By Aaron Allen, The Seattle Medium
Earlier this week, the King County Auditor’s Office presented a report to the King County Council’s Justice and Law Committee at a virtual committee meeting to address racial biases in housing, discipline and mental health housing in county jails and how law enforcement and public officials can re-imagine and work towards reforming “a broken system.”
Convened by Justice and Law Committee Chair Girmay Zahilay, the meeting was also attended by Vice-Chair Kathy Lambert, Councilmembers Claudia Balducci, Rod Dembowski, Reagan Dunn, and Jeanne Kohl-Welles. In addition, representatives from the Auditor’s Office and the Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention (DAJD) were present as well.
A year-long audit of King County’s adult jails — which focused on violent incidents, including excessive and unnecessary uses of force, fights and assaults, sexual assaults, self-harm, and deaths that are not the result of natural causes — found concerns and issues with racial bias in discipline and housing, shortages of mental health housing and more. However, the report also revealed that pandemic-imposed social distancing drastically reduced instances of violence in the Seattle jail. According to officials, the report was designed to shed light on the following objectives: What are trends in violent incidents? What are the causes of violent incidents and what steps does DAJD take to address them? To what extent do the steps DAJD takes to reduce violent incidents address underlying causes and meet best practices?
The 66-page report included six sections focusing on different aspects of the audit, and the key takeaways which included: racial bias in housing, racial bias in discipline, the Seattle jail is almost three times more violent than Kent jail, and a shortage of psychiatric housing. The report also revealed the number of deaths in custody each year, rare occurrences of excessive use of force and the number of incidents where pepper spray was misused.
“Both the council and the executive have been really pushing hard for quite a while on what is re-imagining what this criminal, legal system looks like,” says John Diaz, Director of DAJD. “We know that this legal system among many other social structures in our country are disproportionate.”
“We see the disproportionality as people walk through our doors, although we have little control about who walks through our doors and the people are disproportionate as they walk out the doors because of sentencing and sanctions,” continued Diaz.
According to the report, between 2017 and 2019 violent incident rates were much higher at the King County Correctional Facility than the Maleng Regional Justice Center. In the King County Correctional Facility there were 528 incidents per year per 1,000 inmates, compared to 183 incidents at the Maleng Regional Justice Center.
The report also reviewed 99 percent of all disciplinary actions in King County’s adult jails between 2017 and 2019. The audit uncovered that Black people made up 36 percent of the jail population, but 50 percent of people in the two highest security levels. The opposite was true of White people, who accounted for 56 percent of the jail population but only 43 percent of those in the highest two security levels. Conversely, White people were over-represented in minimum-security housing, while Black people were under-represented.
In addition, the report found that, on average, Black people received 23 percent more infractions than people of other races. It also found that corrections officers gave infractions that carry harsher sanctions to Black people more often than other people in custody.
Even more alarming, the report revealed that Black women, on average, were punished with 70 percent more days in restrictive housing per rule violation than all other women.
“We found the Black people in custody were over-represented in higher security level and Black and indigenous people faced more time in disciplinary housing,” says Brooke Leary, Law Enforcement Audit Manager in charge of the audit. “In contrast White people were over-represented in lower security housing and received fewer days in restrictive housing per infraction.”
Investigators also found 19 incidents where officers pepper sprayed people who were trying to walk away, were being passive, or were responding only verbally. DAJD’s policies say that officers should not use pepper spray as a means of punishment or retaliation, including as a response to verbal abuse alone.
The report also highlighted a shortage of psychiatric housing: According to the report, “The 7th floor of KCCF is designed as psychiatric housing, but in the past few years that hasn’t been enough space for the increasing number of people who need it. By the fourth quarter of 2019, there were on average 18 people in custody each day who needed psychiatric housing but who were placed on other floors. This creates challenges to providing consistent care to this vulnerable population.”
The report made 25 recommendations for improving the problems and barriers found in the audit, including population controls, risk-based scoring to provide more equitable discipline and housing assignments. Some of the key recommendations include:
• Have DAJD work with justice partners to manage the population of the county jails, with the goal of no double-bunking
• Have DAJD and JHS work together to (1) develop in service training for COs on mental and behavioral health of people in custody, (2) develop procedures for information sharing between classification, corrections, medical, and psychiatric staff to ensure proper management and treatment of people with mental illness, and (3) develop and implement a plan to ensure people housed in psychiatric overflow receive commensurate care to those housed in designated psychiatric housing.
• Have DAJD revise its criminal involvement scoring criteria to adjust for systemic racial inequities by removing incarceration experience
• Have DAJD implement a revised management risk scoring rubric using quantifiable measures to reduce bias
• Have DAJD monitor the racial makeup of its security classifications and infractions and sanctions data on an ongoing basis to detect and mitigate racial disparities
• Have DAJD make changes to its sanctions process to reduce subjectivity that may contribute to disproportionalities
• Have DAJD and JHS work together to increase the number of suicide resistant cells in places used for restrictive housing and psychiatric overflow; improve communication on drug-related deaths
The audit also recommended that the County implement a more comprehensive risk management strategy to improve jail safety. As part of this strategy, they recommended that DAJD enhance communication and training to better care for people with mental illness and reduce racial inequities in housing and discipline.
