Thank You, Dan Dear.

What really gets me is this blithe assumption on the "no caged youth" set that we could just take the money earmarked for the new jail and direct it towards keeping the youth "uncaged". Municipal bonds don't work that way. The county would have to refund everyone's money and start over with a new bond, and guess how well a bond issue to not jail youth would go over?

How about we build the new jail, and try our darnedest through effective social programs to keep it underutilized? And build into the new facility some office and support space for those programs?

Even our poorest schools, shameful as they are by modern standards, are WAY above what many kids have access to in most the world. Can we trade some rotten teen criminals for some African or South Asian kids willing to sit still and learn? I'd support that 100%

We spoil even our prisoners, and provide an endless list of excuses for people to commit all sorts of horrors.

The sad fact is, impulsive kids with zero parental guidance, and brains filled up with "Thug Lyfe" nonsense are going to end up hoodlums.

The Right won't talk about depressed wages and lost job opportunities, but the Left won't talk about absent fathers and the lack of discipline that results in youth criminality.

@2 Hm, trading people, interesting idea. Can we trade you for, I don't know, a box of raccoons or something?

@3
Careful what you wish for.
You need hard working, law abiding, tax payers like me if you're gonna continue to subsidize criminality and import millions of low skilled workers who need massive entitlement programs.

Like anybody would give you a perfectly good box of racoons for a run of the mill angry white male who just devoured an old copy of Bill Cosby's Fatherhood.

@2: "the Left won't talk about absent fathers and the lack of discipline that results in youth criminality."
Um, this one comes directly from the Commander-in-Chief:
"[W]hen I was their age I was a lot like them. I didn’t have a dad in the house. And I was angry about it, even though I didn’t necessarily realize it at the time. I made bad choices. I got high without always thinking about the harm that it could do. I didn’t always take school as seriously as I should have. I made excuses. Sometimes I sold myself short.
...
If you’re African American, there’s about a one in two chance you grow up without a father in your house -- one in two. If you’re Latino, you have about a one in four chance. We know that boys who grow up without a father are more likely to be poor, more likely to underperform in school.
...
Part of my message, part of our message in this initiative is 'no excuses.' Government and private sector and philanthropy and all the faith communities -- we all have a responsibility to help provide you the tools you need; we've got to help you knock down some of the barriers that you experience. That’s what we're here for. But you’ve got responsibilities, too....It may be hard, but you will have to reject the cynicism that says the circumstances of your birth or society’s lingering injustices necessarily define you and your future. It will take courage, but you will have to tune out the naysayers who say the deck is stacked against you, you might as well just give up -- or settle into the stereotype."
Remarks delivered by President Barack Obama on the "My Brother's Keeper" Initiative.

Fucking try next time.

@6
Normalizing single mother households has been part of the Dem agenda for 3 decades. One page from the Obama screenplay doesn't change the fact.

Also, why am I to blame for black deadbeat dads?

@8: Respectively, [citation needed] and where did I ever say you were? Nice strawman.
Also, what did you say?
"the Left won't talk about absent fathers and the lack of discipline that results in youth criminality"
And was that true, that the political Left refuses to address the issue? Y/N

@4

You need hard working, law abiding, tax payers like me

Spare us your ridiculous posturing: anybody commenting 60 times since yesterday morning can't be working too hard. Jackass.

@7

Stopped reading when you started telling me about the times you cry. TMI.

Dan, you are a brave man. Not many would say this without fear of repercussions.

@L_C_

I CAN SIZZLE A STEAK ON YOUR HOT TAKES ON THE NEWS OF THE DAY! PLEASE STAY AT YOUR COMPUTER 24/7 LIKE YOU HAVE BEEN! DO YOU HAVE ONE OF THOSE JOBS THE BOTS TELL US ABOUT IN THE COMMENTS WHERE YOU EARN $700/DAY LIKE THEIR COUSIN?

This thread (like so many others) should have stopped with Catalina having the last word.

Still waiting for juvenile incarceration opponents to chime in. Are they all smoke and no substance?

I suppose we could just try them all as adults....

...waiting for the hue and cry to commence.

Whoa. I know there's a more immediate issue here, but my main takeaway is that Dan was friends with one of Dahmer's victims. Small world?

