Youth jail should be improved, not closed, King County Council votes

King County’s juvenile detention facility should remain open permanently, the County Council voted unanimously Tuesday. The vote followed hours of emotional public testimony and protest against “caging kids.”

It was the council’s first time taking an official position on the future of the youth jail, four years after County Executive Dow Constantine called it a “system rooted in oppression” and pledged to close the facility by 2025. Earlier this year, Constantine said that 2028 was a more realistic timeline to begin phasing it out.

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Councilmember Reagan Dunn, who introduced the motion, said it was critical for the council to make its intentions clear to the county advisory committee tasked with developing a plan to close the juvenile facility. An early version of the proposal, submitted by the committee in January, contemplated entirely unlocked detention facilities scattered throughout the county rather than a centralized, locked location.

Although the advisory committee was divided on whether some young people charged with violent crimes should be held in a secure facility, the council was not, and agreed that some violent offenders need to be locked up despite their youth.

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“We need a secure building for public safety reasons,” said Councilmember Girmay Zahilay, a longtime critic of the current model of juvenile detention and its disproportionate impact on Black and Latino youth. “It’s critical to protect our community and ensure that those who have committed serious offenses are housed in a way that prevents further harm."

Zahilay was among council members who added amendments to the motion, calling for improvements to the juvenile detention system, including for some youth detained as long as a year.

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“We can change what happens within the perimeter of a secure building so that it is more conducive to behavioral health and rehabilitation and education in a way that I don’t think it is currently,” Zahilay said.

The $210 million Judge Patricia H. Clark Children and Family Justice Center, which includes juvenile detention, courtrooms, and offices, opened amidst years of “No New Youth Jail” protests calling instead for a community-based restorative justice model and more investment in young people’s wellbeing.

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In the past two years, however, juvenile crime has spiked and 53% more young people are in detention this year, on average, than in 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic.