The event for assembly with a half-dozen younger individuals incarcerated on the Echo Glen Kids’s Middle was a ebook membership. They have been studying “Wards of the State,” my ebook in regards to the overlap between foster care and lockup, they usually wished 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 individuals extra worthwhile than others?” a younger man requested.
He’d been pondering the case of accused rapist Brock Turner, questioning why the decide had alluded to the Stanford College scholar’s brilliant future when sentencing him to 6 months in a county jail for sexual assault, as a substitute of the six years in jail prosecutors wished. Such a stringent punishment would have had “extreme” impacts on {the teenager}, Decide Aaron Persky reasoned.
The younger individuals speaking to me at Echo Glen puzzled why officers by no means appeared to ascertain something like that when them.
For the previous two years, devoted 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 College. There have been good causes for the eye. Final summer time, resulting from overcrowding, some younger individuals 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 toilet.
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.
Schooling there’s spotty at finest, and nobody is getting any of the applications I noticed at Echo 5 years in the past — no extra gardening courses, 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 individuals to stay in juvenile lockup till age 25.
No college district on this state would tolerate such languishing failure. You might argue that these younger individuals would possibly discover higher applications in jail, the place there are established affiliate’s and bachelor’s-degree applications.
One other promise unmet? An $8 million fence to encompass Echo’s 32-acre property. Ross Hunter, former Secretary of the Division of Kids, Youth and Households, demanded the cash to construct one two years in the past, after a number of youngsters escaped, and development was supposed to start final spring. However once I visited, earlier this month, there was nothing however an orange pylon to sluggish 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
