The mission of the state’s largest youth prison in Washington is to “provide a safe, structured, and secure environment” where residents “develop positive habits, and disengage from the activities that brought them here.” Dialectical behavior therapy, treatment groups, recreation and religious events are supposed to provide youth with “the skills for successfully reintegrating into their communities and families while maintaining a crime-free lifestyle.”
But in the past nine months, staff have been arrested for sexual misconduct and selling drugs inside the rural Chehalis facility. Fights among incarcerated boys and young men have spiraled. Overcrowding and understaffing have left youth locked in cells for as long as 21 hours a day, according to a growing tally of legal complaints.
The latest turn in the facility’s tale of trouble unfolds this week, when lawyers for the state ask a Thurston County Superior Court judge to approve a controversial emergency-response measure if the population continues to surge. The state wants to transfer residents of Green Hill School to an adult prison. State officials are also considering conversion of an adult prison in Aberdeen and building two additional 16-bed facilities in Clark and Snohomish counties.
The urgency of the situation at Green Hill remains ever-present for the youth and their families. As recently as July, the 180-bed Green Hill School housed 236 residents.
“That facility is in need of emergency intervention right now,” said Rashida Robbins, the parent of a young person housed at Green Hill, at a public hearing in August. “Someone’s going to get hurt in there if we don’t intervene.”
First-person accounts in a lawsuit filed by King County public defenders portray a stark picture of how basic rights have been trampled with too few staff monitoring safe movement within the facility.
“About two to three weeks ago, two incarcerated young people across from my cell were screaming and crying to use the bathroom,” 23-year-old Royal Adams stated in a May court filing.
In August, 18-year-old M.L. described an institution-wide “lockdown” until 5 p.m. lasting three days in a row, while prison guards from the Department of Corrections brought in during the crisis conducted searches. During that time, no rehabilitation programs could take place.
“When young people are confined to their cells when they are supposed to be programming, they yell and kick the doors and bang on them,” M.L. stated. “It is very stressful and hard to hear how upset everyone is.”
The Green Hill promise falls short
Since passage of justice reform legislation in 2018 and 2019, Green Hill has housed teens and young adults sentenced for a range of serious crimes through their 25th birthdays.
Its sprawling campus of low-slung buildings is located along Interstate 5, circled by barbed wire. The state’s Department of Children, Youth and Families runs the facility, which offers substance abuse treatment, counseling, education and a range of other other rehabilitative programs.
Residents can pursue bachelor’s degrees through nearby colleges, or take up vocational offerings, including cosmetology, construction and car repair. A state-of-the-art, solar-powered recreation center provides youth with a kitchen, a gymnasium and a weight room. There’s a lawn area for meditation and grounding through barefoot exercises. A healing garden offers mental health benefits, as well as fresh vegetables for meals.
Green Hill’s Capitol Classroom brings legislative staff into the facility to teach courses in law and advocacy. Participants leave the facility for field trips, donning suits and ties for visits to the Olympia statehouse, where they meet lawmakers and testify at hearings. Another program, Making a Difference Every Day, or M.A.D.E. Men, was created by a Green Hill resident. It trains and pays incarcerated youth to serve as peer mentors at the facility.
Despite those bright points, according to mounting complaints in state courts, press accounts and public testimony, the state has failed that mandate, in large part due to a staffing crisis. At a recent meeting of a state oversight board last month, Department of Children, Youth and Families officials said 60% of the youth prison’s staff had turned over during the pandemic, leaving more inexperienced employees managing a growing population, in an increasingly dangerous setting.
Problems in Washington not unique to the state
Green Hill is not alone. Across the country, lawsuits, investigative reports and watchdog agencies assert that juvenile justice facilities are experiencing dangerous fallout from short-handed detention facilities. High turnover, employees who fail to show up, and difficulty filling vacant positions have resulted in more fights and deteriorated mental health among youth, as well as inhibited access to vital programming.
In New York, the state comptroller’s office released findings in April that staffing shortages had contributed to an increase in self-harm and drug use among youth held in locked facilities. In South Carolina, the News From The States outlet reported that youth have slept on the floor in detention centers surrounded by feces. Officials have since contracted with private companies “to recruit employees, fix decrepit buildings and send teens out of state.”
A Kentucky audit found chronic staffing issues led to more youth placed in solitary confinement and greater use of pepper spray.
Some Republican critics blame a justice reform enacted a half-dozen years ago for Green Hill’s current crisis. Juvenile Rehabilitation until the age of 25, or JR to 25, allows young people sentenced in adult court for serious crimes committed as minors to remain in the juvenile system until they turn 25. Before the law’s passage, youth were transferred to adult facilities run by the Department of Corrections on their 21st birthdays.
The laws were passed in response to growing evidence that brain development continues through the early 20s, and that youth sent to more punitive adult prisons are more likely to be re-arrested upon release.
