Tag: Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention

criminal justice, King County

County Will No Longer House Inmates at SCORE Jail in South King County, Ending Controversial Agreement


By Andrew Engelson

A controversial agreement between the South Correctional Entity (SCORE)—a municipal jail jointly owned by six South King County cities— and the King County Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention (DAJD) to house county inmates and help alleviate staffing shortages at the downtown jail has abruptly ended after only three months.

“SCORE and DAJD have mutually agreed to end the housing agreement,” SCORE director Devon Schrum said during a meeting of SCORE’s operations board Wednesday. “We’ve never been able to get enough people from DAJD to make a difference for them,” she added. “It’s entirely possible there will be some negative spin.” 

In an email to DAJD staff, department director Allan Nance wrote that “folllowing an initial three-month review,” DAJD and SCORE “have jointly agreed to end a pilot project for housing services, which began on June 10, 2023. As a result, both parties are working together to return all King County jail residents housed at SCORE to DAJD facilities.” About 22 people will return from SCORE to the county’s own jails, Nance said.

In his email, Nance said the decision to end the controversial agreement “was based on two primary factors. First, DAJD has determined that the number of King County jail residents eligible for transfer to SCORE would never be sufficient to provide operational benefits and staffing relief, given the mutually agreed upon screening criteria and the complex and dynamic population housed in our County jails. Therefore, the resource cost of this pilot has outweighed any potential benefit.” Second, Nance said, SCORE needed to use the space for other inmates from the six cities that own the jail. 

In April, the King County Council, in a 7 to 2 vote, approved an agreement to allow transfer of 60 inmates at the downtown jail to SCORE, and create a plan to house and book some people in DAJD custody at SCORE.

The sudden end of the agreement comes after four people in its custody have died at SCORE in the past year–an extraordinarily high number. The ACLU of Washington, concerned about conditions at the downtown King County jail, initiated a lawsuit in February against the county over lack of adequate medical and mental health care, noting that six people died in custody at the downtown jail in 2022. 

The agreement was supposed to help address chronic understaffing at the downtown jail, where a shortage of as many as 120 officers has resulted in overworked jail guards, substandard conditions for inmates, and delays in getting inmates who are ill to medical care when needed, which PubliCola first reported on late last year.  

The number of inmates actually booked through DAJD and housed at SCORE has been relatively small. According to King County’s jail data dashboard, the number has hovered around 30 through much of the year.

The sudden end of the agreement comes after four people in its custody have died at SCORE in the past year–an extraordinarily high number. The ACLU of Washington, concerned about conditions at the downtown King County jail, initiated a lawsuit in February against the county over lack of adequate medical and mental health care, noting that six people died in custody at the downtown jail in 2022. 

La Rond Baker, legal director for the ACLU of Washington, told PubliCola, “The conditions in the [downtown jail] are really pretty horrifying and very, very concerning. They’re putting people’s lives at risk. What we are most concerned about is the failure to transport people to medical appointments necessary for them to maintain even base level of health. They’re not consistently taking anyone to outside medical appointments because of staffing shortages.”

The county’s downtown jail has a capacity of between 1,200 and 1,700 inmates, while SCORE can house about half that. According to its website SCORE is currently holding 443 people. According to DAJD spokesman Noah Haglund, 21 King County inmates remain at SCORE and “[b]oth parties are working together to return” them back to to DAJD jails.

The pilot allowed DAJD to evaluate SCORE housing as a potential option for temporary staffing relief. Given the mutually agreed upon eligibility criteria and the complex and dynamic population housed in our County jails, DAJD’s other approaches have provided a more efficient use of staffing and jail operations than the SCORE pilot could offer. These include rebalancing population between facilities and reopening bookings at the Maleng Regional Justice Center in Kent.

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“Four deaths in one year is astronomical,” said Molly Gilbert, a spokesperson for the union that represents public defenders. 

PubliCola has filed public records requests for all documents, including medical examiner reports, related to the four deaths at SCORE.

Haglund—who got back to PubliCola shortly after this story was published—said none of the four people who died at SCORE in 2023 were people transferred or booked through the DAJD agreement. Haglund also said that DAJD plans to reopen bookings at the Maleng Regional Justice Center in Kent on October 2.

