[tonyz]

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County corrections officers, who were not consulted on the executive’s surprise announcement, were horrified. One senior manager told me that “activists [are] seeking to rewrite the narrative of society,” and, if the shutdowns come to pass, “the ones who will suffer in the end are [people of color], as crime skyrockets and lawlessness becomes the norm.” Frontline correctional officers and medical staff within the jails are in a state of “chaos” and bracing for “mass layoffs,” the manager told me. According to the internal documents, the county executive warned his team to expect “stress, confusion, and a sense of overwhelm” within the department, but reassured them that this should not impede their work to create a “shift in power structure” that would let “internal discrimination and racism come to the surface.”

What will replace jails? According to Budget for Justice, the leading coalition of the progressive-justice movement, the government should “transfer resources from formal justice systems to community-based care” programs “rooted in restorative justice practices that are trauma-informed, human rights-, and equity-based.” Specifically, the activists highlight three nonprofit programs as models for the new justice system—Community Passageways, Creative Justice, and Community Justice Project—which will offer programs such as “healing circles,” “narrative storytelling,” art-based therapy, and community organizing.

The three providers share a philosophical foundation predicated on the assumption that poverty, racism, and oppression force the dispossessed into crime and violence. The programs are designed to reveal how “systems of power create conditions that perpetuate violence in our homes and daily lives” and help offenders “reimagine a society in which their liberation is not only possible, but sustainable by the community itself.”

Though these programs are ideologically aligned with revolutionary goals, they have failed to serve as practical replacements for the “formal justice system.” In one high-profile case, prosecutors diverted a youth offender named Diego Carballo-Oliveros into a “peace circle” program, in which nonprofit leaders burned sage, passed around a talking feather, and led Carballo-Oliveros through “months of self-reflection.” According to one corrections official, prosecutors and activists paraded Carballo-Oliveros around the city as the “shining example” of their approach. However, two weeks after completing the peace circle program, Carballo-Oliveros and two accomplices lured a 15-year-old boy into the woods, robbed him, and slashed open his abdomen, chest, and head with a retractable knife. The victim placed a desperate phone call to his sister and a passerby called an ambulance, but the youth later died at the hospital.

Despite public setbacks and no tangible record of successful alternatives, County Executive Constantine is moving forward with his plan to close the downtown jail and end all youth incarceration. For activists, however, the revolution is not happening fast enough. To increase the pressure, they dispatched a mob to Constantine’s home one night to demand that he speed things up. They shouted him down and shook cans of spray paint, calling on Constantine to release all youth prisoners, including minors charged with murder, because “the police are murderers all the time.” Constantine, standing under a streetlamp with his arms crossed, tried to placate them.

Seattle’s activists have long sought to limit the scope and authority of the municipal courts. For years, influential organizations such as Budget for Justice and the Public Defender Association have advocated for eliminating cash bail, ending probation, reducing the number of municipal judges, and easingsex-offender registration requirements—all under the rubric of “dismantling systems of racism, oppression, and poverty.” Now, with momentum from Black Lives Matter, the activist coalition is mobilizing behind a much more ambitious agenda: abolishing the municipal court altogether and transferring authority to a “shadow court system,” administered by ideologically aligned nonprofit organizations such as Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD), which provides “crisis response, immediate psychosocial assessment, and wrap-around services including substance-abuse disorder treatment and housing”—that is, replacing the punitive state with a therapeutic one.

The reforms put into place so far are already spiraling into anarchy. In recent years, Seattle has become a haven for tent encampments, public drug use, and street disorder, and the city now has one of the nation’s highest property-crime rates. LEAD, which receives $6 million in annual city funding, has repeatedly failed to produce results. In its original “scientific study,” when controlling for old warrants, LEAD had no statistical effect on new arrests—in other words, participation in LEAD was as effective as doing nothing. Despite mounting skepticism from the public and even Mayor Durkan, LEAD executives have refused to release detailed recidivism data since 2015, even hiding critical participant information from municipal court judges.

Finally, last year, following a series of high-profile “repeat offender” cases, Seattle Municipal Court Judge Ed McKenna tried to raise the alarm about the city’s failure to prosecute career criminals like Francisco Calderon, a homeless man who had garnered more than 70 criminal convictions but continued to secure jail-free plea deals from the prosecutor and public defender’s offices. The Calderon trial was widely covered in the media and dovetailed with an explosive report about the city’s “prolific offenders” who had been terrorizing residents and businesses. But McKenna’s call to restore public order provoked a powerful backlash. Almost immediately, progressive leaders—City Attorney Pete Holmes, Public Defense Director Anita Khandelwal, and LEAD cofounder Lisa Daugaard—waged a public-relations war against the judge and pressured him to retire two years before the end of his term.

Judge McKenna warns that the progressive-justice coalition is perilously close to establishing a shadow court system. He argues that Holmes, Khandelwal, and Daugaard are becoming “modern-day lords and landowners,” with the power to dispense justice outside the constitutional framework. McKenna believes that nonprofit diversion programs, which exist beyond the confines of the state and are not subject to meaningful public oversight, are potentially violating the Sixth Amendment, which guarantees the right to a public trial before a jury of one’s peers. “In [pretrial diversion schemes], potential defendants are contacted by prosecutors and told that if they ‘voluntarily’ participate in specific programs, criminal charges will not be filed against them,” McKenna says. “The ethical concern, however, is whether accused persons are waiving their rights ‘knowingly and voluntarily’ or whether accused persons feel compelled to waive those rights under threat of prosecution and jail.”

Despite such concerns, the campaign to replace traditional justice with activism continues. After the George Floyd–related unrest, dozens of King County prosecutors, organized as the Equity & Justice Workgroup, issued a letter encouraging their own office to stop filing charges for assault, theft, drug dealing, burglary, escape, fare evasion, and auto theft. In effect, they want to move all but the most serious crimes into the nonprofit-diversion process. Meantime, LEAD, seeing a chance to extend its power, severed ties with the Seattle Police Department and declared its intent to move “beyond policing” and serve as the centerpiece of the new progressive-justice complex. According to several sources with whom I’ve spoken, a sense of foreboding is pervasive within the municipal court. Its officers believe that their entire branch of government, designed to provide an open forum for justice and a bulwark against tyranny, could be obliterated.

“The system does not wish to be remade and it resists remaking,” Daugaard told reporters. “And there’s no doubt that we would not be having anything like the scale of a redesigned conversation that is occurring if not for the top-line demands of people in the street.”