As a result of the JR to 25 reform, Green Hill’s numbers have increased by more than 60% over the past two years — an increase that had been anticipated, but appears to have overwhelmed state overseers. Young people facing adult sentences now comprise roughly one-third of the population, and remain for an average of 33 months before being moved to adult prisons to finish their sentences, according to state statistics.
“People who say they care deeply about the young people at Green Hill don’t have the foresight to see what their own policies are doing to these young people,” Republican state Sen. John Braun told The Center Square last month. “Our Democratic majorities in the Legislature are focused on ideologies and be damned with the safety of others.”
State Sen. Noel Frame, who worked on JR to 25 legislation, wrote in a Seattle Times op-ed that poor planning is to blame for troubles at the facility.
“We can’t stand by while our vision of a juvenile justice system that helps young people get their lives back on track and ensures true community safety falls apart,” she wrote. “The problem isn’t that vision and JR to 25 — it’s mismanagement.”
Amid the discord, amendments to the reform law are now being considered by state lawmakers and the Washington Department of Children, Youth and Families, the department’s Secretary Ross Hunter said at an Aug. 28 public hearing.
Unsatisfied, some are calling for Hunter to step down.
They include two state legislators and thousands of unionized state workers who renewed a no-confidence vote taken against the former Microsoft manager-turned state official last year. The Washington State Partnership Council on Juvenile Justice, a state advisory panel, also urged Gov. Jay Inslee to fire Hunter. According to a local news report, members cited the “escalating mismanagement of the Department of Children, Youth and Families that has led to the current crisis, eroded trust in the agency, and caused profound harm to the children and youth in its care.”
Green Hill staff betray trust
Amid the upheaval, staff at the Green Hill School who are paid to alter the paths of youth in their care and custody continue to be accused of crimes themselves. The alleged offenses include:
- Last fall, a police raid yielded stashes of vape pens, fentanyl, cannabis, methamphetamines and weapons hidden by staff, according to a KIRO 7 report. At the beginning of this year, four youth overdosed on fentanyl, though none died.
- In January, an employee was arrested for dropping a bag of weed right outside a classroom. Two months later, another staffer was taken into custody after being accused of failing to intervene when a young person was beaten in the facility. Prosecutors charged her with inciting a riot, abuse of office and conspiracy to commit assault. In July, another employee was caught selling meth to an incarcerated youth.
- And in August, two Green Hill employees were arrested for sexual acts with a resident and inappropriate communication. A King 5 investigation found Washington has paid out $4.5 million since 2018 to settle sex-abuse claims filed by 23 current and former Green Hill residents.
Meanwhile, over the past two years, violence has surged. The Lewis County Prosecutor’s Office has charged approximately 140 counts of “prison riot” at Green Hill, according to a letter sent by the Partnership Council on Juvenile Justice. That accounts for 67% of all statewide prison riot charges, even though Green Hill houses roughly 1% of the total incarcerated population in Washington.
“When young people are confined to their cells when they are supposed to be programming, they yell and kick the doors and bang on them. It is very stressful and hard to hear how upset everyone is.”
— First-person account from a court filing
The facility became so unsafe that on July 12, Secretary Hunter ordered a halt to all new intakes and abruptly transferred 43 young people with adult sentences, ages 21 to 24, to an adult prison. In a press release, Hunter stated they would have eventually been sent to the Department of Corrections to serve out their longer sentences, and that rapidly reducing the population would better protect Green Hill’s residents from violence.
“This decision was not made lightly, but the security risks related to overcrowded facilities have made our current situation untenable,” he said.
Secretary Hunter continues to push for more transfers from Green Hill to an adult prison, with the issue scheduled to be heard in a Thurston County courtroom Wednesday.
“We looked at some alternatives, there weren’t very many,” he said at the August public hearing. “We can’t run a therapeutic system without being a safe one.”
That action has already resulted in two lawsuits. The Seattle-based public-interest firm Columbia Legal Services called for an immediate return of the young adults to the juvenile facility. A separate lawsuit by Washington counties — which was settled last month — alleged the agency had violated state law by failing its obligation to house youthful offenders in a safe and rehabilitative setting.
Two weeks later, on July 29, a Thurston County Superior Court ordered the youth returned back to Green Hill, saying that the agency failed to follow its rules in removing the youth from the prison.
Gov. Inslee then intervened, ordering employees from the adult-serving Department of Corrections and private security guards into the Chehalis youth prison.
Those measures have alarmed youth advocates who say they are not appropriate staff members for a youth-focused facility providing treatment and rehabilitation. Juvenile public defenders are among those who have filed complaints, alleging that the state continues to fall short.
“This additional staffing in the form of security guards, not staff who can provide rehabilitative programming to youth, was still insufficient,” King County Superior Court filings state.
A lawyer with the county’s Office of Public Defense, Katie Hurley, summed up the situation in an interview with The Imprint earlier this month, stating: “No rehabilitation is happening at Green Hill right now.”