“The pilot allowed DAJD to evaluate SCORE housing as a potential option for temporary staffing relief. Given the mutually agreed upon eligibility criteria and the complex and dynamic population housed in our County jails, DAJD’s other approaches have provided a more efficient use of staffing and jail operations than the SCORE pilot could offer,” Haglund said.

On its website, SCORE has published press releases on the four unexpected fatalities this year. On March 25 a 65-year-old man collapsed and died. On May 19, a 43-year-old woman in custody was found unresponsive. On June 27, a 25-year-old was also found unresponsive. And on August 12, a 42-year-old woman in custody was also found unresponsive and died.

The fatality in March is notable because it occurred just as the King County council was debating legislation authorizing the agreement between DAJD and SCORE. The council’s Law, Justice, Health and Human Services Committee voted to approve the legislation on March 7, and the death occurred on March 25. The full council approved the measure on April 4, with council members Jeanne Kohl-Welles and Zahilay voting no. 

At the time, the council was heatedly discussing previous deaths in custody at SCORE, in particular one incident in 2019.

In addition, SCORE seems to be in violation of a condition in the agreement that was added by Kohl-Wells in an amendment to the legislation. In 2021, the legislature passed a law requiring all jails in the state to file reports to the Washington State Department of Health (DOH) on the causes and circumstances of any unexpected fatalities within 120 days of the incident. A Seattle Times report in March found that few jails are complying with the law, which went into effect this year. 

“Our position on the SCORE contract has been the same since the County first considered the proposal months ago: King County should be focusing on finding ways to reduce the number of people incarcerated wherever they are held. Incarceration is a harmful, ineffective, and racially disproportionate policy that we know doesn’t make our communities safer.”—Department of Public Defense director Anita Khandelwal

Specifically in response to that problem, Kohl-Welles introduced and passed an amendment to the DAJD-SCORE agreement legislation that required SCORE to comply with state law and file fatality reports with DOH.

However, according to Mark Johnson, a spokesperson for DOH’s Office of Public Affairs and Equity, DOH has no record that SCORE or any of the six cities that operate the jail have filed reports related to any of the four fatalities that have occurred in custody at SCORE in 2023. Both the March and May incidents occurred more than 120 days ago. 

The amendment Kohl-Welles added to the legislation states: “South Correctional Entity has acknowledged and agreed to comply with the unexpected fatality review requirements in accordance with state law, and publicly issues unexpected fatality reports.

SCORE director Schrum did not respond to requests for comment.

Gilbert, with the union representing public defenders, said that the arrangement created many logistical issues that were a burden for both inmates and their attorneys. Transfers to court were especially complicated, and Gilbert noted that DAJD inmates held at SCORE who had hearings in the Kent courthouse were not directly transferred, but transported to Seattle were they spent a night in a holding cell before before being shuttled to Kent.

In addition, she noted that several public defenders complained of being turned away from meeting with their clients at SCORE because the jail said it did not have adequate staff to accommodate those requests.

DPD director Anita Khandelwal said in an email: “Our position on the SCORE contract has been the same since the County first considered the proposal months ago: King County should be focusing on finding ways to reduce the number of people incarcerated wherever they are held. Incarceration is a harmful, ineffective, and racially disproportionate policy that we know doesn’t make our communities safer.”

Editor’s note: Due to a typo introduced in editing, this piece originally said that five “counties” operate the SCORE jail; in fact, it is six cities.

 

criminal justice, Elections, homelessness, Media

Jail Guard Falsified Security Check Prior to Inmate Suicide; Candidate Proposes Shipping Homeless Out of Seattle

1. King County Jail Guard Falsified Records Surrounding Inmate Suicide

A correctional officer at the King County jail in downtown Seattle failed to do a required security check less than two hours before a 47-year-old man with “a history of mental health issues” committed suicide in his cell last year, then falsified a record to make it appear that he had performed the check, PubliCola has learned.

