Between 800 and 1,500 Washington residents are sitting behind bars, serving extra time for their juvenile records — offenses state law says should not add additional time onto sentences for crimes committed as adults.
Of those incarcerated people, 422 are Indigenous, said state Rep. Chris Stearns, D-Auburn.
Last year, the Legislature passed a law that banned the state from adding extra prison time onto adults’ sentences for their juvenile adjudications. But the law only applied to newly convicted people, meaning people serving time for adult felonies still have to serve extra time in some cases if they have a past juvenile record.
The state’s House Committee on Community Safety, Justice, & Reentry on Monday held a hearing about a proposed bill sponsored by Stearns that would make last year’s law retroactively apply to prisoners sentenced prior to the new law’s effective date, and in most cases require the state to afford those people a resentencing hearing.
In Washington, Indigenous children are three times more likely to end up in the prison system than white children, Stearns said. And data shows that Indigenous people are incarcerated at a rate 38% higher than the national average.
Among Washington’s prison population, 41% of Indigenous people, 39% of Black people, 38% of Pacific Islanders and 32% of Latino people have one or more juvenile felony adjudication in their background, according to state corrections data obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington.
James McMahan, policy director with the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs, was one of three people who testified against the bill at Monday’s hearing. He argued the bill, if passed, would minimize the experiences of crime victims.
“We’re talking about a population here, all of whom recidivated as adults with a new felony conviction after they accrued their juvenile points,” McMahan testified.
