Last week, the King County Council voted 8-0 to support a non-binding motion to leave the county’s child jail open. King County Council Member Girmay Zahilay joined the council in voting for the measure—with some meager amendments stressing how the county needs alternatives to jail for kids, upstream investments, and to improve the conditions at the current facility—despite running in 2019 on a platform to “dismantle our current youth prison model.” At the time, it seemed as though Zahilay understood that King County could not wait to gradually improve the youth jail as kids inside suffered.
Republican King County Council Member Regan Dunn brought forward the motion to set the Council’s intention to keep the Patricia H. Clark Children and Family Justice Center open, despite a 2020 commitment from King County Executive Dow Constantine to close the youth jail. Constantine originally promised to shutter the child jail in 2025, though the county’s Care and Closure Advisory Committee set a more realistic date of 2028. With 2025 fast approaching, Dunn seemed to want to signal what seemed pretty obvious to people watching the issue, that the jail wouldn’t be closing in 2025, and if Dunn can help it, ever. Earlier this year, he called the idea of closing the youth jail a “fantasy.” Dunn did not reply to a request for comment.
The climate around this topic has shifted as politicians such as Dunn make claims about a massive rise in juvenile crime. However, this isn’t a dramatic new paradigm of juvenile crime that would warrant a dramatic policy shift. According to cases referred to the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office (PAO), juvenile crime appears to be almost on par with pre pandemic levels. In 2023, the PAO received about 2,182 case referrals for criminal cases involving kids, versus 2,788 case referrals in 2019. Between January and July of this year, law enforcement referred about 1,449 cases to prosecutors, which means if cases double in the second half of the year, the number of cases would remain relatively close to pre pandemic numbers.
Beyond that, while KUOW reported an increase in the number of children booked into the youth jail, this is, again, on par with pre-pandemic numbers, according to data from the King County Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention. The youth jail has averaged about 83 admissions in 2024, versus an average of 80 admissions in 2019.
Relying on rhetoric about rising youth crime, Dunn has rabidly scrutinized King County’s fledgling youth diversion programs, despite initial numbers showing they have a lower or comparable recidivism rate to youth prison (though we can’t truly understand the recidivism rate for at least another couple years.) The diversion programs seem promising, especially since numerous studies show that youth incarceration does little to decrease juvenile crime, and in some cases increases the likelihood of a person reoffending. As Constantine said in a statement to The Stranger after the Council’s vote, “the youth justice system does not produce the outcomes we all want, which are safe communities and healthy kids.” On Friday, Constantine reiterated his dedication to closing the youth jail.
In 2019, Zahilay’s beliefs seemed to be to the left of Constantine’s. He argued against the new youth jail entirely, and stressed exactly these points, that youth prisons increased crime and disproportionately resulted in the arrest and incarceration of Black, Native, and Latino-American youth. That’s still true today. Black youth made up more than half the children in custody or on electronic home monitoring in King County, despite making up just 6% of the county’s population. White kids made up 22% of bookings. While campaigning, Zahilay argued that the county must not put kids into a carceral setting, even kids who the county must detain by law, or kids that must be detained for their safety or for the safety of the public. Zahilay called the youth jail “large, dangerous, expensive and ineffective.” Zahilay promised that if elected, he planned to act boldly and “scrap business as usual.”
But Zahilay embodied business as usual last week when he went along with Dunn’s virtue signal vote promising to keep the youth jail open. Zahilay’s amendment promised, at best, more incremental change to the system, the very strategy he seemed to criticize during his 2019 campaign. Zahilay’s amendment, which Council Members Rod Dembowski and Jorge Barón also supported, pledged to transform the King County youth jail to be more rehabilitative, more education focused, and no longer primarily concerned with confinement of youth.
Zahilay said he still disagrees with how the county operates the jail and argued in an interview with The Stranger Friday that his position on youth incarceration hadn’t changed “that much, actually.” He still supports community based alternatives, and wants a jail that operates more therapeutically. But he no longer believes in one of the prongs of his plan, the close-to-home facilities that he once argued to replace the child jail. Seattle still doesn’t have close-to-home networks, but they do exist in cities such as New York, and these facilities are designed to be small, therapeutic, and keep kids close to their families and their communities. The Care and Closure Committee recommended a system of group homes as part of their plan for closing the youth jail.
Previously, Zahilay argued these facilities would be better because they’d allow kids to stay in their communities, and allow more involvement from the kids’ parents or caregivers. Now, Zahilay said his vision of what close-to-home facilities would accomplish can be achieved at the youth jail facility. Zahilay said he didn’t “want to be too ideological about a specific building” when what he wants is a concept. That’s miles away from a statement Zahilay gave to the Seattle Times in 2019, when he said he flat out opposed a big, youth jail facility because it “promotes all kinds of abuse.”