Disciplinary records from the Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention confirm that the guard, Emmanuel Palaita, did perform a check about an hour before the inmate, Keith Denegal, was found dead in his cell in the early morning of February 20, 2022. However, Palaita failed to do the previous mandatory check, leaving Denegal alone in his cell for more than an hour and a half, in violation of jail rules requiring checks at least once an hour. An investigator concluded that Palaita’s “failure to act endangered the safety of the inmate population he was responsible for.”

Because of the fraudulent log, investigators found Palaita had violated department policy, falsified documents, caused loss or injury to the county or public, and breached jail security. He was never disciplined, however, because he left his shift and never came back, going on leave for several weeks before turning in his official resignation more than a month after walking off the job. According to DAJD spokesman Noah Haglund, Palaita never responded to notices about the internal investigation, and declined a hearing after the investigation to clear his name.

Because Palaita falsified a DAJD record, the department forwarded his name to the King County Prosecutor’s office for inclusion on the county’s Brady list—a list of law enforcement officers whose testimony in court is suspect because they have a history of dishonesty.

Since 2021, nine people have died “unexpectedly” at the jail, including five who committed suicide. Haglund said the department “has taken several important steps since last year to protect jail residents against self-harm,” including retrofits to remove gaps between beds and walls, limiting the distribution of over the counter medication, and increased suicide prevention training.

Since 2021, eight DAJD employees have been disciplined for falsifying security checks, Haglund said.

Because Palaita falsified a DAJD record, the department forwarded his name to the King County Prosecutor’s office for inclusion on the county’s Brady list—a list of law enforcement officers whose testimony in court is suspect because they have a history of dishonesty.

PubliCola has also determined that after Palaita left the county last February, he applied to be a Seattle firefighter, although it does not appear the department has hired him. According to records maintained by the city’s Public Safety Civil Service Commission, Palaita passed all the tests required for placement on the Seattle Fire Department’s Firefighter Register, one of the first steps toward becoming a firefighter in Seattle, and he will remain on the list until June 2024.

We have reached out to the fire department for more information about Palaita’s application and whether the department takes the Brady list into consideration when hiring firefighters.

2.  Here’s a Bold New Idea from Westneat’s Favorite Candidate: “Triage” Homeless People Into “Open Space” in King County

On Wednesday, the Seattle Times’ Danny Westneat posted a layup column lightly mocking “the good, the bad, the bizarre ideas” coming from some of the candidates who are unlikely to make it through this year’s August 1 primary. Among the “out-there ideas” Westneat chose for mockery: Taxing spray paint to stop graffiti; building campgrounds for homeless people around the city, including one where people could use fentanyl (“imagine the community meetings,” Westneat snorts) and using AI to audit city departments for waste. “Their ideas,” Westneat chuckles, are like “Seattle satire.”

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Given his interest in oddball ideas, it’s strange that Westneat—who says he’s been attending forums and debates all around the city—failed to mention any of the bold new proposals from a candidate he helped boost to prominence two years ago: Kenneth Wilson, who’s running for the open seat in District 4. In 2021, when Wilson was running against council incumbent Teresa Mosqueda, Westneat wrote that he, “stands out in the crowd”  being “being boring and competent.” Westneat was thoroughly charmed by Wilson’s “dorky” engineer vibe, and praised him for his back-to-basics campaign focused on “mismanagement,” government waste, and “building housing for the homeless faster.”

So you’d think Wilson’s big idea this year would be right up Westneat’s alley. Wilson wants to fix homelessness with a “triage” system that will take homeless people off the streets of Seattle and relocate them to an as-yet-unidentified piece of land somewhere in King County, providing recycling bins for them to store their belongings while they “move along in the right path with us.”

“We could do something with triage, especially with King County and their big resources in land. And we would actually move and get these people on the path that’s away from drugs, it’s away from the challenges of the city,” Wilson said at a recent forum.

“There’s so many people in [Seattle] who’ve got mental issues and things like that,” he continued. “In King County, we have a lot of open space, beautiful areas where we can actually make a difference in people’s lives, get them away from the challenges that are making the addictions, causing some of the mental health spill-out, where the damage is coming to our community.”

