For years, Washingtonians have struggled to decide whether — and how — to incarcerate minors. In an op-ed for the Seattle Times last month, Washington’s legal establishment, led by King County Superior Court Judge David Keenan, settled on its answer: funding more youth jails and more youth services. We, the public defenders of SEIU 925, reject Judge Keenan’s vague proposal.
Even if incarcerating children did improve public safety — and it does not — his proposal does not address the true cause of the state’s underfunded youth services: our unjust, unconstitutional, judge-created tax system.
To be fair, Judge Keenan has directly experienced Washington’s broken juvenile justice system. As a teenager, he was repeatedly incarcerated. And now, as a judge — after long stints in law enforcement and corporate law — he holds the power to incarcerate the teenagers we defend.
His career trajectory has been nothing short of astonishing; recruited to run for King County Superior Court by Washington Chief Justice Steven Gonzalez, Judge Keenan has held powerful positions in county courts and on nonprofit boards for almost a decade. He will likely run for State Supreme Court when Justice Charles Johnson retires in 2027. If anyone is the voice of Washington’s legal establishment, it is Judge Keenan.
Unfortunately, Judge Keenan’s op-ed fails to reflect his experience. Most tellingly, he failed to cite any evidence showing that juvenile incarceration improves public safety. There is none. Disturbingly, he also failed to explain why we should trust Washington’s authorities to safely incarcerate children when those same authorities have been credibly accused of sexually abusing hundreds of children over decades.
Judge Keenan’s proposed solutions were as disappointing as his omissions. While he acknowledged that he, as a White man, has been much luckier than the overwhelmingly non-White children incarcerated at facilities such as the Green Hill School, he offered those children nothing beyond a vague suggestion that the State should fund everything: more cages, more diversion programs, and more support for truant students.
As James Foreman exhaustively documented in his Pulitzer-Prize-winning Locking Up Our Own, this approach fails. Communities of color have spent decades demanding both more jails and more services. Somehow, jails are always funded. Meanwhile, services, when not prioritized, are ignored.
For evidence of this, look no farther than our own backyard. Washington’s youth services have been ignored for decades, casualties of our wildly unjust, judge-created tax system.
In 1933, wealthy Washingtonians undercut sweeping public support for taxing the rich by convincing our state Supreme Court to rewrite Washington’s entire tax system. The justices attempted to ban taxes on the wealthy while simultaneously allowing regressive sales and excise taxes, violating Washington’s populist Constitution in the process. Washington’s judge-created tax system — the second most unjust in America — impoverishes working people while enriching our state’s wealthiest residents.
Washington’s judge-created tax system has been a disaster for our state’s children. Our wildly unjust taxes are also wildly unstable, ensuring that youth services remain chronically underfunded. The state now faces simultaneous funding crises in all the services that vulnerable children need to thrive: schools — particularly special education — mental health care (we rank 48th nationally in youth mental health), child care, and housing.
Impoverished children denied these basic services often find themselves shunted into the criminal legal system, forcing them to rely on Washington’s perennially underfunded public defenders. These crises predate any chaos at the federal level. They are ultimately attributable to Washington’s judges.
Judge Keenan’s call for more funding, then, rings hollow. If he is serious about helping Washington’s children, then he must start by rejecting decades of law that have twisted our tax code at our children’s expense. We urge Judge Keenan to remember that it was hope – not abuse – that set him on his remarkable path to the bench. Every child in Washington deserves the opportunities Judge Keenan received. Our judge-made tax system has failed them.
