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Macklemore speaks out against new youth jail in King County

He joins protest against project that foes say will do more harm than good to teens

By Daniel Beekman, The Seattle Times
Published: December 22, 2016, 7:59pm

Macklemore is lending his voice to an effort to stop King County from building a new youth courthouse and jail in Seattle.

The Seattle rapper backed the effort Wednesday on Twitter and Facebook, urging his followers to sign and share an internet petition.

The petition asks King County Executive Dow Constantine and Seattle Mayor Ed Murray to reconsider their support for the project. It had more than 1,400 supporters early Wednesday night.

It says the city should deny the county the master-use permit that it needs in order to move ahead. A decision on the permit was expected Thursday.

“We should focus on alternatives to youth incarceration,” Macklemore wrote on Twitter, where he has 2.78 million followers.

In 2012, voters approved a $210 million levy to replace the county’s existing courthouse and detention center at 12th Avenue East and East Alder Street in the Central Area.

Proponents of the project say the existing detention center is outdated and dilapidated. They say the detention facility in the new juvenile-justice complex, formally known as the Children and Family Justice Center, will be better.

Opponents say voters were misled in 2012 by a ballot title that didn’t mention detention and an explanatory statement that didn’t include the word “jail.” They object to youth incarceration, particularly in a county where black youth are much more likely to be detained than youth of other races.

When Constantine trimmed the number of beds planned for the new detention facility from nearly 150 to 112 last year, he said the county was detaining many fewer youth than it used to.

But he acknowledged that black youth represented just 10 percent of the county’s juveniles and 50 percent of its detainees.

“Countless studies have proved that youth incarceration is not the answer,” the “Don’t Cage Kids: No New Youth Jail in King County” petition says.

“It perpetuates a vicious cycle of criminalizing young folks; incarcerating a youth for low-level crimes makes them more likely to re-offend than those who were not incarcerated. Furthermore, incarcerating young people deepens the racial disparity inherent to the criminal justice system.”

In a statement Wednesday, Murray sought to distance himself from the permit decision.

“The city of Seattle issues nearly 800 master-use permits annually. Those permits are issued by the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections according to technical criteria having to do solely with land use and environmental issues,” the mayor said.

“The office of the mayor cannot intervene in any permitting decision, including this one, as it is a technical decision based on the county’s application.”

Opponents of the new youth jail protested outside Murray’s house Tuesday night. Their fight against the master-use permit began more than a year ago and is the latest in a series of attempts to stop the project.

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