The Metropolitan King County Council is approaching a vital resolution about its taxpayer-funded juvenile detention facility. Residents ought to concentrate.
In 2012, county voters permitted constructing a brand new middle for youth at a price of $242 million. Opened in February 2020, the Decide Patricia H. Clark Youngsters & Household Justice Middle on Capitol Hill was heralded for its trendy school rooms, library, fitness center, and medical clinic all throughout the identical constructing as neighborhood providers and juvenile courtrooms.
5 months later — as protests roiled the area within the aftermath of the George Floyd homicide — King County Government Dow Constantine introduced his intention to shut the middle no later than 2025.
The concept, he mentioned, was to maneuver public funding away from “methods which might be rooted in oppression.”
That misplaced objective has proved simpler mentioned than accomplished. The brand new proposed timeline is 2028, and severe questions stay unanswered, akin to: The place would the county home violent youth offenders?
In accordance with county statistics, there have been 62 youth in detention on June 24 — 92% have been charged with felonies. On June 20, King County prosecutors charged a 15-year-old with second-degree homicide.
Earlier this yr, King County Councilmember Reagan Dunn launched a movement that might put his fellow representatives on file in regards to the want for some type of safe detention sooner or later.
Dunn’s proposal acknowledged: “It’s the intent of the Metropolitan King County Council to not shut the Decide Patricia H. Clark Youngsters and Household Justice Middle and preserve it open and working with safe detention providers supplied.”
Final week, one other council member, Jorge Barón, provided a competing modification within the Law & Justice Committee to be heard on June 26.
Barón’s modification would strike Dunn’s language and substitute it with: “A MOTION declaring the intent of the Metropolitan King County Council to keep up operations of the juvenile safe detention facility on the Decide Patricia H. Clark Youngsters and Household Justice Middle till and until viable alternate options change into operational.”
In different phrases, it drags out this course of to some undefinable future when solutions to questions that haven’t been supplied for years will lastly change into clear.
There’s a excessive price to this countless deliberation.
4 years of speaking in regards to the unrealistic aspiration of closing safe detention has taken a toll, in keeping with a King County Auditor’s Office report in April: “Workers defined that the uncertainty round closure dampens morale and leads to workers exploring employment alternatives with extra long-term safety.”
With fewer workers members, time beyond regulation prices have spiraled and providers for youth in detention have diminished — particularly since youth charged as adults have been housed within the CCFJC since 2017.
“When a shift is understaffed, youth could also be confined to their cells, and DAJD (Division of Grownup and Juvenile Detention) might shorten faculty durations and cancel enrichment applications. This could result in elevated stress amongst youth and violent incidents,” acknowledged the auditor.
A number of present Metropolitan King County Council members are mentioned to be contemplating a run on the job of King County Government when it seems on the poll subsequent yr.
This political dynamic ought to immediate residents to look at how their elected officers take into account these competing motions about the way forward for juvenile detention. Voters wished a safe facility for severe offenders. Council members must pay attention.