The following editorial originally appeared in The Seattle Times:
The rationale behind keeping adolescents and young adults in juvenile facilities for crimes they committed as minors is on-target. Research consistently shows that locking young people in prison does not create the behavior changes society seeks.
All the more reason to make sure this initiative is done right. The verdict so far shows Washington has miles to go.
Passed in 2018, the law known as “Juvenile Rehabilitation to 25” allows youth who are charged as adults to serve their time in one of two juvenile lockups, the Echo Glen Children’s Center in Snoqualmie or Green Hill School in Chehalis, until age 25. The problem is, Echo Glen is not secure. Kids escape every year, often assaulting staff in the process.
In May, seven teenagers locked a worker into a cell, stole her keys and took off in her car. One of them, 17-year-old Timothy Hernandez-Ebanks, was serving time for first-degree murder. And he’d escaped from Echo Glen in much the same manner last year.
Hernandez-Ebanks, who was 13 when he killed a man in Burien, was not serving his time under JR to 25, because the King County Prosecutor had charged him as a juvenile. But his escape from the bucolic, unlocked campus in 2022 naturally raises questions about why he was returned there, instead of being sent to Green Hill, which operates more like a traditional prison, albeit with younger inmates.
That’s where JR to 25 comes in. Hernandez-Ebanks couldn’t go to Green Hill because it is at capacity, according to the Department of Children, Youth and Families, which is scrambling to make more beds available. More than half of Green Hill’s 173 residents are there because of JR to 25.
The capacity crunch points to a perennial problem: Progressive policies that feel good to lawmakers but are enacted without the supports to ensure they work.
The situation speaks to inexcusable naiveté or, worse, passivity regarding the harm that some kids at Echo Glen are capable of inflicting. DCYF Secretary Ross Hunter says his agency “did not understand the severity of the challenge with this population.”
After last year’s escapes, officials vowed to make the site more secure. But over the intervening 16 months, there were few changes. The Legislature secured $8 million for a perimeter fence, plus funding for additional staff, during the session that wrapped up in April.
Money, while important, is a straightforward fix. But the chronic chaos at Echo Glen speaks to complex, thorny questions about the state’s ability to balance rehabilitation with security.
When JR to 25 became law, the Washington Institute for Public Policy was assigned to evaluate its impact on community safety, recidivism, finances, youth rehabilitation and racial disproportionality.
That report is due in December. Looks like the writers have their work cut out.