@8 Toxic masculinity? That we raise boys to views girls as 'things' and teach them that it's okay to run from responsibility because it's always the women's fault?
Or how we teach girls that the only thing that matter is getting men to pay attention to them and when things go wrong we dump everything on them and blame them when they have the gall to buckle under the strain?

I guess there's just not enough women blaming in my suggestions.

Thank you Dan. The issue is that the old juvie is decrepit and a new one is needed. The idea that we can automatically do without one (because no one under 18 ever commits a violent crime, I guess) is, to put it mildly, naïve.

Nah, we don't need a new youth jail, or an old one

Perhaps you could have taken this up with Kshama before you endorsed her and her entourage of hyperventilating sycophants, Dan.

I'm proud of Seattle's willingness to address racial disparities in the criminal justice system and fully support diversion programs that will keep youth out of jail and holding bad cops accountable, but this dogmatic adherence to "No Youth Jail" is a waste of political energy. The reality that these (well-intentioned) advocates are pushing for it that teenage murderers would be intermixed with adult prisoners at King County Jail, which is helpful for no one.

I worked for a period in the Juvenal justice system. It is fucked upped and most of the kids caught up in it deserve better. On the other hand there are few kids who well....

Regardless these old Juvie detention centers are fucked up when it comes to safety, the sight lines are horrible and that is just the start.

What a terrible piece of journalism, Dan. Your entire argument about "zero detention" is quoted from an unattributed citation by the Stranger's own writer, Ansel Herz.

You raise good points, but resorting to click-bait sensationalism is beneath you.

@23:

What are you saying is unattributed? If you follow the Stranger's click-hole to its bitter end, you do get to https://seattle.legistar.com/Legislation…

According to wiki, there are currently 70,800 juveniles in youth detention facilities in the U.S. 40% of these facilities are privately operated. About 500,000 kids are brought to detention facilities in a year. These figures do not reflect juveniles tried as adults.

It's my understanding from other material that it costs taxpayers approximately 80,000 dollars per year per kid to lock them up. It's much more expensive than adults.

O.k. Let those figures sink in a bit and ask yourselves what kind of society are we? How are we raising our children? It didn't start with them - it started with us.

All children are all of our children, in one way or another.

It is simply immoral and, as already stated, traumatizing indeed, for juveniiles to be incarcerated. It is destructive to their lives; wracking further destructiveness upon that which has already happened.

On top of that, I think the example stories used, while certainly serious, are not the usual reason why most of these kids are in jail. We've been "lock-em-up-happy" the way people get "trigger happy." In some of these private operations, you have kids in their for talking back to principals - or any number of other "offenses" that aren't even violations of law for adults.

They lock children up in these places for being runaways. Some of these kids have been abused - raped by family members, for example - and then what? That child is put in a jail cell.

This is America!

Many of these kids should be out, period. Their freedom shouldn't be restricted, period. Others could easily be in half-way house situations - where they are living in a group home setting - like a surrogate family setting - while continuing normal life activities such as studies and excurricular interests, and continuing to pursue goals and objects in bettering their lives.

Those who are violent need serious attention psychologically. They need to be in intensive psychotherapy and counseling and group work, they need tutoring in remedial skills, they need attention for learning disabilities, they may need medications and regular follow-up with physicians, they need educational specialists. And -- they need to live as members of a society --IN that society!

If they are that violent, you could restrict certain freedoms = to protect - while still having these kids live in a normal community setting - not a prison facility - as if they're animals. You don't put kids in cages. And you certainly don't have it under a private facility - where they are profiting on how many kids they lock up!

I will make a few other points. The stories mentioned, all but 1 of them (I believe it was) happened in public parks. I have been amazed in Seattle at how police are nowhere to be seen in the public parks. Of course you're going to have assaults if you don't have police going regularly through these parks - or there all the time.

I'm definitely into militarization - so I'm not talking about police like soldiers sentried about ... but there should be, IMO, more of a shown presence in these areas. I've noticed this about the trail system too. And there aren't any public emergency phones.

So I would put more attention on prevention. And I would not support any more funding for these places. You have to empty them out. We have a major crisis in the country with locking people up -- and one of the more disgraceful aspects of this system is locking up kids.

These country is in the Middle Ages, still, IMO - with respect to our understanding of human beings and what makes them tick. If you go to Norway, I think it is, their "prisons" are more like dormitories in colleges with modest private rooms. You'd be stunned some of these photos. And they have a very low population, and the very, very few who go in for something for murder spend a lot of time just talking with people who work there about what they're done. And they change. They learn to look at themselves and what they did, understand what drove them to do this. They don't have life sentences either.

We live in a terribly stressed society, economically. The one crime that didn't take place in a park - but a store - consider that these kids are living in society where they are watching consumerism glorified constantly. And they don't have any money. People are buying, buying, buying - and the smallest purchase is great hardship and big consideration. But they see on t.v., for example, people buying this stuff all the time like it's nothing.

People need enough money to live on. You'd see a lot of crimes plummet with that, as well. Not in the sense that you need a soda or a candy bar to survive, but a certain amount of economic stress, when reduced, takes a lot of steam out of other situations.

I'm not trying to excuse any of this - I'm not saying that people shouldn't be concerned. But we have to stop solving all our problems by locking people up - and by just putting money into that kind of false solution. It's got to stop.

BTW, that Norway story I posted @25, they even had a campus - greenery and all. So this man - who was there for the very unusual case of murder - he would go out on daily walks with a psychiatrist or psychologist talking about himself and what had happened. Guess what? People have the ability to reform. Really. And this is not a weird thing there - this is a normal expectation and understanding. What is weird or unusual is that someone would do such a violent act - taking another person's life. (Of course, they've had a rise in violence more recently, as in the news, but the point is, we don't have to live like this. There are alternatives, other ways to do things.)

You guys miss SB, I can tell.

@26: Don't worry, no one read your Norway story, because no one is going to read your long ass comment. Brevity my friend, brevity.

The "no-jail" is basically arguing against a phantom idea that a new jail will lead to a greater crackdown on kids to fill it, as if the jail is the problem. The fact of the matter is there are violent kids who need serious intervention before they continue the cycle of violence and poverty, leaving behind their own kids to grow up in a broken home, resorting to violence, and having another kid before going to jail for 20+ years.

We have been comfortable to leave this intervention to the state using prisons and youth detention centers, but it clearly does not work. Instead of forcing detention, can we force trade school or something? I bet a lot of kids would be a lot less likely to sell drugs and jack people up if they can get full health/dental and $50,000 plus a year working as an electrician, industrial maintenance worker or plumber.

Juvenile detention facilities are actually an excellent place to get the services that these youth so desperately need directly to them. Yes, it's late, after they've already committed serious crimes. Yes, there is a general lack of "good will" feeling towards this population, and it's an uphill battle to designate the funds needed for these programs. But it makes sense. And it's happening in small ways all over the country.

@25 - do you think this juvenile should live in the community, rather than being detained before his trial?

http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/18/us/massach…

I don't understand the HIV analogy Dan is putting forth:

Some juveniles will always commit horrible crimes, therefore we should not oppose juvenile detention facilities just as some gays will always contract HIV, therefore we not oppose barebacking and needle-sharing?

@31: Unless you feel that the juvenile facility causes youth crime, you should not be too confused by the analogy.

Unsafe sex practices cause HIV infection, while a facility is a response to a problem caused by other factors that will remain present whether or not the facility is built.

@31... There will always be a need for detention facilities, so we shouldn't eliminate them. Just as there will always be people who have HIV, so we shouldn't eliminate the services that meet their needs.

Or are you just being obtuse?

@33

Maybe I am being obtuse, but not intentionally. I'm probably being more pedantic. I didn't catch the implication that the goal of ending HIV meant ending the services right then and there. It just seems like a poor analogy that appeals more to emotion than reason.

Dan is the one being obtuse. He knows full well that the calls for zero detention of youth are the simple sound bite that is needed in today's awful climate to advance the cause of fixing this part of our system. Same as the Zero transmission chants from the 80s. But Dan knows how to do three things in this world: Write a sex-advice column, fuck, and write over-the-top clickbait like this. Dan is essentially being a grammar Nazi here because he doesn't like the idea of people calling for an impossible outcome (eg: No youth detention) in the service of a realistic outcome. But Dan, calling for "Reasonable rates of youth detention only for offenders who really deserve it," is hardly a rallying cry. You say you support fixing the criminal justice system and the systemic racism in it and our society. So why do you insist on picking semantic fights with the people trying to do that?

I've said it before, I'll say it again: Stick with Savage Love. It's what you're good at.

Dan, thanks for stating the obvious reality. All too often the flaws in the system are used as an excuse to say we ought to toss the whole thing out, and that's plain wrong with this too.