Zahilay told The Stranger when he came up with his platform in 2019, he did so in partnership with community organizations, such as Community Passageways, SE Network SafetyNet, CHOOSE 180, and Urban Family Center Association, all of whom support the vision of zero youth detention, but are more aligned with the criminal justice reform movement that argues for improving carceral systems as opposed to abolishing them. The groups supported Zahilay’s amendments to Dunn’s motion, as proven by a letter they sent in which they acknowledged the need for a secure facility, even in a reimagined criminal legal system.
Beyond the advocacy organizations that helped build his platform, Zahilay said when he speaks with community members in New Holly, Rainier Vista, and Skyway, “neighborhoods that are predominantly Black and Brown, predominantly living in poverty,” they tell Zahilay that they’re afraid of getting shot and killed, and that they want him to do something “to keep young people from shooting and being shot.” To many of them, that means a secure facility, he said. Zahilay’s team also pointed out, in response to the numbers showing no massive crime increase compared to 2019, the number of cases involving a youth with a firearm more than doubled from 2019 to 2023, according to data from the PAO.
He called Tuesday a challenging vote, “but ultimately, I feel like I did the right thing.”
Zahilay’s promise of no jail-based punishment for kids helped him unseat living civil rights legend Larry Gossett from the Council in 2019. Now, Zahilay’s apparent reversal of his position disappointed abolitionist organizations. Creative Justice Northwest Executive Director Nikkita Oliver, and one of the organizers of the No New Youth Jail campaign, said that as a council touted as one of the most progressive elected in King County in many years, the vote disappointed them. Both Zahilay and Barón voted for an amended bill that was not backed by the research that shows the best ways to address youth violence, Oliver says. Another progressive member of the council, Council Member Teresa Mosqueda, was absent from the vote due to a stomach virus, she told The Stranger Friday by text. When asked how she would have voted, Mosqueda did not respond. Oliver called it a very unfortunate day for Mosqueda to be out.
Oliver disagrees with Zahilay, and the rest of the King County Council, that public safety requires King County to maintain a secure facility with locked doors. They also disagree that locked doors help keep the public safe. King County can lock up as many kids as they want to right now, but hasn’t seen a decline in youth crime. If jailing kids can reduce crime and keep the public safe, why hasn’t it, Oliver pointed out. Because it can’t, as shown by a long-term study of Seattle youth that found “adolescents who were incarcerated were nearly four times more likely to be incarcerated in adulthood than comparable peers who were not confined.”
Research shows that to reduce crime and prevent youth recidivism, King County must avoid jailing them and bolstering funding for community-led youth diversion programs, such as Restorative Community Pathways (RCP), which has received about $16 million since 2021, which amounts to roughly $5 million a year for several different organizations all working to provide services to youth that focus on providing community-based services. Oliver said their organization, Creative Justice, which provides services to RCP, has to fight just to find cab fare for youth to just be transported to the program. That’s compared to the $47 million the county budgeted to run the youth jail.
“I’m disappointed in our elected officials’ ability to prioritize what really matters,” Oliver said.
Oliver pointed out how on the day of the youth jail vote, migrants filled the Council Chamber to beg for funding for housing. Children spoke and asked the King County Council for homes, the very children “that if they don’t get a house, and end up violating laws because of growing up in poverty, they’ll later be prosecuted and thrown into that youth jail,” Oliver said. Instead of talking about that, the Council had a very long drawn out conversation about a non binding motion.
From Oliver’s perspective, an invisible race to succeed Constantine as King County Executive colored the discussion and vote around the youth jail Friday. No one wants to look like the “radical” left, Oliver said. But Oliver pointed to other cities that embraced these research-backed approaches, such as Newark, New Jersey, a Democratic-run city that has prioritized addressing violence as a public health concern, established an Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery, and seen a reduction in murders, overall crime, and shootings. That’s what Oliver would like to see in King County: a real conversation about addressing the root causes of crime, more funding for programs such as RCP that help not only the children accused of crimes, but also the families of those children, and the victims of that crime.
Maybe with rumors swirling that Zahilay plans to run for King County Executive, he decided not to risk sticking to his earlier position to close the youth jail, preferring to try to split the difference by virtue signaling to both the right and the left, which is a very “business as usual” move. Zahilay may sense prevailing political winds moving against strong abolitionist policies. A whole slate of City Council members was just elected on a pro-police platform and politicians rhetoric about crime has failed to reflect dropping crime rates, meaning voters may believe we need a tough-on-crime approach. Plus, every time the local police departments catch a kid involved in a crime, they’re sure to share the story on their social media feeds.
Still, with staffing shortages, overcrowding at youth state facilities, and the significant focus and rhetoric on kids committing crimes, King County could benefit from a strong voice pushing back against incarceration as a viable solution for kids, even if it means telling his own constituents something they don’t want to hear. Zahilay could have at least argued some of the crime numbers seem to simply be normalizing from where they were pre pandemic, while still advocating for more money to combat gun violence. Many people had their eyes on this vote. At a time when tough-on-crime seems to be the only tune politicians are dancing to, Zahilay might have rallied a progressive push back to Dunn’s nonsense, rather than adding a milquetoast amendment full of unfunded promises.