By Erica C. Barnett
The city council’s public safety committee will consider a contract with the South Correctional Entity (SCORE) this week; the agreement would grant the city “the use of at least 20 beds” at SCORE for Seattle misdemeanor offenders, at an estimated cost of around $2 million a year, not counting transportation to and from the Des Moines jail, which is owned by six south King County cities. The legislation anticipates moving people to SCORE as soon as September, and would use an underspend of $600,000 to pay for the beds in 2024.
The beds at SCORE would be in addition to those at the downtown Seattle jail, where King County just agreed to begin booking people for minor misdemeanors committed in downtown Seattle, after a long period of booking restrictions imposed during the COVID pandemic.
Due to an ongoing shortage of jail guards, the King County Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention (DAJD) has limited bookings to people accused of serious misdemeanors, like domestic violence and DUI, along with frequent offenders and people who commit lower-level offenses in “hot spots” identified by the city. The new policy has no end date and there are no specific limitations on how many jail beds the city can use.
A shortage of corrections officers can lead to dangerous and inhumane conditions, including a lack of access to health care and basic hygiene for people incarcerated at the jail. Staffing at the downtown jail has improved, but there are still about 70 vacant guard positions, according to the DAJD.
Seattle elected officials, including Mayor Bruce Harrell, City Attorney Ann Davison, and a supermajority of the City Council, have argued that the proliferation of drug use and other criminal activity in Seattle is partly the result of a lack of penalties that would otherwise deter people from committing crimes.
According to a memo from the mayor’s office, failing to approve the contract with SCORE will lead to “continuing public safety concerns” in Seattle. “Without an immediate ability for law enforcement to respond and disrupt the harmful impacts crime can have on our property and injury victims, we leave the community no option for respite for repeated criminal behavior,” the memo says.
The city council’s public safety committee—whose chair, Bob Kettle, frequently decries what he calls a “permissive environment” toward crime in Seattle—will consider the contract with SCORE on Wednesday.
Critics have pointed out a number of logistical and legal concerns with any potential contract.
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In a memo to Harrell’s office last month, the SMC court administrator, Josh Sattler laid out some of the impacts a contract with SCORE would have on the court.
Transferring misdemeanor defendants to SCORE would also require a new data exchange linking SCORE, the municipal court, SPD, and the city attorney’s office, Sattler wrote—a “sizeable technology project” that would “introduce a high level of risk as this information is critical to ensure defendants have timely hearings, access to counsel, transport is arranged, and release is timely.”
“Establishing a new data exchange with a new jail is one of SMC’s greatest concerns with a secondary jail,” the memo said.
There are also more immediate, practical concerns.
Driving to SCORE to meet with a client and back to Seattle would use up more than an hour of an attorney’s work day—one of the issues the union raised in the Unfair Labor Practice complaint it filed last year with the Public Employment Relations Commission, which noted that having to drive to SCORE would “add multiple dead hours” to attorneys’ workdays, which already involve rushing back and forth between a county jail (either the downtown Seattle King County Correctional Facility or the Maleng Regional Justice Center and Kent) and nearby courts.
The city says that it would be a simple matter for the court to conduct hearings remotely with people jailed at SCORE, and for defense attorneys to meet with clients using tablets and the jail’s wifi connection.
But Molly Gilbert, the president of the union that represents King County Department of Public Defense employees, said that during brief, aborted pilot to house King County inmates at the Des Moines jail, the wifi would frequently “just shut off, and [the clients] were never in confidential areas.” It’s unclear whether people with severe mental health conditions would be expected to attend hearings at mental health court via iPad; the mayor’s office said the city will create guidelines about who can be detained at SCORE at some point in the future.
“The City feels comfortable that they have addressed these previous issues around Wi-Fi effectively and will continue to monitor and assess performance through the ongoing workgroup,” a spokesperson for the mayor’s office said.
Currently, the municipal court requires in-person appearances for every hearing after a person’s first appearance—and the interlocal agreement makes the city responsible for transportation. This means the city would have to pay, and arrange a ride, for every inmate held at SCORE every time they need to appear before a judge. The court owns a small van that it sometimes uses to transport a handful of defendants at a time, but “If SMC Marshals will be expected to handle defendant transport, this could be a sizeable cost for the City of Seattle,” Sattler’s memo says.
“What we experienced [during the county’s pilot with SCORE] was, it was frequently the wrong people” being transported, “people were not showing up when they were supposed to be there, and people were left behind when they were supposed to be transferred back,” Gilbert said.
A spokesperson for the mayor’s office said the city “will be transporting clients from jail to SMC for hearing and back throughout the day. We are still working through operational requirements for transport and will not begin booking people into SCORE until these details are worked out.” The city doesn’t have any cost estimate for transportation.
Nor is there any plan yet for where to hold people who are jailed at SCORE while they await their hearings; there’s a small holding cell at the courthouse building where people detained at the downtown jail can be held immediately before their appearances, but the cell wasn’t meant to hold a large number of inmates or to detain people all day. “How long are we leaving people in a holding cell? Who’s feeding them? Is it even humane to even keep them there for that long?” These are questions, according to Gilbert, that the city and SCORE have not addressed.
According to Sattler’s memo, the court doesn’t have the capacity to take on the number of cases they would need to hear if the city adds jail beds at SCORE. By law, first appearances have to happen within 48 hours of an arrest, and adding more hearings to the court’s six-day-a-week calendar would probably require adding another judge to the court—something the mayor and council would have to change the law to accommodate. An eighth courtroom, of course, would add more expenses to the city budget, which is currently facing a shortfall of around $260 million a year.
As PubliCola has reported, at least six people have died in custody at SCORE in the past year and a half, including a woman who died of severe malnutrition and a 21-year-old who died of unknown causes. The mayor’s spokesperson noted that SCORE completed an accreditation program “that certifies it is operating under best practices and standards for law enforcement” earlier this year, and “also has accreditation with the National Commission on Correctional Healthcare (NCCHC), among others. NCCHC’s stated mission is to improve the quality of health care in jails.”
The mayor’s spokesperson also said people will have access to mental health services and drug treatment at SCORE. This is inconsistent with what judges and defenders have told us about services at SCORE, and Sattler’s’ memo notes that the “seven independently elected Judges will likely have concerns or objections related to access to medical facilities, treatment and release planning services at a secondary jail.”
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this post characterized the court administrator’s memo as a reflection of the seven municipal court judges’ views, rather than those of the court administrator. We have edited the post to correct this error.
