Crossposted from Zero Youth Detention  Community Accountability Boards (“CABs”) have served as a diversion program – or alternative to the formal court process – for first-time juvenile misdemeanor cases in King County since 1959. CABs are made up of trained community volunteers who hear juvenile cases and devise a tailored plan of accountability for each young person.  Read more from Zero Youth Detention

Crossposted from Cultivating Connections  Over the past year, the Department of Community and Human Services (DCHS) has partnered with C4 Innovations to analyze the racial equity impact of homeless housing prioritization tools used across the country. C4’s report, published in October 2019, found that one of the most commonly used tools – the Vulnerability Index – Service Prioritization Decision Assistance Tool or VI-SPDAT – results in higher average vulnerability scores for white people compared to people of color. Their conclusions reinforce DCHS evaluators’ ongoing efforts to understand and improve coordinated entry prioritization.  Read more… Read More

Community members and King County employees are invited to join in  honoring our nation’s foremost human rights leader and King County’s namesake, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The theme for the 2020 Annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration is “Yes, we are on the move and no wave of racism can stop us. We are on the move now.” They keynote address will be given by john a. powell, Director, Othering & Belonging Institute, University of California, Berkeley. The program also includes music and spoken word.   Thursday, Jan. 16, 2020,  noon to 1 p.m.,… Read More

Community members and King County employees are invited to join in  honoring our nation’s foremost human rights leader and King County’s namesake, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The theme for the 2020 Annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration is “Yes, we are on the move and no wave of racism can stop us. We are on the move now.” They keynote address will be given by john a. powell, Director, Othering & Belonging Institute, University of California, Berkeley. The program also includes music and spoken word.  Thursday, Jan. 16, 2020,  noon to 1 p.m., Town Hall… Read More

Fair and Just Prosecution recently invited King County Prosecuting Attorney Dan Satterberg and Deputy Chief of Staff Carla Lee to New Haven, CT, to speak to 25 newly-elected (and some veteran) district attorneys, academics and a Yale law students about the important role prosecuting attorneys can play in reviewing long sentences imposed in prior decades. The King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office (PAO) is doing this through ‘second look’ case work. “A prosecutor’s obligation to do justice extends backwards as well as forward,” said Dan Satterberg. This ‘second look’ concept includes a review of an old cases… Read More

Crossposted from For the Defense  For years, Detric Johnson felt as though there was nothing he could do to erase the mistakes of his past. He faced more than $10,000 in legal financial obligations (LFOs), a crippling burden. He had felonies on his record, most of them 25 years old. Without a driver’s license, he couldn’t land a job.  “My life was in a shambles,” he said.  All that changed over the course of a few months, when an old DUI and another driving charge caught up with him and he was assigned a… Read More

Crossposted from Zero Youth Detention  Each year, the Annie E. Casey Foundation hosts a national conference for the over 300 jurisdictions in 40 states that have signed on to implement its Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative (JDAI). This year, the conference was hosted in King County, from October 16-18, in part to showcase the work of King County’s Zero Youth Detention and essential community partnerships.  “I started volunteering. I found community, and they saw gifts in me I didn’t know I had,” said Durell Green, describing to conference attendees the transition that took him from time in… Read More