The event for assembly with a half-dozen younger folks incarcerated on the Echo Glen Youngsters’s Heart was a guide membership. They have been studying “Wards of the State,” my guide in regards to the overlap between foster care and lockup, they usually needed to speak.
I got here away with some observations of my very own: First, an appreciation for the sophistication of their questions. Second: how few retailers they needed to train these inquisitive minds.
“Why are some folks extra helpful than others?” a younger man requested.
He’d been pondering the case of accused rapist Brock Turner, questioning why the choose had alluded to the Stanford College pupil’s vivid future when sentencing him to 6 months in a county jail for sexual assault, as a substitute of the six years in jail prosecutors needed. Such a stringent punishment would have had “extreme” impacts on {the teenager}, Decide Aaron Persky reasoned.
The younger folks speaking to me at Echo Glen questioned why officers by no means appeared to ascertain something like that when taking a look at them.
For the previous two years, trustworthy readers of this web page have seen one piece after one other chronicling the pressure-cooker ambiance at Washington’s second youth jail, the bigger and extra chaotic Inexperienced Hill Faculty. There have been good causes for the eye. Final summer time, on account of overcrowding, some younger folks at Inexperienced Hill have been confined to their cells greater than 20 hours a day and supplied with “urine bottles” to alleviate themselves since there weren’t sufficient officers to escort them to a rest room.
But, whereas the crises at Inexperienced Hill have dominated headlines, realities at Echo Glen are in some methods worse. The idea governing each prisons is, purportedly, rehabilitation, the concept that filling younger peoples’ still-developing brains with schooling and counseling can truly immediate change. However within the classroom at Echo Glen the place we met, it was clear that the residents, all between the ages of 15 and 24, had nearly nothing to do.
Training there’s spotty at greatest, and nobody is getting any of the packages I noticed at Echo 5 years in the past — no extra gardening lessons, or tutoring for a highschool GED diploma. Nor any college-level work — all of which had been promised in 2018, when legislators handed the legislation permitting younger folks to stay in juvenile lockup till age 25.
No faculty district on this state would tolerate such languishing failure. You may argue that these younger folks would possibly discover higher packages in jail, the place there are established affiliate’s and bachelor’s-degree packages.
One other promise unmet? An $8 million fence to encompass Echo’s 32-acre property. Ross Hunter, former Secretary of the Division of Youngsters, Youth and Households, demanded the cash to construct one two years in the past, after a number of children escaped, and building was supposed to start final spring. However after I visited, earlier this month, there was nothing however an orange pylon to gradual my automobile.
Deep within the forest, on its sprawling campus in Snoqualmie, Echo Glen doesn’t give off the simmering, verge-of-crisis ambiance that has lengthy prevailed at Inexperienced Hill. However it could be much more of a warehouse for teenagers.
— Claudia Rowe
