A King County Metropolitan Council committee on Wednesday expressed indecision about whether to keep the county’s youth detention center open, once again delaying a vote on whether members support keeping it open.
The future of Judge Patricia H. Clark’s Children and Family Justice Center in Seattle’s Central District has been a point of contention between county leaders and juvenile crime experts for years.
Amid a years-long effort by County Executive Dow Constantine to find alternative methods of detaining youth, Councilman Reagan Dunn proposed the legislation that failed Wednesday in a vote by the House. the four members of the council’s Law and Justice Committee. The proposed motion would have stated The committee’s intention was to continue operating the facility, but would not have committed the county to a specific course of action.
In any case, the detention center would not close until 2028, and there is no consensus on what a detention center should be. what the replacement would look like, including whether it would be a secure installation with locks.
Last month, the City Council deadlocked over the future of the youth detention center and postponed a vote until this week. On Wednesday, council members split their vote on two amendments to Dunn’s motion, prompting him to bring the vote to the full nine-member council in a month.
“[The detention center] “This is a critical service to King County, and if we don’t provide direction, there’s going to be a problem downstream,” Dunn said, asserting that the only option for repeat violent gun offenders is incarceration.
King County Councilmen Jorge L. Barón and Claudia Balducci, who voted against Dunn’s proposal, expressed concern that the only real impact of the motion might be to short-circuit the executive office’s efforts to identify alternatives to detention.
“I see this motion as confirming the current status quo,” Barón said. “In my conversations with voters, they are not satisfied with the status quo.”
More than 100 people showed up Wednesday to publicly weigh in on the vote, with the majority voicing opposition to the proposal, citing a lack of resources devoted to community support to prevent crime rather than imprisoning youth and the racial disparities inherent in incarceration in the United States. On average, about half of the children held in the youth detention center are black, while about 7 percent of King County’s population is black.
“I have not heard anyone today who is satisfied with the current situation,” Barón said.
The state requires King County to operate a juvenile detention center, and closing the detention center at some point could require both judicial approval and changes by the Legislature.
The center opened in early 2020, but months later, amid unprecedented protests for racial justice following the killing of George Floyd, Constantine announced it would close the detention center by 2025.
That effort has since foundered. An advisory committee appointed by Constantine failed to agree this year on how to proceed with replacing the detention center, or whether potential replacement facilities would be secure and have locking doors.
The majority of children in detention are accused of serious or violent offences. Many children with less serious cases are placed under electronic home monitoring rather than being detained.
Policy changes around juvenile rehabilitation have meant that the most serious cases are taking longer to resolve, so the center is now holding fewer youth on average and for longer periods of time, according to a recent audit report. The Seattle facility is not designed for long-term stays and lacks appropriate support programs, the audit report found. The average stay has tripled since 2017.
Once their cases are resolved, youths sentenced to longer terms are typically transferred to one of two state facilities: Echo Glen Children’s Center or Green Hill School. Last month, the Washington State Department of Children, Youth and Families suspended admissions to both facilities, citing overcrowding and unsafe conditions.
Katie Hurley, an attorney with the King County Department of Public Defenders, said King County is on the same path as DCYF if it does not set a limit on the number of people held at the Patricia H. Clark Center.
“This purely symbolic motion distracts the council from the much more pressing issue of how to address the looming overcrowding crisis in our youth prison,” Hurley said. “The youth prison is incarcerating more children than the budgeted staff numbers can handle.”
The full council will vote on the proposal on August 20.