Wilson, unlike the candidates Westneat poked fun at this week, has a decent shot of making it through the primary, thanks in part to the credibility Westneat’s column gave him during his first campaign. As of Wednesday, he had raised more money than any other candidate in his race.

Courts, criminal justice, Equity, King County

King County Jail Director Asks Court to Rescind Rule That Limits Youth Detention
Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention Director Allen Nance (background: King County Sheriff Patti Cole-Tindall)
Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention Director Allen Nance (background: King County Sheriff Patti Cole-Tindall)

By Erica C. Barnett

The director of King County’s Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention (DADJ), Allen Nance, has asked the state supreme court to rescind a rule barring local courts from issuing warrants against and jailing young people who violate court orders or fail to appear in court, unless the child poses a “serious threat to public safety.”

The court issued the rule in 2020 to reduce crowding in youth jails and made it permanent in 2021, sparking immediate pushback from judges and juvenile court administrators, who argued that judges need discretion to jail young people for their own good and so that they won’t commit more crimes in their communities.

In a letter to the court in April, Nance argued that judges are “uniquely situated to make informed decisions regarding the need for temporary custody of a youth following the issuance of a bench warrant and once a youth is brought before the court to have the warrant served or quashed, because they “often know the youth, their family, and social histories or have the expertise to obtain the information they need to help determine the presence of urgent and immediate necessity for a custodial response.”

For example, Nance continued, a young person may need to be held in jail because their parents “do not know where their son or daughter has been living or what challenges they face outside the home”—challenges that could include “the deadly effects of substances [such as fentanyl] that are readily accessible to youth and permeate our communities.” Although “most youth do not require custodial supervision and incarceration,” Nance wrote, “for a subset of the youth who come before juvenile court judges, a decision to issue a bench warrant or order custody may mean the difference between life and death.”

A spokesman for the Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention said the department “does not track data specific to how young people who are released in their communities while awaiting resolution of their court issues may end up harming themselves or their community.”

However, the spokesman continued, the views Nance expressed in his letter “are about doing what is in the best interest of young people and what also promotes community safety. Proper judicial oversight is required to ensure that both the best interest of young people as well as the community are taken into consideration.” The letter, he added, is limited to the court rule restricting warrants for failure to appear and violating court orders. “We continue to advance our commitment to find alternatives to incarceration whenever possible, in the least restrictive environment that achieves the safety goals for youth and the community,” the spokesman said.

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Anita Khandelwal, who directs the county’s Department of Public Defense, says if the court gets rid of the rule restricting warrants for youth who don’t pose an imminent threat, the most likely outcome is a return to pre-COVID policy, in which judges issued warrants “without examining whether the youth posed a serious threat to public safety,” including situations where “a youth didn’t come to court or wasn’t at home when they were supposed to be.”

The result, she says, will be a spike in warrants and youth incarceration, especially for young people of color; in 2019, before the court issued the rule, between 82 and 84 percent of warrants issued by King County Juvenile Court judges in 2019 were for youth of color, according to Khandelwal.

In a letter asking state Supreme Court Chief Justice Steven González to maintain the rule, dozens of advocates and defense attorneys argued that incarcerating young people harms their physical and mental health, disrupts their education, and worsens the racial disproportionality of the entire criminal legal system. “Because the juvenile legal system is entangled with many other institutions that have perpetuated racist practices like policing, housing, education, and employment discrimination, limiting the circumstances under which a youth can be incarcerated due to a warrant in a juvenile offense proceeding protects our youth and enables a more racially just future,” the letter says.

King County, under County Executive Dow Constantine, has vowed to shut down the youth jail by 2025, although that pledge has been coupled with an increase in youth incarceration and worsening conditions at the facility. So far this year, an average of 34 kids are incarcerated at the Clark Children and Family Justice Center in Seattle every day, an increase of almost 20 percent over  .

In a letter to Khandelwal, Constantine’s labor relations director, Megan Pedersen, said the county executive “has always empowered county leaders to weigh in on policy matters based on their operational vantage point and subject matter expertise. … This issue highlights the complexity we navigate with criminal justice issues within the Executive Branch given competing policy objectives.”

