proposal period, opposition heated up after the approval when several local anti-racist groups began to form the coalition that eventually became known as the No New Youth Jail Movement. Three groups funded by the Quaker affiliated American Friends Service Committee came to play pivotal roles: EPIC (Ending the Prison Industrial Complex); YUIR (Youth Undoing Institutional Racism) and European Dissent.

Over the past 18 months, organizing hundreds of people to flood the offices of elected officials with phone calls and letters and to gather at city and county meetings to speak out against the detention center. One such meeting saw them orchestrate a “people’s filibuster” which saw organizers flood the city council chambers to take turns reciting passages from civil right’s legend Angela Davis’ book Are Prison’s Obsolete?, extending the meeting by several hours in an attempt to delay the approval of the construction contract with developer Howard S Wright.

Wright’s office became the site of a biblical re-enactment staged by Jenn Hagedorn and Claire West of European Dissent. The two led about 100 mostly white protesters to its main lobby, placed thousands of coins upon a large coffee table while startled staff looked on, and flipped it over in an ode to the Biblical description of Jesus Christ’s actions against the money lenders in the temple. West said the demonstration served to draw attention to one of the movement’s key messages, that money is being made on the backs of black children.

By March 2015 county officials announced they would no longer refer juveniles to criminal courts for “status offenses”—juvenile-specific crimes including truancy, running away from home or being late to class. Officials moved to “decriminalize” mental illness in youth, by referring them to programs instead of juvenile detention. They also announced that they would reduce the number of beds planned for the Family Justice Center’s detention facility, from 144 beds to 112. The current Youth Services Center holds 212 beds.

More recently, in October, the City of Seattle passed a resolution, written primarily by members of EPIC, announcing the city’s goal of completely ending juvenile incarceration within its borders.

King County’s experience with racial disparities in juvenile incarceration is not unique. Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative (JDAI) works with more than 250 counties nationwide, including King County, to decrease juvenile prison populations. The initiative was founded in 1992 as a response to what was then an astronomical growth in the United States’ juvenile prison population. Since that time, 83 percent of participating counties that have implemented JDAI’s practices have reduced their juvenile detention populations. On average, those counties cut their daily detained-youth populations by 43 percent. That means that, on average, 3,173 fewer youth are incarcerated in the United States each day.

But the system still incarcerates youth of color at higher rates than white youth. In 2013, the most recent year for which national data was available, 68 percent of all confined youth belonged to an ethnic minority, despite the fact that they comprise about 48 percent of the total youth population in the United States.

King County provides a clear example of what the problem looks like up close. Since 1998, when it joined JDAI’s program, it has decreased its overall population of incarcerated youth by 70 percent. Its juvenile population fell from a daily average of 205 in 1998 to roughly 55 today.

The most significant policy change that led to the decrease, according to county officials, was a change in detention intake policies: Police officers are now required to call the detention center to determine whether confinement is necessary before bringing a young person there. Previously, police officers would drop off juveniles at King County detention center as they saw fit.

Today, King County has the second-lowest juvenile prison population of counties of equivalent size, according to JDAI. But the percentage of the incarcerated who are black has risen from 35 percent to nearly 60 percent during that time.

The county believes prosecuting minors for status offenses has contributed to disproportionality because so many of those charged with them are youth of color. Officials also recently passed legislation that stops charging juveniles for failure to pay the fare on county-operated public transportation.

Both King County and the City of Seattle have signed onto a Statement of Shared Commitment to reduce disparities in juvenile justice and are working with local school districts within the county, including Seattle Public Schools, to implement restorative justice practices in place of expulsions and suspensions.

Importantly, the county will also begin providing training to security officials stationed on buses in the County on how to deal with adolescents, specifically those of color. Dave Upthegrove, the King County council member who spearheaded that legislation, would love the training to extend to every school, police station and prosecuting attorney’s office.

King County’s Chief Juvenile Judge, Wesley Saint Clair says:

Until we have the courage to start dealing with issues of institutional racism, structural racism and implicit bias, we will be dealing with racial problems over the next 150 years. We must look to our partners in education, law enforcement and child welfare, plus behavioral and medical health providers, to participate in the conversation about implicit bias and undoing institutional racism.

 

 

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