Controversial county effort to divert youth criminal cases to community groups not meeting goals

A $16 million effort by King County to send most juvenile criminal cases to community-based diversion programs, rather than the court system, is struggling to meet its goals, a county report shows.

Restorative Community Pathways, begun in 2021, was meant to reduce youth involvement in the criminal legal system by placing young people accused of misdemeanors and lower-level felonies into a network of nonprofit organizations for rehabilitation.

Youths who complete the diversion program avoid criminal charges, and can receive services including mentorship, cash to meet basic needs, healing circles, and referrals for social services.

In the program’s second full year, 2023, it enrolled 170 youths referred by prosecutors, far fewer than the 400 to 600 cases the county aimed to divert to community groups annually.

One reason for the low numbers was that the consortium of community groups handling the juvenile cases “had capacity issues as a result of turnover, retention, and some internal policy decisions,” said Jimmy Hung, who leads the juvenile division of the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, a program partner.

“As a result, we chose to re-direct cases to other diversion paths or in some cases filed those matters into formal court,” Hung said by email.

The Metropolitan King County Council required the progress report last fall as a condition of expanded funding for Restorative Community Pathways. The consortium of community groups originally called for complete independence from county oversight, and was not required to report youths’ completion rates, among other data.

The program has since defined completion as a participant having a support system in the community and having “made substantial progress on, or completed, self-identified goals.”

Last year, 134 young people completed the diversion program and 50 youths left before finishing diversion, the report shows.

It is unclear what prosecutors did with the cases of the young people who quit the program, or the 234 young people referred to the diversion program in the first two years who never enrolled.

The report does not indicate how many of those cases were diverted to another program or criminally charged, and David Baker, director of data and analytics for the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, said that information was not immediately available.

“Restorative Community Pathways is still shrouded in mystery, and that’s a problem,” said King County Council Vice-Chair Reagan Dunn by email. He dismissed the completion standards as “too vague and minimal,” and called for more evidence that the program is effective.

“We need to know that our juvenile offenders are being rehabilitated in a meaningful way that diverts them from re-offending, and Restorative Community Pathways doesn’t provide enough transparency to show those results,” said Dunn, a former federal prosecutor. “County dollars should be prioritized for juvenile diversion programs that are proven to work.”

The consortium of Restorative Community Pathways providers, which is managed by the nonprofit Rooted in Vibrant Communities, did not respond to a request for comment. Providers in the consortium are Choose 180, Collective Justice, Congolese Integration Network, Creative Justice, East African Community Services, and the Pacific Islander Community Association of Washington.

"This work is about removing power from the County and returning it to communities–it is a move towards getting rid of the criminal system," the consortium website says. "Through individual and collective healing we are able to care for our communities and truly keep each other safe."

Community-based diversion is one of several county initiatives aimed at minimizing youth detention and addressing racial disparities in the criminal legal system, in which Black youth are arrested at roughly twice the rate of white youth, according to the county.

The county progress report did not provide data about how many youths enrolled in the community-based diversion program have since committed other crimes. However, data the prosecutor’s office provided to KUOW shows that 27% of youths diverted to Restorative Community Pathways through 2022 have since had new law enforcement referrals.

Hung said it is too early to compare three-year recidivism rates with those of court-based diversion, in which juvenile probation counselors can require drug and alcohol assessments and treatment, mental health therapy, job skills training and other conditions.

“We don’t have any information to suggest that kids who participate with [Restorative Community Pathways] end up with worse outcomes because of their involvement with the program,” Hung said. “The numbers we’re seeing are not raising red flags that would suggest pausing the program before we have a validated third-party study.”

“We remain optimistic in the RCP program. At the same time, it’s still too early to make any definitive conclusions,” Hung said.

Restorative Community Pathways also offers crime victims services and restitution. The program served 87 “community members who have experienced harm” last year who were referred by prosecutors. The consortium of providers made 46 restitution payments to harmed parties totaling $57,000, the report said.

A second fund, focused on supporting youth diverted from the court system, distributed $122,636 in payments last year to 189 young people to help them and their families meet basic needs, according to a quarterly report from the county Department of Community and Human Services.

“We're finding that a lot of these kids going through the program are needing basic needs — housing stability, support, behavioral health support, and I think community organizations are really the best place to make that connection,” said Jen Tanaka, who oversees the program at DCHS.

The nonprofit providers are also allowed to find and enroll other people who would benefit from the program aside from those referred by prosecutors. Last year, that included another 95 young people and 31 harmed parties, according to the report.

Restorative Community Pathways now has capacity for all of the young people prosecutors refer for diversion, Hung said. However, prosecutors now send cases to the program half as often as they initially did: in 2022, 48% of all diverted juvenile cases were sent to the program, compared to 24% of diversions in the first four months of this year, according to an online data dashboard.

The largest proportion of youth diversions are once again overseen by juvenile probation counselors, a system strained after the county cut 15 of those positions in 2021 to help pay for Restorative Community Pathways.

“Our juvenile probation counselors are now understaffed and overloaded with cases,” said Ketu Shah, presiding judge at King County Superior Court, due both to a recent spike in juvenile crime, and to the smaller percentage of cases being diverted to Restorative Community Pathways.

Shah said that while judges see increasing numbers of young people in court who had previously been through the community-based diversion program, he has not seen data that indicates how well Restorative Community Pathways works.

“Diverting youth into structured programs can be a wise idea, but it has to have structure and objective standards so that we can see if it's effective or not,” Shah said.

The county is planning an outside evaluation of Restorative Community Pathways to be completed in 2025.

Correction 5/27/24: This story has been edited to specify that prosecutors successfully diverted 170 youth to Restorative Community Pathways in 2023, and that the program served 87 “community members who have experienced harm” referred by prosecutors.