Khandelwal has asked to add Nance’s letter to the agenda for the next meeting of the county’s Care and Closure Advisory Committee, which makes recommendations on a path to closing down the youth jail; that meeting will be on Monday, June 24 at 4pm.

criminal justice, housing, human services, King County

County Approves Controversial Jail Transfer, May Keep Veterans Levy Flat Despite Rising Costs

1. After hours of public comment opposing the transfer of 60 men from the downtown King County Jail to a regional jail in Des Moines called the South Correctional Entity (SCORE) yesterday, the King County Council approved the contract, with only Councilmembers Jeanne Kohl-Welles and Girmay Zahilay voting “no.”

County Executive Dow Constantine secured $3.5 for the transfer, which the county Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention has said will only include mentally and physically “healthy” men accused of low-level crimes, in last year’s budget, but the furor over the decision didn’t begin in earnest until this year, when legislation to move the first group of downtown jail residents came before the council.

The DAJD has said the transfer is necessary to improve safety and reduce workloads for guards at the downtown jail, where understaffing has become a chronic issue and where, as several council members noted Tuesday, some officers have resorted to sleeping at the jail during the brief time between their shifts. Opponents, including prison abolitionists and the union that represents employees at the county’s Department of Public Defense, argued that the move has the potential to endanger prison residents, limits their access to visitors and attorneys, and does little to solve the long-term issue of over-incarceration, including people who languish in jail waiting for competency restoration or because they can’t pay bail.

“[The DAJD has] worked tirelessly at making sure that the standards and the jails health services in a King County Correctional Facility are better than standards in most facilities throughout this country, Caedmon Cahill, policy director for the Seattle Office of Civil Rights, told the council. (Cahill was speaking as an individual, not a representative of OCR.) “That is why I have such concern with this council and the executive outsourcing this responsibility to another agency. I do not have faith that those that SCORE will come to you when they are not meeting your expectations.”

“We need to do more with getting our staffing in place, but we also need to take down this downtown jail. That can’t be done overnight, so we’re talking about short term solutions and long term solutions, but I don’t find the short term solutions really compelling.  We’re going to be asked to put in more money, and more money, and more money, and [never] get to the solutions.”—King County Councilmember Jeanne Kohl-Welles

But DAJD director Allen Nance said removing 60 people would make it easier for the department to ensure the safety of those who remain. “If we can move some people to SCORE, perhaps reduce the number of people that are in the in county jail by moving some folks to our [Regional Justice Center] facility, we can get to a place where we are no longer having to operate as much of the downtown jail as we have in the past, and we are in a better position to provide the level of service to the people who remain downtown in a way that is challenging for us to achieve today,” Nance said.

The agreement included several amendments that council members said would help mitigate its impact, including one sponsored by Councilmember Rod Dembowski that will require council approval for future transfers to SCORE and another, sponsored by council chair Dave Upthegrove, that will require the executive to get council approval for any future contract extensions.

Before the vote, Kohl-Welles, who will leave the council next year, said she expected that Constantine and the DAJD would be back with a request to expand the SCORE contract within a year. “We need to do more with getting our staffing in place,” she said. “But we also need to … take down this downtown jail,” something Constantine has pledged to do. “That can’t be done overnight, so we’re talking about short term solutions and long term solutions, but I don’t find the short term solutions really compelling.  We’re going to be asked to put in more money, and more money, and more money, and [never] get to the solutions.”

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2. The King County Regional Policy Committee, which includes elected officials from cities across the region as well as county council members, voted this week to put the six-year Veterans, Seniors, and Human Services Levy on the ballot in August without increasing the initial rate property owners will pay if the levy passes above the current 0.01 percent (10 cents for every $1,000 of property value). The levy pays for housing, behavioral health care, and other services for veterans and seniors.  A staff analysis, first reported on by Crosscut, showed that a flat levy renewal will cut the amount of affordable housing the levy can build by half, and fund ongoing operations at 45 percent fewer units than the current levy.

In contrast, Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell recently proposed a renewal of the city’s affordable housing levy that would nearly triple the size of the levy, an increase that will only modestly expand the amount of housing the levy will build thanks primarily to the rising cost of construction,

Councilmember Rod Dembowski proposed several amendments that would raise the levy by varying levels—from .011 to .013 percent—but got no support.

