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King County’s four-year-old, $200 million Judge Patricia H. Clark Children and Family Justice Center on 12th Ave will remain open through and beyond a promised 2025 deadline as officials pursue establishing “a network of diverse community care homes” in a quest to change how Seattle moves forward on youth detention and addressing its disproportionate impact on communities of color.
King County Executive Dow Constantine’s office is pursuing only three of six recommendations from an advisory council formed to examine the “future of secure juvenile detention” and what changes should be made at the relatively new youth jail facility at 12th and Alder. None of the recommendations currently being pursued by Constantine’s office, according to a final report from the advisory council, include a 2025 end of secure detention at the facility.
Black kids continue to be disproportionately detained in King County, making up about half of the population housed at the facility or on home detention.
The new youth jail opened in the winter of 2020 with 16-cell living halls designed to look like dorms but secured for incarceration with electronic locks and state of the art surveillance systems, new classrooms, and an expanded visitation areas where youth offenders can meet with family and lawyers. There is a Merit Hall where detained kids can earn TV time and officials repurposed an “interview room” as a video game room. And there are courtrooms where legal proceedings can be carried out.
“As we move toward zero youth detention, how we can repurpose space?” one official said at the time. “As our population decreases, we can move our secure perimeter.”
The 2025 goal toward “zero youth detention” was born out of the 2020 Black Lives Matter Protests in Seattle and followed years of protest against the construction of the new youth jail facility about a block south of Seattle University.
“Today I commit King County to converting the remaining youth detention units at the CFJC to other uses as quickly as possible, and no later than 2025,” Constantine said that summer in a series of updates on social media in response to a leaked memo on the plan. “I will also be proposing additional investments to help create healthy and community-based solutions that address the needs of youth & families in King County,” Constantine said.
Critics of potential changes point to a changing criminal landscape. “In 2023, there were 177 violent felonies committed by juveniles, including murder, gun violence, drive-by shootings, domestic violent, rape, and residential burglary. Juvenile violent felony filings are up 57% from 2022, and up a shocking 146% from 2021,” reads a press release from King County Councilmember Reagan Dunn who opposes the end of secure detention by the county.
And the Constantine administration has backed off the 2025 timeline. In the report on the advisory council’s recommendations required under a King County proviso on youth justice spending, the executive’s office is, instead, pursuing three initiatives hoped to change the way the county handles youth incarceration while maintaining the youth jail.
The first recommendation being pursued is providing more funding and resources for programs supporting kids when they leave the jail and “return home to their
families or are placed in kinship care with extended family members.”
A second is to boost educational and social programs and facilities that provide “culturally responsive and linguistically relevant, developmentally appropriate, and youth-and family-centered supports that address their identified needs.”
The most concrete would be an initiative to “create, contract, and provide oversight to a network of diverse community care homes where youth would stay while their court case proceeds if they are unable to go home because of safety concerns.”
The report does not include details of how soon the recommendations can be implemented.
In the meantime, King County kids continue to be incarcerated without a path to “zero youth detention.” More than 40 juveniles are typically being held in secure or standard detention, on electronic home detention, or in group care in King County at any given time.
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