SPOKANE — Only a handful of spots for new offenders are left at the state’s medium- and maximum-security juvenile facilities in the wake of site overcrowding problems and staffing shortages.
Criminal justice officials and lawmakers have called the state’s juvenile justice situation a “state of emergency.” A recent report presented in a state meeting estimated there’s only room for 15 more juvenile offenders left at one of the two detention facilities. As children in Washington deal with the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the skyrocketing cost of living, public officials are scrambling to find answers to the juvenile justice crisis.
Echo Glen Children’s Center in Snoqualmie still has vacancies, but the juvenile detention center is “close” to maximum capacity, according to a presentation made this week by Dr. Lauren Knoth-Peterson, a senior research scientist with the Washington State Institute for Public Policy.
The state’s other juvenile detention center, Green Hill School in Chehalis, surpassed its capacity months ago and has kept operating well above its stated maximum. This week, Green Hill’s population was roughly 20% higher than its projected maximum capacity to properly care for juvenile offenders.
“There are no additional units possible,” Knoth-Peterson said. “There’s not the land or the ability to build new units there.”
Knoth-Pederson was one of several juvenile justice professionals who spoke Friday at a meeting of the Washington State Sentencing Guidelines Commission.
“Now Echo Glen, for example, that was once a highlight of how we should engage in juvenile justice in terms of a therapeutic environment, now has fencing around it.” King County Superior Court Judge Veronica Galván said. “We went from trying to have a therapeutic environment to literally building a prison for children.”
The state plans to open up additional units at Echo Glen as soon as next year, Knoth-Pederson told the sentencing commission Friday.
Of the two detention centers, Green Hill is the only one that houses older male offenders in the age range of 17 to 25.
State Sen. Claire Wilson, D-Auburn, chairs the Senate Human Services Committee and also sits on the state sentencing commission. At Friday’s meeting, she asked about how to solve staffing shortages she’s encountered on visits to Green Hill and Echo Glen.
One looming question for the commission, Wilson said, is where to put young adults in the 18 to 25 range whose brains are still developing and would be best suited to a facility somewhere between the juvenile rehabilitation and adult Department of Correction models.
“Our systems were never created to get people out of them,” Wilson said. “They were created to keep people right where they were.”
Norrie Gregoire, a Walla Walla County Juvenile Court Administrator and member of the sentencing commission, echoed Wilson’s concern about staffing shortages. He called on state lawmakers to do whatever they can to ensure the facilities are fully staffed.
“You can see we’re just kind of in a very tricky situation right now,” he said. “The double-whammy of being understaffed — I’m sure morale is probably not great. So I feel for those folks.”
Retired King County Superior Court Judge Wesley Saint Clair told his fellow sentencing commission members that Friday’s meeting should not be about pointing fingers.
“It’s really about: How do we proactively try to address things, actually use our most recent experiences,” Saint Clair said, “to help refocus a system from the intent of keeping people in .. to an intent to actually re-enter them into the community?
Some 96% of the people who are entered into the Department of Corrections will eventually be released back into society, Saint Clair added.
“We shouldn’t be trying to sentence or to impose sanctions to that 4%, but to the vast majority of folks who are returning to our community.”
Katie Hurley works as special counsel for criminal policy and practice in the King County Office of Public Defense. At Friday’s meeting, she said one clear step in solving the juvenile detention crisis is re-examining the state’s sentencing policy.
Washington state has the only determinant sentencing scheme in the country for kids, Hurley said, meaning that each different crime carries a predetermined jail or prison sentence that cannot be changed by a judge, parole board or any other agency.
“All other states bring more individualization into the decision of whether to take a young person from their community and incarcerate them in juvenile prison,” Hurley said.
Hurley suggested that the state change its sentencing policy to mandate that before a child is put into a juvenile detention facility, the judge should “at a minimum” make a finding that a community-based placement would not adequately protect the community.
“Right now, the juvenile scheme — just like the adult scheme — is driven by the offense that the child is convicted of, and then that drives their standard sentencing range,” Hurley added.
Per-capita rates of youth incarceration vary drastically between counties in the state. King and Snohomish counties are among those that have historically recorded lower counts of incarceration, on average, compared to other counties in Washington.
If other counties incarcerated children at the same rate as King and Snohomish counties do today, Hurley said the state would see a 57% reduction overall in the children who are sent to juvenile rehabilitation centers.
“I bring out that statistic to say that we can do this,” Hurley said. “Counties in the state are doing it, and we need to put in place pathways to take kids off the conveyor belt of, ‘You’ve committed a certain offense, and you do certain time.’ “
