Years ago, when my children were young, our government made what I described then as a mistake.
I know what you’re thinking: That can’t be. That doesn’t sound like the government.
The mistake? They severely restricted the age at which local businesses, such as fast food establishments, could hire workers, limited their hours and controlled what they could do.
Hiring these kids became too much of a hassle, so many businesses didn’t. This was done with the honorable intent of keeping kids safe, keeping them from being tired at school, and making them better students with time to do homework.
But did it accomplish those goals without unintended consequences?
Now, years later, these students are not safer, they are not better students (at least judging by the published scores) and apparently they are too tired to get up for school. Or so I keep hearing as the excuse for why their test scores are lower.
The point is, if we’ve learned anything, it’s that the more power we give all levels of government, the worse outcomes we have. Actually, the bigger lesson here is that when given the chance to make a decision, they will almost certainly make the wrong one, rarely if ever admit it, and then just do more of the same.
A good example is Green Hill “School.” Is it really a school? Oh, it has a school, but it also has a very serious crime problem that sadly seems to include some of the staff. Now, why is that? We know it’s not that they now house 25-year-olds with actual juveniles. We know because they told us so. It must be true.
When it opened in 1891, it was billed as a “reform” school, housing only two genders, boys and girls (that’s so yesterday), and its mandate was to also teach them trades. It featured a farm, workshops, shoemaking, carpentry, machine work and classrooms. Residents were generally abandoned kids, and incorrigibles, and were referred to as “children.”
Not criminals like we see housed there today, and certainly not runaways.
Today, the farm and work there doesn’t exist, and the residents are rarely children as we’d think of them. Just juveniles mixed with adults.
And, as we’ve seen in the more recent past, it is also a place where crime seems fairly common.
I’m sure there are many who want to be rehabilitated and make something of themselves, but mostly we hear about crime. Drugs, assaults and other crimes, including those of a sexual variety, are sadly a fairly regular source of news and, too frequently, include staff.
Now you’d think — at least I think — that this would have been a priority in the most recent legislative session, and with billions in new taxes imposed on us, this might have come up.
After all, we're told public safety is a government priority all the time, but then they don’t act like it. Since housing criminals has been known to help with crime, it seems a reasonable conclusion we could expect it would make their to-do list.
But no, they just spent more, taxed more and left this very real problem hanging. Of course, it will take new taxes — oh, I mean “revenue” — to fix, and we’ll have to pony up more if that’s what we want, but they’ll wait until we forget how much they spent this time around.
Meanwhile, I did read in The Chronicle Saturday where they are opening a new 46-bed facility inside a prison, very carefully separated from adult inmates. They are not to be confused with adult “residents” from Green Hill, who apparently volunteered to be transferred there. Which is weird, because why would an adult at Green Hill get to “volunteer” where they are housed? Why do they get to decide much of anything? Maybe that’s part of the problem, along with people in charge who think like that.
They also say this isn’t a solution. Overcrowding is still a serious problem at Green Hill, just not serious enough to do anything about. Good job, Olympia.
Green Hill was specifically for people up to 18 years old, until somebody decided differently. And that experiment hasn’t gone well, so why don’t they just stop doing it? First, they’d have to admit they were wrong, which is not something they are prone to do.
And, of course, residents would no longer be able to order a drug-laced burrito with their cellphone from their jail cell, space or whatever the proper term is where they reside. I can see where that might be problematic.
Maybe I’m crazy, but since 18-year-olds already go to prison, maybe when they turn 18 at Green Hill they should go to big boy prison too?
That seems reasonable, but that’s just me.
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John McCroskey was Lewis County sheriff from 1995 to 2005. He lives outside Chehalis and can be contacted at musingsonthemiddlefork@gmail.com.
