Dr. Ben Danielson Won a Racial Discrimination Case. Now He's Fighting Youth Incarceration.

Dr. Ben Danielson is no stranger to standing up against unjust systems.

Well-known for his lawsuit of racial discrimination against Seattle Children's Hospital, Danielson, a pediatric physician and former South Seattle medical director of Seattle Children's Odessa Brown Children's Clinic, resigned in 2020 from the hospital. He later successfully won his case, proving the racially hostile work environment he had endured.

Since then, Danielson has branched into tackling health care problems outside the hospital, approaching health care more systemically. One of his efforts is the Allies in Healthier Systems for Health and Abundance in Youth (ASHAY), which began under the community sponsorship of the South Seattle Tubman Center for Health and Freedom.

ASHAY's mission is to deconstruct harmful institutions like youth incarceration, and instead build up fortifiers of health and hope for the youth.

"As a pediatrician," Danielson says, "there's a role that we should be playing in supporting young people and a need for us to transparently see what happens when we make the choice to incarcerate a young person."

For decades, research has shown that juvenile incarceration has an overwhelming negative effect on youth. In a 2014 medical study on the long-term consequences of juvenile incarceration, data showed clear conclusive results that juvenile incarceration is not only ineffective in reducing criminal behavior, but increases the likelihood a youth will remain tethered to the criminal justice system.

ASHAY's work focuses on demonstrating programs and projects that center youth voices. They want to generate more consideration about living in communities that would never incarcerate a young person or allow youth to be unhoused. They hope to invest in true prevention, and to promote a system that acts before something tragic happens.

"There is so much clearly dysfunctional and wrong about our current approach to youth incarceration," Danielson says, "It's realizing that we have to be in conversation in ways that's different than just trying to win an argument around facts."

ASHAY has worked on multiple projects and collaborations since 2021, many of them based in South Seattle. In 2024, they helped facilitate a gun violence documentary at Garfield High School. After another horrific gun violence death, Garfield high schoolers wanted to create a documentary to process what they had been through. ASHAY was able to invite a filmmaker to help bring this project to life.

"They had a specific desire to not just wallow in the deepest negatives of having experienced gun violence, but also wanted to name that they were still young people celebrating going through an experience of life like high school," Danielson says, "They wanted to re-instill a sense of spirit in their school."

Throughout South Seattle, ASHAY also continues to support South End organizations like CHOOSE 180, which leads a community-centered effort to break the school-to-prison pipeline. ASHAY's work centers on supporting voices in the community while they continue to host conversations about abolition and youth incarceration.

"It's hard to encourage conversations across beliefs in this space," Danielson says. "So as a part of ASHAY, I'm willing to talk to somebody who fully believes that we need prisons as much as I'm willing to talk to somebody who's closer to my own sense of our need to stop doing harmful things to youth."

In March 2025, ASHAY also published a paper in the American Journal of Public Health on youth detention and incarceration facilities in the U.S.

They conducted a landscape analysis of youth facilities with an intent to close from January 2010 to February 2023, identifying a total of 118 facilities in 33 states. From this study, ASHAY was able to gather information on what helped and led facilities to close. Most importantly, Danielson states that the study debunks the myth that it's impossible for facilities to close. He hopes ASHAY's study can create greater dialogue around the possibilities of closure nationally.

Today, Danielson is particularly excited about the new storybook project ASHAY is working on. They are partnering formerly incarcerated adolescents with children's book authors to allow these youth to become authors. The books will be oriented to younger children, around the ages of 3 to 7.

He hopes that younger children will be able to see somebody who looks like them as an author, and for adolescents to develop new skills. "For them to be reframed from being considered a criminal to being considered a published author feels really powerful," he says.

There are already lots of extraordinary people and programs doing great work in the area of youth incarceration, Danielson says, and ASHAY's goal is to support that while honoring youth brilliance in this space as well. He's found it to be a disservice to instantly negate youth brilliance by talking about their brains as not fully formed. As proven through many of ASHAY's projects, the youth have a lot to say and are foundational in creating better systems in health care and beyond.

"We want to push people to envision a different world," Danielson says, "one in which the very idea of incarcerating a young person is rendered unimaginable."

Sarah Goh is a Singaporean American journalist from Seattle, and a current medical student. At the intersection of community, art, and health equity, she hopes to elevate marginalized voices and explore the overlooked and unexpected through her writing. Find her at SarahSGoh.com or @sarahsgoh.