Kids in King County Jail Are Punished Harshly for Pranks and Sent to Isolation, Lawsuit Contends
The King County Regional Justice Center in Kent typically holds between 700 and 1,000 inmates at a time—some of whom are serving out sentences, others who are awaiting trial. Most of those in custody are adults. But at any time anywhere from 15 to 25 of the people in the county jail are youth under the age of 18. Based on the discretion of a King County prosecutor, these teens are being charged as adults, and the treatment they receive at the RJC while awaiting trial differs significantly from the treatment they would be receiving in juvenile detention, according to a class action lawsuit filed Monday in federal court.
The suit alleges that its teenage plaintiffs have been held alone in small, concrete, windowless cells for at least 23 hours a day, sometimes more. They often remain in these cells for days, weeks, or months at a time, with very limited opportunities for recreation, education, or even stretching their legs; sometimes they are only allowed out for 15 minutes every three days. Sometimes, during those 15 minutes, the only place they’re allowed to go is to a room adjoining the cell.
The official reason for being placed in this kind of solitary confinement at the RJC, according to staffers at Columbia Legal Services (the nonprofit firm filing the suit), is often “minor misbehaviors that are common for many teenagers,” such as failing to meet a dress code or “mouthing off” to correctional officers. Once, a plaintiff was disciplined and put in isolation “because he put jam in a lock,” says Nick Straley, a CLS staff attorney who helped conduct an investigation into the RJC’s practices over the past year. To simply “add on and add on and add on” to time spent in isolation for these kinds of pranks without “provid[ing] services to keep the kid from misbehaving,” Straley argues, is both ineffective and inhumane. Research shows that solitary confinement has an even more devastating impact on the teenage brain than it does on an adult’s. It is for this reason that, in January 2016, former President Barack Obama banned federal prisons from holding youth in isolation.
“It’s bad for anyone, but specifically bad for juveniles,” says Travis Andrews, the Juvenile Justice Policy Analyst at CLS. “Regardless of what their criminal status should be, we believe that children should be treated as children.”
Read more: http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/some-kids-tried-as-adults-in-king-county-are-held-in-isolation-for-months/