How Restorative Community Pathways Works to Create a Future Without Youth Jails

by Lauryn Bray

According to an August report, an average of 52 youth are held daily in detention in King County, and a September report indicates that more than 60% of the detained youth are Black. Restorative Community Pathways (RCP) is a program for youth charged with misdemeanor offenses. It strives to reduce youth incarceration by providing impacted parties with social services as an alternative to incarceration. Born out of the “No New Youth Jail” movement, the goal of RCP is to repair harm caused by crime, which it has done by rejecting the victim-perpetrator dichotomy to address crime’s root causes.

“RCP is a pre-court diversion program,” said Jasmine Vail, communications coordinator at RCP. “Right now, we receive 40% of youth from the prosecuting attorney’s office, and they get diverted directly to us, and all charges are dropped when they consent to RCP.”

According to Vail, part of RCP’s main focus is restorative justice, something she says is not facilitated by our current justice system. “One of the things that we’re really focused on [regarding] healing and safety is that it really is simultaneous. … And what I mean by that is when we’re meeting the needs of both the harmed party and the youth who cause the harm, it actually creates space for restorative justice to work, and we don’t have to choose,” she said. “Right now, our current incarceration system disregards both healing and safety. It disregards healing by not providing any restitution or repair for when harm is caused.”

Vail says our current justice system disregards safety by not providing youth who have offended with the necessary services and resources to process and learn from the consequences of their crimes. “Youth who interact with the incarceration system never process the impact that their choices might have had on other people. They’re 50% more likely to cause harm again and interact with the incarceration system,” she stated.

Vail also says it’s hard to facilitate restorative justice processes in carceral settings because the basic needs of the involved parties are not being met. 

“If your basic needs aren’t being met, it doesn’t really create enough space for you to even have restorative conversations,” Vail said. “[We have community navigators who] work with the youth and talk about their basic needs getting met. [The youth] create a self-determined action plan … and then the community navigator supports them in accomplishing that, [which] covers their basic needs. It covers counseling, any kind of groceries they have, [and] if their family is [experiencing] housing instability, then it’s also [providing] rental support.”

Not only does RCP provide youth with social services to help them confront the consequences of their crimes, it also works with other parties to repair any harm that resulted from the youth’s crime.

Chase Gawiran, a community navigator with CHOOSE 180, is one of the people at RCP who facilitates this connection. “We’re [community navigators] making sure that we’re also talking to people that may have been affected by harm and offering them similar services as we’re offering the participants that we’re getting.”

These services can sometimes look like reimbursing a harmed party whose car was stolen and missed work because of it. “One of the things that we try to mitigate in this process is understanding that harmed parties need support as well — they may have wages that were affected due to property damage or a car being stolen — and if they went through traditional court systems, they may still never get their car back,” said Gawiran. 

According to Gawiran, the value in programs like RCP lies in the fact that it strives to achieve healing for all affected parties. “The main thing for me with restorative justice and why it’s important to prioritize healing over punishment is that simply applying punishment to someone does not recognize that everyone is deserving of healing,” he said. “And just applying punishment is also not acknowledging the fact that there is a situation or environment that has allowed harm to occur, and punishing the person is not addressing that environment or that situation.”

RCP is a consortium made up of six organizations: Congolese Integration Network, CHOOSE 180, Creative Justice, Collective Justice, Pacific Islander Community Association, and East African Community Services.

“RCP has a really strong history in community and community activism as well, so it would be a bit of an injustice to say that we’ve been around for two years,” said Gawiran. “The history of RCP goes way back to 2012 with different advocacy movements, like the “No New Youth Jail” movement and Native organizations partnering around the facility that was being built over at Alder [Street].”

The facility Gawiran refers to is the Judge Patricia H. Clark Children and Family Justice Center (CCFJC), a 112-bed juvenile detention center. When King County first announced it would be building a youth detention center in 2011, there was pushback from community. CCFJC opened in 2020, but amid that year’s local and nationwide protests following the murder of George Floyd, community organizers and activists rallied together to call for its closure, demanding that the money spent on operating the facility be invested in impacted youth.

Following these protests, King County Executive Dow Constantine declared he would close CCFJC in 2025. But in February 2024, Constantine announced that plans to close CCFJC would be delayed until 2028. Last month, King County Councilmember Reagan Dunn proposed legislation that would permanently keep the jail open, citing data trends showing an escalation in felony youth offenses since 2021, and the legislation passed unanimously.

Today, the nonprofits that make up RCP’s consortium are organizations that have been involved in protesting CCFJC since April 2011. To this day, the consortium continues to advocate for the divestment of resources from carceral solutions, like youth detention, and invest in programs like RCP that focus on restoration, restitution, and reconciliation. The goal of RCP is to set forth a path toward divesting from the current juvenile legal system and investing in community-driven support for young people, their families, the community members who have experienced harm, and the community as a whole.

Lauryn Bray is a writer and reporter for the South Seattle Emerald. She has a degree in English with a concentration in creative writing from CUNY Hunter College. She is from Sacramento, California, and has been living in King County since June 2022.