By Erica C. Barnett
King County will not achieve the goal of closing down the Patricia Clark Children and Family Justice Center—more commonly known as the youth jail—by 2025. Instead, King County Executive told PubliCola, the county will work toward implementing the six recommendations that came out of an advisory group that included impacted community members and advocates as well as representatives from the criminal legal system.
Constantine announced plans to shut down the youth detention center in the summer of 2020, amid local and nationwide protests against police violence and incarceration. At the time, about half the kids in detention were Black, compared to about 7 percent of King County’s population. Three years and a supposed nationwide racial reckoning later, about half the kids in detention are Black.
Since then, though, the population in the youth jail has bounced back to its pre-pandemic levels, even as the Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention has struggled to hire guards and other staff—a situation that has resulted in worsening conditions for the 40 or so kids confined at he the detention center on a typical day. Constantine began suggesting that 2025 was no longer a firm deadline in 2022, when he told PubliCola that hitting that closure date would depend on how quickly the county could address backlogs in the juvenile justice system and on what recommendations came out of an advisory board charged with crafting alternatives to youth detention.
There is no new target date for closing the youth jail. In an interview with PubliCola, Constantine said “the date will be when we can get all of the other pieces in place to allow us to close that [facility] and to repurpose it.” Specifically, his plan would start by focusing on areas where the advisory broad reached a general consensus, like establishing a series of “community care homes” where kids could access services like school reentry programs and behavioral health care—”the kinds of services that would help a young person successfully rejoin the community and not slip back into the criminal legal system,” Constantine said.
Jimmy Hung, the director of the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s juvenile division, said the recommendations the advisory committee came up with are “very thoughtful, they’re very ambitious, and they’re going to require a massive amount of public funding.” Other jurisdictions across the country have successfully opened respite centers as an alternative to jail, Hung said, “so I think it’s commendable that the county executive wants to invest in that way.”
“Now we’re in a moment where people, including people across the street at City Hall, are calling for more detention and more of the traditional way of doing things. And I think that we have to resist that.”—King County Executive Dow Constantine
Funding for the community homes would have to come mostly out of the county’s general fund, which is facing a deficit of around $50 million this year. (Many county services, like King County Metro and human services, are levy-funded, but the general fund pays for a number of mandatory county services, including the courts, the sheriff’s office, and Public Health). Not only will Constantine’s office need to come up with funding for the new facilities, which will cost an unknown amount of money, but convince the county council to fund them instead of other competing priorities.
“The county council, I’m pretty confident, will be willing to embrace the opportunity to move forward, step by step, on creating a different model,” Constantine said, “but people have to be able to stand up to pressure to … just go back to the old ways, to ‘lock them up and throw away the key,’ to the days of mass incarceration.”
King County Council budget committee Girmay Zahilay, a longtime critic of youth incarceration, said the change in tone since 2020 and the county’s budget deficit had already made it clear to him that the county wouldn’t close the youth jail next year. The same problems will make it challenging to start opening community care homes or the respite center in the immediate future, even if proponents of both alternatives can push past political opposition, he said. “I don’t think that large unanticipated expenditures from the general fund are realistic right now, unless there’s some kind of state intervention,” Zahilay said. For example, state Sen. Jamie Pedersen has introduced a bill that would increase the 1 percent cap on property tax rate increases to 3 percent.
Hung said he could envision a scenario where “if we get those recommendations implemented and they’re proving to be effective in lowering juvenile crime, especially violent crime, and we can continue to reduce the use of formal secure detention, I think there could be a gradual shift in the use of detention.” Specifically, he said, “I think [standing up] community care homes is a strategy where, if we had what [the advisory board is] describing, we could drastically lower our detention population right now.”
Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell and a majority of the city council have consistently signaled a desire to move toward arresting (and, in many cases, prosecuting) drug users and other low-level offenders; while youth incarceration wasn’t a specific issue on the campaign trail, the last several city elections have signaled a hard turn away from the restorative approaches that were briefly in vogue in the immediate aftermath of 2020.
During the pandemic, the number of kids incarcerated in the juvenile detention center dropped into the single digits, creating what Hung calls “some hope, but it might have been displaced,” that the number could continue dropping to zero. “The wheels are falling off society and the kids are suffering, and we’re seeing the results of that now in our juvenile justice system. Until we get back to where we were pre-pandemic, I think it’s hard to imagine us seriously talking about not having a detention facility.”
“The fact is that there was a moment there where people were willing to see things with fresh eyes and understand that what we’re doing was not working. And I was certainly willing to see that,” Constantine said. “Now we’re in a moment where people, including people across the street at City Hall, are calling for more detention and more of the traditional way of doing things. And I think that we have to resist that; we have to have the strength to stand up and say, no, this doesn’t produce the best results. And that system is disproportionately impacting people based on race.”
Of the six recommendations that came out of the advisory group, the most controversial among group members was a proposal to essentially replace the jail with a 24-hour “respite and receiving center” where kids accused of crimes can go immediately post-arrest and either be released immediately or stay on a long- or short-term basis, depending on the offense they’re accused of and their needs. For example, some kids might lack a safe home to go to when they’re released; others may, in the view of prosecutors, pose a risk to other people or be at risk of retaliation themselves.
“I’ve been doing this long enough to know that you can’t possibly have enough information after, let’s say, a homicide occurs where you feel completely comfortable—not just for the safety of the public, but for the young person themselves—that you can place them in a non-secure facility,” Hung said. “You don’t know if that young person continues to pose a risk to the community, and you don’t know if they’ve done something that now puts them at risk of retaliation.”
According to the advisory committee’s report, some members raised concerns about young people getting out of respite centers and immediately committing additional crimes; additionally, there wasn’t a clear consensus about how secure the respite facilities would need to be. Some jurisdictions have adopted a dual model where some kids are locked inside and others are allowed more freedom to come and go.
“I think the controversy will be around if a young person poses a serious threat to community safety—if, for example, they’ve been charged with murder—will that person be able to just walk free in a couple of days,” Zahilay said. On the flip side, he said, “If we’re going to build another facility that is a secure detention facility, we have to be clear on what we’re changing to make it different from the current” youth jail.
Constantine, echoing Hung, said he believes there will continue to be a need for secure detention—traditional jail—for kids accused of the most serious crimes. Currently, about 10 of the 40 or so juvenile jail inmates are youth who have been charged as adults but are too young to transfer to the downtown jail; their cases are generally more complicated than young people jailed for misdemeanors and they tend to stay in the youth jail much longer than other kids.
“Just because some people have to be in secure detention, in something looks very much like adult detention, doesn’t mean that everybody accused of a crime needs to be,” Constantine said. “So let’s work on the problem we can solve now.”