A Thurston County Superior Court judge has given the state two weeks to return 43 young men who were abruptly transferred from the Green Hill School juvenile rehabilitation center to an adult prison in Shelton, unless the state can demonstrate that the emergency move was necessary to reduce dangerous overcrowding.
Columbia Legal Services, which represents young men relocated from Green Hill, had requested a preliminary injunction to overturn the Department of Children, Youth, and Families’ (DCYF) decision and ban similar transfers, calling them “egregious violations of state law.”
Attorney Sarah Nagy claimed that the state denied the 21- to 24-year-olds due process, including legal counsel and statutory hearings. The law allows young adults with criminal convictions as juveniles to stay in juvenile facilities until they turn 25.
Nagy stated that if her clients are not returned to the juvenile prison, “they will be unable to complete their degrees, the programming that is unique to Green Hill School; they’ll lose the continuity of their mental health programming, their job training.”
One of the young guys transported to Shelton was already attacked by an inmate and placed in solitary confinement for his own safety, according to Nagy.
Dan Judge, DCYF attorney, argued that the state moved the men without court approval because it is responsible for maintaining order in its correctional facilities, and that seeking emergency hearings to move the men would have given the young prisoners advance notice and “presented a great danger to an already untenable situation at the prison that was on the verge of a riot.”
Days before the move, the judge reported that 20 convicts at Green Hill clashed with officials after authorities confiscated a microwave because one of them had used it as a weapon and beat someone with it.
The judge stated that Green Hill is presently down to 188 convicts, close to its target of 180, after hitting a population of 240 young people many weeks ago. A court order requiring the men to return to Green Hill immediately, he argued, “would be equivalent to throwing gasoline on a smoldering fire.”
Judge Anne Egeler ruled that the state cannot move any more prisoners from juvenile facilities to adult prisons without due process, and that the Aug. 2 deadline to return the 43 men from the state prison to Green Hill School gives the state time to seek emergency permission to keep the men in custody.
Thurston County Superior Court has scheduled a permanent injunction hearing in the lawsuit for September 27, which would order the state to restore the young men to Green Hill and not relocate any others without due process.
DCYF informed counties on July 5 that it would suspend the intake of adolescents sentenced to state rehabilitation until it resolved the congestion at Green Hill. That decision has caused havoc in county courts, with many claiming that their local juvenile detention facilities lack the capacity or services to house young people for extended periods of time.
