THE 17-YEAR-OLD I'll call Jose is speaking with me about the state's juvenile jails. "Most people don't really get rehabbed in there, you know," he says. He should know—it hadn't happened to him by the time he got out of the Maple Lane detention center in March, where he was serving a one-year sentence for a stabbing related to his crack dealing. The urinalysis tests he was forced to take as a condition of his parole kept coming back dirty, indicating drug use. So his parole officer sent him back to Maple Lane for another 30 days.
Finally he decided to change. "It helped when I got locked up," he says. "I had more time to think. I asked myself, 'Do I want to keep going back to the same place?'" While such professions of transformation can't be taken on faith, Jose seems to be doing well for now. The slender youth with shoulder-length dark hair attends an alternative school located above the Seattle office of the state Juvenile Rehabilitation Administration (JRA), which administers parole, and spends three hours a day after school in a landscaping program run by the office.
Some of Jose's friends, released from jail more recently, are having a different experience. If they want to take drugs, skip school, or hang out with old gang buddies, there's little the state is trying to do to stop them. In one of the odder moves by a purportedly tough-on-crime Republican legislature, the state eliminated juvenile parole as of August 1 for everyone but sex offenders and the 25 percent of young criminals considered at highest risk of re-offending. (Authorities here don't know of any other state that has similarly ditched routine juvenile parole.) The JRA estimates that 800 kids a year around the state now will be released without parole; 272 are already out without the kind of supervision that kept tabs on Jose until he finally began turning his life around.
Just about everyone involved with juvenile offenders—prosecutors, prison officials, social workers, and parole officers—is appalled. "It doesn't make any sense," says Pierce County Prosecutor John Landenburg, who has been outspoken on the issue. "You only have to understand that 95 percent of all juvenile criminals end up staying with the county." He is referring to county youth detention facilities rather than state institutions like Maple Lane or Echo Glen. Only the most dangerous 5 percent—designated as such because of extensive criminal history or the commission of particularly violent crimes—are incarcerated by the state. Since only this 5 percent is eligible for parole, the state actually is releasing unsupervised 75 percent of the most dangerous 5 percent of juvenile criminals in Washington.
Among those scheduled for August release without parole are a 17-year-old girl with 40 assaults to her name and a 19-year-old boy who began committing crimes at age 12 and was sent away most recently for assaulting a pregnant woman while breaking into her car.
One wonders what those crime-stopping Republicans were thinking. The same legislature passed a sweeping juvenile crime bill in 1997 that in many ways cracked down on underage criminals—by sending older teens to the adult system, for example. The bill also allocated $4.5 million in the following biennium to set up a system of what is called "intensive parole" for highest-risk offenders.
Gaining popularity across the country, intensive parole calls for much closer supervision of offenders. As it is being implemented in this state (in what may be the nation's first statewide program), parole officers or their assistants meet with kids 14 times per month immediately after their release, and four times monthly as the six-month period of supervision winds down (previously, parole officers were required to meet only twice each month with the kids on their caseload, though in reality they often met more frequently). Intensive parole also involves curfews, electronic monitoring, and—for kids with no constructive agenda—a mandate to report daily to a center where they will take classes and join work crews.
Juvenile justice workers had been advocating for intensive parole for some time. What they didn't expect was that the Legislature, in funding the costly program, would cut $1.3 million in funding for regular parole.
SO BAFFLED ARE some observers that they assume the failure to allocate money for standard parole was an oversight that somehow slipped into the massive 1997 bill. But Rep. Tom Huff, that year's chair of the House Appropriations Committee, says not only that the move was deliberate but that he does not regret it. In the drive to save taxpayer money, he says, "we have to make tough decisions." And he points out that the Legislature actually put more money overall into juvenile parole because the intensive system costs so much. "We put money into areas where we felt, based on research, that it would do the most good."
For Huff, the question of research is central. He argues that parole administrators have not been able to supply any "conclusive evidence" that ordinary parole works. While conceding that Gov. Gary Locke is likely to propose restoring funding for parole in his December budget, Huff believes that the Republican caucus won't be inclined to vote approval unless appropriate research studies can be found.