In fact, the mayors of two suburban cities—Nancy Backus of Auburn and Angela Birney of Redmond—argued that renewing the levy at 10 cents per $1,000 actually represents an increase, because the current “effective rate” of the tax is just over 8 cents per $1,000. For context, it’s important to know that 10 cents per $1,000 was only the initial levy; it went down over the years as property taxes increased, because the county could raise the fixed amount of money the levy promised with a lower tax rate. Raising the initial level back to 10 cents per $1,000 will cost homeowners about 20 percent more, but that’s only because King County homeowners’ property wealth has skyrocketed over the past six years. If this levy passes, the effective rate will almost certainly decline as property values rise as well.

King County Councilmember Claudia Balducci voted for the 10-cent rate, but said she wanted to keep the tax level open for discussion when the county council’s budget committee meets to discuss the proposal later this month.

“I will support moving this out today with the rate as it is, but would like to set the expectation that we have a real discussion at the committee,” Balducci said . “I hope we don’t walk away from exploring this as deeply as it deserves.”

criminal justice, King County

County Moves Another 50 from Downtown Jail Amid ACLU Lawsuit Over Jail Conditions

By Erica C. Barnett

Less than a week after a King County Council committee tentatively approved plans to move 50 people from the downtown King County jail to the South Correctional Entity, at a cost to the county of $3.5 million, the downtown jail quietly transferred another 50 minimum-security inmates to the Maleng Regional Justice Center (MRJC) in Kent over the past weekend, emptying out a unit on the downtown jail’s third floor. According to DAJD spokesman Noah Haglund, the majority of the people who are being moved are facing misdemeanor or non-violent felony charges.

The MRJC has suspended most bookings for months because that facility—like the downtown jail—doesn’t have enough staff to book people except by appointment, Haglund said. The 50 people transferred to the Kent jail are being “double-bunked” in a unit that previously housed about 50 people, bringing the total number of people incarcerated in the Kent unit to 104. A single officer will oversee the doubled-up unit, one of the “efficiencies” DAJD director Allen Nance referred to in a memo announcing the move on March 10.

Haglund said the unit has a capacity of 115.

“We base our current staffing on how many individuals in the housing unit are out of their cell at any given time and their classification status,” he said. “One officer can supervise a maximum of 64 people in the dayroom (the “common area” in the unit) at a time; the number of people in the dayroom at any given time will not exceed the maximum levels prior to the recent transfer.” Ideally, Haglund said, “we would prefer a 1:64 ratio for officers to number of people supervised at this facility,” which would require an additional officer, but “there is no single ratio that would apply across all housing units and classification types.”

The King County Corrections Guild President has filed a demand to bargain because of the higher staffing ratio, which union president Dennis Folk says still exceeds the 1:64 ideal. “What they’re saying is, ‘You’re only managing the 40 or 50 that are coming out at one time,’ and we’re like, that’s not the case. We still have all the other people we have to manage” at the same time—people who may need out of their cells for medical care, appointments, and visitation.

“Leadership will be working with staff to develop the safest unit schedules and operational practices. We are committed to increasing the ratio of staff to residents as our staffing improves, but also believe that moving these residents from KCCF to MRJC will improve current living conditions for those in our custody and in turn lower the daily operational challenges for our staff.”—DAJD director Allen Nance

According to Nance, jail “[l]eadership will be working with staff to develop the safest unit schedules and operational practices. We are committed to increasing the ratio of staff to residents as our staffing improves, but also believe that moving these residents from KCCF to MRJC will improve current living conditions for those in our custody and in turn lower the daily operational challenges for our staff.”

The DAJD has struggled to recruit and retain jail guards in its adult and youth jails. told PubliCola the department needs to hire more than 100 net new officers to reach the point where guards no longer receive 2.5 times their regular pay for working voluntary (as opposed to mandatory) overtime shifts. Folk said emptying out the third-floor unit would eliminate the need for one guard.

