(The Center Square) – Members of the Metropolitan King County Council are set to vote Tuesday on a proposal that rejects County Executive Dow Constantine’s plan to close the Juvenile Justice Center in Seattle by 2028.
Constantine originally proposed the King County Care and Closure initiative to shut down the Patricia H. Clark Children and Family Justice Center, or CCFJC, by 2025, and to instead shift responsibilities for juvenile detention to private organizations.
He later pushed back the proposed closure date to 2028.
King County Councilmember Reagan Dunn opposes that decision and offered a proposal to ensure the facility remains open.
“My proposal says that unequivocally we would keep the Patricia Clark Juvenile Justice facility open for detention services,” he told The Center Square.
“I’ve been working really hard behind the scenes to keep the facility open,” said Dunn, who would need five votes from the nine council members to get the proposal over the finish line.
“They are the worst of the worst of juvenile offenders,” he continued. “Nearly all of them are felons, overwhelmingly violent felons, who committed murders, rapes and other sexual assaults, and they are so dangerous that there is no place safe to put them outside of the $240 million dollar facility that we built in 2020.”
Those who support less restrictive alternatives to juvenile offenders argue incarceration only leads to reoffending upon release.
“The proposed motion before the council is a step in the wrong direction,” Rhea Yo with Legal Counsel for Youth and Children said during a June council meeting when Dunn offered his proposal to ensure the facility remains open.
“There’s an abolitionist group that wants to dismantle the criminal justice system and replace it with some as yet undefined system that has nothing to do with incarceration,” Dunn said. “It’s not realistic, it’s not reality as some of these 15,16 and 17-year-olds are very dangerous.”
Dunn also argues the Capitol Hill facility, which opened in February 2020, is a much better environment for juvenile offenders trying to turn their lives around.
“It has classrooms, it has a gymnasium, it has a library, it’s state of the art,” he explained. “We couldn’t even begin to site all these unsecured respite houses around King County, let alone get libraries and gyms in there. I don’t know what they are thinking.”
According to Dunn, as of late July there were 69 juveniles being held in secure detention at CCFJC, including 12 being tried as adults. Offenses for youth in secure detention include six cases of murder, three for rape – including rape of a child – one for child molestation, 14 for assault, 26 for robbery, eight for unlawful possession of a firearm, one for possession of a stolen firearm, and 10 for other felony offenses.
This story will be updated after the vote of the full council Tuesday afternoon.