@35: If the goal of the "No Youth Jail" movement is, actually, just "reasonable rates of youth detention only for offenders who really deserve it," it seems to me that there's no logical leap involved in their coming around to support building a new facility that might actually help work toward that goal by introducing a better facility that could help serve an interventionist goal instead of just a punitive one. But that's not the behavior we're seeing from, as someone so brilliantly said above, Kshama Sawant and her entourage of hyperventilating sycophants (among others), so we're led to believe not only by their words, but by their actions, that they are delusional about how to solve these problems and probably shouldn't be trusted with developing policy solutions.

I hate agreeing with Dan. He's grown to be *one* of Kshama Sawant's most obnoxious demagogues. But on this, since he's departed from her, I suppose, he's right.

I think we should just lock up all children from about 5 until they're 25. Train them up properly while they're in there. Give them good skills, and make them proper little productive members of society. They can each have their own "wire mother" in their cell to cry themselves to sleep with every night. That way we wouldn't have foetid-breathed ranters like ol' SB and Lib_Cen @8 to worry about any more, because they'd live in a perfect world...

@35: So your point is shame on Dan for having a grasp on reality?

Are you backing Ben Carson for President, by any chance?

"A century of experience with training schools and youth prisons demonstrates that they constitute the only extensively evaluated and clearly ineffective method to treat delinquents." - Barry Feld, Editor of the Oxford Handbook of Juvenile Crime and Juvenile Justice, 2012, 934 pp.
Patrick McCarthy, President and CEO of the Annie E. Casey Foundation in June 2015, after decades of being the NGO leader in reforming juvenile detention centers in the country, announced through a TEDx talk that he was calling for the "permanent closure" of "all youth detention in the United States." "I believe it's long past time to close these inhumane, ineffective, wasteful factories of failure once and for all. Every one of them. We need to admit that what we're doing doesn't work, and is making the problem worse while costing billions of dollars and ruining thousands of lives." Nate Balis, Director of Juvenile Justice Strategy Group says "Even for the small portion of kids who have committed serious crimes and require confinement, this outdated model needs to be replaced with strategies we know encourage youth development and growth." All of these experts as well as Jerome G. Miller and Mark Steward, the two most successful directors of detention centers in this country agreed they did not work, created strategies that did work and involved strategies much different than what King County is subjecting our youth to. The first change called for is avoiding doing what we have always done. Rearranging the deck chairs, which finds its equivalent in King County's creating another large facility for over a hundred children and making it fancy by adding some 'services' we've seen before in its new halls is morally lazy and deliberately ignoring all these experts and the science, and most of all not commensurate with "First do no harm". The harm being done is being done to vulnerable, usually impoverished and disadvantaged, usually non-white, often mentally ill, too often LGBTQ, highly stressed children and their families. If you think there is only one way to do it - lock up those seriously criminal, violent children for the sake of public safety it is probably because you are, in this field, a surface feeder. You listen to politicians who make career opportunities out of playing up fear and rushing in to be the savior and win your vote, but you probably haven't really sought out people in the field who have studied youth detention. Prosecutors and judges, certainly not all happy with the situation, are not being champions of change either. If the law wants retribution and mandatory sentencing, and there is not anything stopping over-charging, plea bargaining prosecutors, the mean-hearted system will slog on, and everyone gets to keep their careers. Where a child, that ultra rare child, is a public safety problem there are other ways to take handle things. No child should be treated without hope that they can be brought back into a positive association with and member of their community. In responsible, progressive places such children from the moment they have an association with the law enforcement/justice system are treated in such a way to immediately begin easing them into a good association with their community. Check out the Missouri Model, the New Zealand Model, the Monterey County - Rancho Cielo Youth Camp model, Utah, ARC of Harrisburg Pennsylvania, Germany, Netherlands, and see the many ways much different from ours that children are not treated like throw-aways, lock-aways, -"other people's children." It is in the details. When a person is a public safety concern because they have an infectious disease, like tuberculosis, the person is placed in "quarantine". They are not punished for their condition. They are made as comfortable as reasonably possible and they are treated, treated with an eye on getting them back into their community as non-infectious, and, then, maybe later completely free of tuberculosis. It is all done with respect and a positive attitude. The same can and elsewhere is done for children. But not in this state. There is no real rehabilitation program at the King County Juvenile Detention Center. This is probably getting too long. I so want to go on. So thank you, Dan Savage. I got this much out. - Carol

yes Carol, that was way too long. If nothing else, paragraphs are your friend. But your point seems to be that other places have youth detention centers that are somehow better than the youth center that is yet to be built. Is that correct?