The downtown jail population, which bottomed out during COVID (when booking restrictions limited the number of people booked for low-level crimes), has rebounded to more than 1,200, without a commensurate uptick in staffing. King County Executive Dow Constantine has pledged to close the downtown jail , but the population has trended in the opposite direction of closure, prompting protests from advocates who argue that the county should stop booking non-violent felonies until the jail can guarantee adequate physical and mental health care and ensure the safety of incarcerated people.

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The ACLU of Washington sued King County last month, alleging that conditions at the downtown jail are so bad that they violate a 1998 agreement known as the Hammer settlement, in which the county agreed to address overcrowding and poor medical care, and understaffing at the jail. The DAJD’s recent efforts to transfer people out of the downtown jail are widely viewed as an attempt to come closer to compliance with that settlement.

According to Molly Gilbert, the president of the union that represents the county’s public defenders, moving people to RJC—as opposed to SCORE—could be a positive for defense attorneys, if the people who get moved to Kent are defendants from the area; currently, Department of Public Defense (DPD) attorneys have to travel to downtown Seattle to meet with their Kent-area clients. “However, we have no idea what population they actually moved,” Gilbert added.

Meanwhile, the public defenders’ union is trying to get King County Councilmembers to add an amendment to the legislation approving the contract with SCORE that would spell out DPD’s visitation needs and require a quarterly report on how the contract is going. The full council will take up that legislation, which passed out of committee unanimously, next week.

Courts, criminal justice, King County

Amid Lawsuit Over Jail Conditions, County Moves Forward With Controversial Inmate Transfer Plan

By Erica C. Barnett

A King County Council committee tentatively moved forward on an agreement to move up to 150 men currently incarcerated at the downtown King County Correctional Facility to the South Correctional Entity (SCORE), a jail owned jointly by six south King County cities. The contract, which will cost the county around $3.5 million over two years, is supposed to “help King County mitigate the impact of the unprecedented levels of employee vacancies on staff in the Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention,” according to a letter from King County Executive Dow Constantine that accompanied the legislation. Under the agreement, DAJD would initially transfer about 50 men to SCORE starting in April.

PubliCola first reported on the county’s decision to fund the SCORE contract last year.

The county council’s Law, Justice, Health and Human Services Committee moved the agreement forward without recommendation, citing the need to balance concerns raised by attorneys who represent incarcerated people with the abbreviated timeline laid out by Constantine and the county’s Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention, which runs the jail. The council plans to work out the details over the next two to three weeks and adopt the agreement by the end of March.

The union that represents employees at King County’s Department of Public Defense, SEIU 925, believes the proposed agreement fails to address their concerns that moving defendants to SCORE will impede attorneys’ access to their clients and put them at a disadvantage during court proceedings; the union sent a letter to the council laying out their concerns with the contract last night.

Currently, SCORE only allows inmates to access court hearings virtually, and has just one booth where attorneys can talk to their clients and pass documents back and forth, along with several booths where one member of an inmate’s defense team (which might include investigators, paralegals, and mitigation specialists) can communicate with them at a time.

“We frequently have to get documents signed; we frequently have to work through documentation; we frequently need interpreters. Trying to do this over video will be impossible.”—Department of Public Defense union president Molly Gilbert

SCORE also has video visitation booths where visitors can speak with incarcerated people virtually; the jail, unlike those operated by King County, has no in-person visitation.

“Once you get above the misdemeanor level and start talking about felonies, you’re talking about really convoluted court hearings and legal concepts that are difficult to explain,” DPD union president Molly Gilbert told PubliCola. “We frequently have to get documents signed; we frequently have to work through documentation; we frequently need interpreters. Trying to do this over video will be impossible.”

Last November, the union filed a demand to bargain over the proposal to move inmates to SCORE, arguing that the agreement creates changes to their members’ working conditions; the county has not agreed to negotiate with the union.

“I don’t want to be an alarmist here, but we are at a critical stage. Delaying simply creates one more day, one more moment where the opportunities for people in our custody won’t get met.”—Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention director Allen Nance

At Tuesday’s meeting, interim DAJD administrative division director Diana Joy said SCORE had assured the department that it would transfer defendants to court and that attorneys as well as other DPD staff, such as investigators and paralegals, will have direct access to clients.

