Bootsy Holler
Karen Rispoli and Ralph Bunch say they were treated unfairly.
Related Content
More About
Ralph Bunch got his final walking papers last month.
For 10 years, the veteran corrections employee has been trying to deal with the troubled kids in the King County juvenile detention facility. But in the two years since he joined three other detention employees in a racial discrimination suit against his employer, he says he's been a marked man at work. In mid-July, after six months on administrative leave on a claim that he screened a violent video for juvenile male detainees, the county fired him.
But Bunch isn't going away quietly. His racial discrimination suit against the county goes to trial this October, and he's appealing his firing to the county personnel board. He's confident he'll win, based on contradicting witness statements, an inadequate investigation, his main accuser's failure to pass a lie detector test, and several witnesses in his favor who were never interviewed by detention center officials.
That legal drama is just the latest in a series of costly lawsuits and settlements that have plagued King County's juvenile detention division over the past six years. County executive Ron Sims says recent court activity is simply a by-product of his dictate to clean up the troubled system. "When I have unprofessional staff, I have the mistreatment of young people," he says. "I wanted that place cleaned up, and I still want it cleaned up."
Bunch responds that the latest attempt to fire him came after he filed suit against the county, not before.
The county has been making major shake-ups in the management. They've recently resorted to downsizing—moving court and probation services to other departments and putting the juvenile lockup on East Alder Street under the jurisdiction of the adult jail system. Sims says he got tired of contempt citations for inadequate work by the department's probation workers, so he transferred them and their duties to the courts. "I said, 'They work for you now, and if they can't get it to work, fire them,'" he says. But not all of the 200 juvenile detention employees (who supervise a similar number of young detainees) agree that the targeted employees are the ones who deserve to be shown the door.
The majority of the 120 to 200 young people incarcerated daily in the facility range from age 14 to age 17, although youths up to age 21 can be serving time there, if still under the jurisdiction of the juvenile courts. The average stay is 11 days, the maximum 30 days (not including children charged with serious crimes who are awaiting trial).
There's no dispute that the juvenile jail has bred a culture of favoritism, cronyism, and discrimination. "The situation [in juvenile detention] is such that employees on all sides fear retaliation from management, reprisals from line supervisors, and retribution from co-workers if they risk complaining," wrote Bryon Warfield-Graham, then-supervisor of the county's Affirmative Action Workforce Diversity Unit, in a 1993 investigative report. He adds that employee interviews found "almost unanimous criticism of the management of [juvenile detention] and its ability to manage personnel, conduct investigations, award discipline, and respond to complaints."
This isn't old news to some employees, who say little has changed, despite four different bosses since 1994. Five, if you count the temporary replacement for current juvenile detention manager Nate Caldwell. He's in Florida, awaiting trial on federal charges that he and three colleagues at a former job conspired to use an escape as an excuse to fire a black jail lieutenant (see accompanying story).
Sims says he's on a mission to fix problems in juvenile detention that go back not just several years, but several administrations. He says a trusted senior staffer who served as acting director of juvenile detention described the atmosphere in the department as "being like Kosovo. Every executive's been down this path, and they've all turned their backs," he says. "My goal is to clean up that institution so that kids can go through safely."
LIKE MOST PERSONNEL matters, Bunch's case is complicated, and arguments can be made supporting both sides. In short, his bosses have a paper trail of various disciplinary actions against him; he says he's been targeted for years. Bunch says his run of trouble coincides with his decision to testify in support of four co-workers in a 1995 civil suit against detention union officials. The timing may be coincidental, but Bunch was twice suspended in August 1995, shortly after his name appeared on a witness list for the trial of Local 2084 and then-union president David Winger. Bunch got suspended a third time in late November of that year, about two weeks after a King County Superior Court jury awarded four female detention workers a total of $800,000 (including an $80,000 personal assessment against Winger) and $146,134 in attorneys' fees.
Fellow employees describe Bunch as having a good rapport with detainees. He's no hulking goon, but is solidly built and carries himself with physical confidence, a must in any corrections facility. Especially for Bunch: Colleagues say that, since filing his suit in May 1999, he's been targeted by managers who routinely assign the most troublesome detainees to his care. "A lot of those kids are seriously combative and have assault issues," says one detention employee. Last April, Bunch had his jaw broken by a detainee while trying to break up a fistfight in his unit.