And kittenalarm, here's a tip for you: throwing out insults and buzzwords with no back up makes a person look stupid. You may be OK with that, or you may actually be stupid, but It really does help your case if you can make an actual argument.

These kids need to go somewhere. They are serverely disturbed human beings.
They are young and with the right environment, there could be a chance of repairing their fractured psyches and hearts.

For-profit detention facilities often get stipends for every detainee, and there has been more than one kickback scheme where a judge sentenced kids to years for joy riding in mom's car.

My boyfriend was sent away as a preteen because his abusive, alcoholic father decided he was sick of having the kid in his hair. He fabricated crap about him trying to stab his sister to get him sent away. The rest of the family was too terrified of the man to set the record straight.

Yes, there are cases where detention of youth is necessary, but abuse is rampant. What we really need to call for is protection of due process in juvenile cases.

Our current policy focuses on discipline and considers due process inapplicable. We need the right to appeal/ review of these cases, genuine fact-finding--all those rights adults enjoy.

Is it just me or is liberalism getting more extremist? Of course conservatives are getting more extremist also, but that doesn't make it any better.

The prison industrial complex is full of POOR people largely people of color. Its set up for poor people and people of color (that means children too). They are targeted.

The feds pay private prisons millions to hold prisoners. The longer they hold them and increase the number the more money they make. We have more people in prison per capita than any other country on the planet.

And I don’t see the bankers that committed fraud and illegally foreclosed and evicted people from their homes in jail. The bankers and wall street that sent millions of jobs overseas for cheap labor. The profit making housing industry slumlords not in jail causing homelessness. But the poor are criminalized. Being rich can see to it that you most likely won’t go to prison. Reforming this system won’t be enough its too profitable.

TheLastComment @46,

It's just you.

More rainbow sidewalks!

@49: So, are you ready to admit that you were lying when you said that liberals refuse to address the issue of absent fathers and the societal ills it causes?

@51

The only way anyone could possibly believe Liberal_Censorship's assertion is if they were completely and utterly unaware of the things that black liberals are doing and saying every day in communities all over America.

Same goes for "why don't liberals talk about black-on-black crime," which of course is talked about constantly by black liberals, and has been for a very long time.

Hey Dan,

Seems like you are a bit uninformed on this one. Maybe stick to talking about sex positive issues? The detention center, which is what you seem to be concerned about, was built in 1992. It is not decrepit. Youths who commit rape and murder will still be detained in the current location (although not for long; those who commit the heinous crimes you speak of will likely be tried as adults).
The idea of zero youth detention is not an abstract one, but a visionary and humane one. Your City of Seattle council members voted unanimously to come up with alternative to youth incarceration and eventually get to a point of zero incarceration. Yes, it will take time. But investing in the continued racist and oppressive juvenile justice system with $210 MILLION is absolutely not the best step forward.
In your HIV analogy (which is a fucking awful one btw), incarceration would be akin to AZT treatment; it didnt really do anything to stop the problems and in fact created even harsher side effects but on the surface, it looked as though something was being done to at least address the issue (as thousands of lives were lost in reality). Working toward ending incarceration potentially would be like the PrEP of today; it is proven to have widespread beneficial results that saves and improves lives of all. But I probably would refrain from using HIV to analogize youth who come into contact with the criminal justice system if I were you. Oof.
It seems to me that your only argument is that we need a nicer jail for the rapists and murderers. Nowhere in your misguided piece do you touch on status offenders (runaways, youth who are truant, possession charges, etc), who make up half of the population in the detention. Nor do you mention how many rapists and murderers are in the detention center (close to zero). The youth who find their way into the current facility are mostly black and brown boys with low-level charges. Do we really need to focus our tax money on housing them in a more modern cage? Or perhaps alternatives are indeed what is needed?
Your uneducated piece diminished whatever respect I may have had for you. At least do your research before you influence others with your fear-mongering bullshit.

So we have multiple text walls lambasting Dan, telling us there are really effective alternatives to incarceration for violent teens. Yet somehow none of people advocating for zero incarceration can actually articulate what those alternatives are.

...is it a Canadian girlfriend?