If we know how to stop our kids’ mutation into monsters, but willfully disregard that knowledge, what exactly does that make us?
That question has consumed me for more than a decade. It recently found new flesh with the inescapable orgy of stories documenting the rise in juvenile crime across the region. According to local news networks this week, shootings, armed robbery, and carjackings signify the onset of puberty as much as a swollen larynx.
Coincidentally, the timing of the stories synchronized with a unanimous King County Council vote earlier this month to keep the Judge Patricia H. Clark Children and Family Justice Center permanently open. For those living in an underground survival bunker over the last two decades, the center is the youth jail at the heart of the decade-long No New Youth Jail campaign.
The same youth jail that Republican candidate for Washington Attorney General Pete Serrano said he wanted to ensure wasn’t shut down during last week’s debate, stating that—along with schools and parents—the state needed to “discipline our kids.”
No mention of how the state needs to provide for their well-being.
I’ve covered the quest against the jail’s construction since King County voters first passed a funding measure in 2012 to replace a previous dilapidated facility. Ensuing years hence brought countless protests at Seattle City Hall and county council chambers against erecting the center. Protesters wanted the cost of the building—$240 million—reallocated for non-incarceration-based programs for youth.
Responding to the intensity of those protests through the years, I’ve seen the county’s position on juvenile detention evolve from regrettably necessary, to aspirationally rare, to wholesale abolishment, to this month’s boomerang to back where we began.
At least that’s the takeaway from the council’s vote, which should be noted as nonbinding and directed at King County Executive Dow Constantine’s stated goal of closing the facility and ending youth detention as we know it.
“Utopian” is what King County Council Member Reagan Dunn called that prospect during this month’s public meeting. Dunn filed a motion last spring to continue the center’s operations through 2028.
He partially blamed the uptick in violent crime committed by juveniles on that strategy. He has this much correct: youth crime has risen. Last year, 177 violent felonies were committed by juveniles that included murder, drive-by shootings, and rape. One thing left omitted: Every single one of these crimes has happened while the County still employs incarceration as a primary response to youth crime.
Instead of blaming a strategy to diminish incarceration that has not been fully implemented, fully funded, or fully committed to, you’d think he and other King County Council Members might be the first to admonish and blame our current system, which is still heavily focused on a carceral approach that has resulted in a 61% rise in juvenile bookings last year, and the same percentage rise in bookings so far this year—returning us to the incarceration levels of 2019.
Why is there no demand for him to mount a defense of that system, one that goes beyond the lazy explainer that unless the youth are punished primarily with incarceration then an orgy of violent nihilism will run rampant on our streets unless we punish youth with incarceration? Detention is practiced today yet it has failed to deter youth from committing crimes.
Can you imagine Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on a quarterly earnings call, blaming a steady dip in revenue and sales year after year not on their present business strategy but on the one they’re thinking of potentially deploying? He’d be ridiculed and bound for urgent cognitive testing.
Why absurd in that case but rational in ours?
How would we judge that same CEO if he had a step-by-step guide to help his company succeed, yet chose not to use it? We know that, even as the County has deployed yet another committee to make recommendations on how it can reach its goal of zero youth detention, we already have a nearly 300-page roadmap to Zero Youth Detention that is publicly available and has been in the County’s possession for at least four years.
It has provided a detailed, realistic, and practical approach to reducing juvenile crime, both violent and otherwise, that is not centered on incarceration. Strengthening cognitive behavioral health services, individually tailored intervention programs, and residential treatments centers are but a few options.
But they leave that roadmap virtually untouched.
That logic seems to go unchallenged when four out of five children locked up in the county’s detention center are, on average, children of color. Contrastingly, that same category makes up just a tick more than a quarter of the county’s entire youth population.
How easy it is for them to be collateral pawns in the game of “what’s most likely to get me re-elected at a time my constituency is all-in on carceral punishment as a solution for our social ills, and reduction in incarceration was so five minutes ago.”
I understand the instinct and reflection that comes with the need to feel safe, secure, and protected at whatever cost to whomever else. I understand the need for redressment of harm to be a precondition of forgiveness. A friend of mine was killed by a youth in 2017. For a time I wanted nothing more than that young man to be caged for as long as he possibly could, or to suffer the same fate as my friend. I understand the animal reflex inherent in most of us that activates a perverted lust for immediate vengeance over gradational accountability.
That same instinct leads us to snatch hold of a shortsighted solution without considering the social poisons we’ve squeezed into the roots of our future. Thanks to studies conducted by the Sentencing Project, we know that confinement in juvenile detention centers reduces the likelihood of graduating high school by 28%. We know that every day spent in incarceration increases a youth’s likelihood of recidivism by one percentage point. We know that incarceration leads to higher rates of rearrest, and criminality into adulthood. We know incarceration retraumatizes already traumatized children whose brains are developing until they are 25.
We know all this, and yet we indulge in lazy solutions, calling effective alternatives Utopian. What Orwellian madness are we living in?
No, we cannot release the children who are currently detained tonight if they have nowhere to go except the environment that put them in jail in the first place. And will there be truly rare and horrific cases such as Colt Gray, the 14-year-old suspected of opening fire and killing four people at his Georgia high school, requiring removal from the general population, unfortunately, yes.
There is no overnight fix to a system that has been in place for centuries. But there is a bridge to a future that puts guidance, healing, and transformation at the heart of juvenile justice. And it’s a bridge that our County is refusing to cross.
The data has not changed. The science has not changed. The empirical evidence has not changed. The fact that our children need resources, care, attention, and actions—not words—has not changed simply because our attitudes to anything that appears lenient have hardened.
So instead we choose a path that greases the supply chain of criminality instead of disrupting it. A path that leads broken children into hard-to-repair adults. A path that foreclosed on the possibility of a different future.
I ask again, what does that make us?
‘what’s that make us’?
it makes us Prisoners
to our reptilican
brainstems
held hostage
to impunity
hubris &
greed
and
oddly
enough
it makes
eltrumpfster
a mad, market-
ing Genius ready
to Conquer the World
even if he’s gotta
Burn it all Down
to “save it.”
Impressively, the Sentencing Project study the author cites reveals a key to understanding youth violence — and then minimizes it afterwards: “Studies find that youth who become involved in the juvenile justice system are several times more likely than other youth to have suffered traumatic experiences.” A few paragraphs above this, we read,
“Studies that track youth outcomes into adulthood have found that an alarming share of young people incarcerated in youth correctional facilities are later arrested, convicted, and incarcerated as adults. Research studies that control for young people’s backgrounds, offending histories and other relevant characteristics have found that confinement most often results in higher rates of rearrest and reincarceration compared with probation and other community alternatives to confinement.”
No word as to whether “young people’s backgrounds … and other relevant characteristics…” included a history of having “suffered traumatic experiences,” but it appears there was no attempt to control for this factor in this study.
Later in the study, the very last paragraph of the “Why Incarceration Fails” section finally admits,
“Incarceration can retraumatize youth and make them less likely to succeed. Often, incarceration is itself a traumatic experience for young people, and it can exacerbate the difficulties experienced by youth who have been exposed to violence and other adverse childhood experiences.”
Why this factor was placed last is a question for the authors, but these mentions of childhood trauma tell us our intervention efforts must start far earlier than the young person’s first encounter with the criminal-justice system. We must intervene to remove children from violent homes, or our efforts to eliminate youth jails will fail against the reality of traumatized children growing into violent adolescents, and jail as the way of protecting the rest of us from their violence.
Unfortunately, all this cray-cray has run right into reality.
Once I saw the reference to caging youth, I knew where we were going with this.
This irrational hatred of a facility shows the immaturity of the movement. OF COURSE incarceration should be the last resort. I think all rational people agree with that. But this building is not just a jail. It’s also the Juvenile Court, which serves an important administrative function in determining what the consequences should be for the offender. Would it be better to have that downtown with the adults in a facility that is already over-burdened?
As for the “jail” part, there will always be some children who are better off as wards of the county than they would be at home, and some who will be safer behind bars than on the street. And there’s always the occasional child who needs to be behind bars because they did something heinous. This is a modern facility that allows for the juvenile justice system to function in a much better and safer environment than the previous facility, which was the definition of grim.
Pretending we don’t need a facility for administering the juvenile justice system is stupid. It serves no one, especially the youth who are caught up in the system.
Thank you once again Catalina for being a voice of sanity here on Slog.
Anyone who seriously believes that we should close juvenile detention needs to be kept far away from making policy decisions. They should never be handed the levers of power. As long as there are humans, there will be a need for a facility to separate those who cannot follow rules from the rest of civil society.
Catalina Vel-VuRay, you should write for The Stranger. You make structured, fact based arguments that are based in rational thought.
Housing juveniles with adult criminals is true cruelty. Not sure why The Stranger pushes this nonsense