The County has a roadmap to end youth detention. Why aren't they using it? by Marcus Harrison Green 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?