Braun: Response to Green Hill safety issues sunk by majority’s offender-friendly leanings

I’ll say this for our Democratic colleagues in the state Legislature: They certainly are creative when it comes to promoting offender-friendly policies.

This year the majority used the state’s multibillion-dollar budget shortfall to put a new spin on an old idea, with a bill that proposed the early release of violent felons as a way to save tax dollars.

Republicans would have taken that bill apart at a committee hearing, which probably explains why it quickly died.

There’s something similar lurking behind the Legislature’s failure to deal with the well-publicized safety and security issues at Green Hill School, the state-run juvenile rehabilitation institution in Chehalis.

I have been very public about how leaders of the House’s majority Democrats are ultimately to blame for killing my bill to give new population-management tools to the agency that oversees Green Hill.

That legislation, Senate Bill 5278, came out of the Senate on a 49-0 vote. It received strong support at the committee level in the House. I’m confident it would have won a majority of votes in the full 98-member House.

The problem was, my bill was being falsely portrayed as being part of a package deal, along with a juvenile-offender bill proposed by a Democratic senator from King County.

Not just any juvenile-offender bill – Senate Bill 5296 would have turned the state’s long-standing approach to sentencing on its head. There’s no chance I ever would have paired my bill with it.

With few exceptions, the Democrat bill would prevent a judge from sentencing an offender to Green Hill or the Echo Glen Children’s Center near Snoqualmie unless the court made an “independent finding, supported by clear and convincing evidence,” that placing the offender in a community-based option would not adequately protect the community.

When her bill came before the full Senate, the prime sponsor’s sales pitch was that that it would help relieve the overcrowding at Green Hill by letting judges sentence youth offenders to community-based options, rather than incarceration, which the current law would require.
It’s a creative argument, just like trying to sell the early release of felons as a money-saving idea. However, none of the Republicans in the Senate were ever going to support it. Four Democrats also voted no, meaning SB 5296 barely squeaked through on a 26-23 vote.
The truth got stretched even more when my bill and her bill were on the same public-hearing agenda before the House committee on human services.

The sponsor told the committee how her bill and my bill had come over from the Senate together, adding that we had “worked together” on both bills. “I hope you’ll see them as a package as well,” she testified.

While the human-services committee moved both bills forward on split votes, the House Appropriations Committee clearly had a preference. It supported mine unanimously, while hers came out on a party-line vote, similar to what happened in the Senate.

A few days later both were put on the voting calendar for the full House, but that’s all the farther they got.

The House Democrat leaders went weak. Politics got in the way of policy, and rather than treat the two bills separately, they let the controversial bill die and take mine down with it.
As I’ve said all along, the Green Hill situation is complicated. Juvenile rehabilitation is a challenge anyway, and the “JR to 25” law, which dates to 2018, has made things much harder.

I can understand the interest in allowing offenders who were younger than 18 when they were convicted of felonies in adult court to remain in a juvenile-rehabilitation facility until age 25 – but as I predicted, when opposing the move to JR-to-25, the law has created more problems than it may have solved.

Between the longer stays resulting from JR-to-25 and the loss of medium-security beds when the Naselle Youth Camp closed in 2022, it’s no wonder Green Hill is way over capacity.
Besides being unsafe for everyone, the overpopulation gets in the way of Green Hill’s mission, which is to provide the services that will help its residents get on a path toward a successful re-entry into our communities.

My response to the Green Hill overcrowding is fairly complicated as well, because it has to offer something meaningful while working within the constraints of the JR-to-25 law.
The bill went through five votes, and changes were made at each step. The latest version would allow the Department of Children, Youth and Families, which oversees juvenile rehabilitation in our state, to transfer older Green Hill residents to adult prison if they present a safety threat to others or consistently refuse to participate in rehabilitation programs. It is a commonsense approach.

My bill also would require DCYF to transfer residents if overcrowding occurs. Adult prison and the state’s eight community facilities would be among the transfer options.

Speaking of transfers, some Green Hill residents have already moved to a new facility near Aberdeen. A wing of the state prison there that was shut down a few years ago due to lack of population just opened space for juveniles.

It’s not enough space, however, so as long as the JR-to-25 policy is in place, DCYF can still benefit from the population-management tools my bill offers. I’m intending to advocate for SB 5278 again in 2026.

In the meantime, let’s consider ourselves forewarned about what the Democrats view as priorities. Knowing how far left the Senate majority now leans, we should expect to see all of their offender-friendly proposals again.

Representatives from the criminal-justice community who testified against SB 5296 at the committee level correctly observed that rehabilitation and public safety are not mutually exclusive. A place like Green Hill should be able to provide both, but it’s much harder when you have 230 teens and young adults in a space meant for no more than 180.

They also question the degree to which a community’s safety should be left to a judge’s discretion, when clear sentencing guidelines already exist, and whether offenders from areas where community-based options are less plentiful would be more likely to end up incarcerated.

The representative for the state prosecutors’ association offered the most succinct takedown.

He said the Democrat bill would fundamentally alter the sentencing framework for juvenile offenders, creating a system that is inconsistent, resource-intensive, and detrimental to victims and to the rehabilitative mission of the state’s juvenile-rehabilitation efforts.

Republicans agree. In our view, the majority sacrificed safety and security at the state’s juvenile-rehab institutions because of ideology. That’s not the leadership Washington needs. Legislators must do better.

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Sen. John Braun of Centralia serves the 20th Legislative District, which spans parts of four counties from Yelm to Vancouver. He became Senate Republican leader in 2020.