However, the contract itself says only that “SCORE will provide a minimum of one transport to a King County designated facility every twelve hours for King County inmates newly booked at SCORE or housed at SCORE and requested by King County to be returned.” It says almost nothing about defendants’ access to attorneys and others working on their cases; the sole reference to these rights in the contract is a line stipulating that “confidential telephones or visitation rooms shall be available to a Contract Agency Inmate to communicate with his or her legal counsel.

At Tuesday’s meeting, DAJD director Allen Nance said it was important for the county to move forward on the contract quickly because conditions at the jail have continued to deteriorate amid an ongoing staffing shortage.

“I don’t want to be an alarmist here,” Nance said, “but we are at a critical stage … Delaying simply creates one more day, one more moment where the opportunities for people in our custody won’t get met.”

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Understaffing at the jail reached unprecedented levels during the pandemic, as the jail struggled to hire and retain applicants for high-stress jobs that pay less than other law enforcement positions and lately have required frequent mandatory overtime. Currently, according to King County Corrections Guild president Dennis Folk, the jail is 111 guards short of its staffing target—an improvement since last year, when the shortage reached 129 absent guards.

“This is [DAJD’s] way of trying to decrease our numbers [of people] that are in custody, which ultimately results in us having less posts that we need to fill,” Folk said. Removing 50 people from the jail, for example, could eliminate the need to staff one floor of the jail, for example. “I don’t think it will make that big of a dent, but they seem to think it will.”

Guard shortages, combined with a dramatic increase in the number of people housed at the downtown jail, have led to untenable and sometimes dangerous conditions in the jail. In February, the ACLU of Washington filed a lawsuit against the county, alleging that conditions at the jail violate an agreement known as the Hammer settlement, which requires the jail to meet minimal health and safety standards, including adequate access to behavioral and physical health care.

The contract says the inmates who will be transferred to SCORE will be men accused of Class C and “non-violent B level” felonies, such as burglary, auto theft, and  stalking. “SCORE would not be used for people doing service work in King County jails, who have frequent court appearances, or who have significant medical or mental health needs,” the agreement says. Gilbert says a stable group of inmates without “frequent court appearances” doesn’t really exist; everyone in the jail, except people waiting to go to Western State Hospital for competency evaluations, has to appear in court. “We don’t understand what population it is they’re talking about,” she said.

“Yes, it’s challenging, yes, there are tradeoffs, but I think we owe it to the folks who are trying to make the best of a very dangerous situation, to take up their request … and give the best answer we can within the timeline they have asked for.”—King County Councilmember Claudia Balducci

King County Councilmember and committee chair Girmay Zahilay said Tuesday that while “on the one hand, we want to be able to relieve pressure on… the downtown jail,” which is facing “crisis” conditions, “on the other hand, we’ve heard some some downsides,” including the need for defense attorneys to travel to a third jail, on top of the downtown jail and the Norm Maleng Regional Justice Center in Kent (which has suspended new bookings) , in order to meet with clients.

Councilmember Claudia Balducci, who worked for DAJD for 15 years and directed the department from 2011 to early 2014, countered that both DPD and the jail itself have asked the county to do something to improve conditions inside the facility. “So yes, it’s challenging, yes, there are tradeoffs, but I think we owe it to the folks who are trying to make the best of a very dangerous situation, to take up their request … and give an answer the best answer we can within the timeline they have asked for.”

Folk, from the jail guards’ union, said that once the jail has 473 guards on staff—the point at which guards who volunteer for extra shifts are no longer eligible for overtime pay at 2.5 times their regular wages—”I want that contract canceled.” Hiring more than 100 new guards presents challenges that go beyond recruitment. One issue, Folk said, is that many new recruits can’t pass the state law enforcement academy’s physical fitness test; in a recent batch of 13 new guards, he said, “over half failed” and had to be let go. Still, he said, the jail has 19 new hires coming on board this month.

In July 2020, King County Executive Dow Constantine pledged to close the downtown jail “in phases” after the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the intervening years, the county’s overall jail population has rebounded, reaching about 1,600 (compared to a pre-pandemic average of around 1,900) last year.