Following deaths, King County cancels deal to send people to a regional jail

King County has ended a controversial deal, after just three months, to send people from two county-owned jails to a regional jail in Des Moines.

The cancellation comes after four people have died this year at the Des Moines jail, South Correctional Entity, known as SCORE. All four deaths occurred after the Metropolitan King County Council began debating the SCORE deal.

Noah Haglund, a spokesperson for the county Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention, said the county and SCORE “jointly agreed” to end the program following a three-month review.

Haglund said the county evaluated SCORE as an option, but because of eligibility rules about who could be sent there, “other approaches have provided a more efficient use of staffing and jail operations.”

Haglund, in an emailed statement, said the deaths at the SCORE jail did not play a role in the decision to cancel the agreement.

“DAJD and SCORE decided jointly to end the pilot project because we were unable to house a sufficient number of King County Jail residents at SCORE to provide staffing relief, given the eligibility criteria agreed to by both parties,” Haglund wrote. “We can confirm that none of the deaths at SCORE this year involved people who were housed under contract with King County.”

SCORE is jointly owned by the cities of Auburn, Burien, Des Moines, Renton, SeaTac and Tukwila.

The news site PubliCola first reported the end of the agreement.

Dennis Folk, president of the King County Corrections Guild, the union representing officers at the county’s jails, said the deal fizzled because it became cumbersome.

SCORE, Folk said, was only willing to accept minimum security cases, people who are incarcerated for only brief stretches. It became, he said, more hassle than it was worth to transfer people from SCORE back to downtown Seattle for court appointments, where they’d have to stay overnight at the county jail, only to be transferred back to SCORE.

“Operationally it became more burdensome than it needed to be,” Folk said.

The County Council, in April, voted 7-2 to send people to the Des Moines facility, part of an effort to deal with unprecedented staffing shortages at the county’s two jails, in downtown Seattle and in Kent.

The vote followed sustained discussion and significant public testimony against the deal. A death at SCORE just one week prior to the vote wasn’t mentioned in any of the testimony or debate.

“We never heard about that, it should have been in the news and the County Council should have been told about it,” said Molly Gilbert, president of the union representing public defenders under SEIU 925. Gilbert was one of the most prominent critics of the proposed plan to send people to SCORE.

“We warned the executive’s office repeatedly in every bargaining session about the problems we could foresee and we were summarily dismissed,” Gilbert said Thursday. “Pretty much every single thing that we warned them about ended up coming true.”

Gilbert said there have been problems coordinating medical care, and that people reported they had no access to church or a law library at SCORE and had trouble making phone calls. People also had trouble getting to court hearings from SCORE, she said.

SCORE had a video visitation system for people to meet with their lawyers, but they couldn’t access it from a confidential area, Gilbert said.

“Our clients were very unhappy there and were demanding to be rotated back to county custody,” she said. Because SCORE would only accept low-risk, nonviolent offenders, Gilbert said she heard stories of people staging fights at SCORE so they could be sent back to county custody.

The King County jail system lost about a fifth of its corrections officers between 2020 and fall 2022, and it has struggled to hire officers even as it has added new incentives. Folk said the county’s jail system still has 109 vacancies.

There’s also been a surge in deaths in King County’s jails, including at least 15 since 2020, mostly in the jail in downtown Seattle.

Earlier this year, the ACLU of Washington sued King County and County Executive Dow Constantine over conditions at the Seattle jail, where lawyers say understaffing has jeopardized people’s health and safety. The lawsuit claims the county has violated a longstanding legal agreement to protect access to court hearings and health care.

Constantine’s proposal to send people to SCORE capped the number of transferees at 60 initially, with the possibility to expand. The county had planned to spend about $1.75 million a year to house people at SCORE through the end of 2024.

Constantine’s office did not respond to a request for comment. Last spring, his administration billed the SCORE deal as not ideal, but a near necessity brought on by the staffing crisis.

“We have a crisis in our jail, we use that word a lot around here, but it’s more than a crisis, it is an emergency,” Councilmember Rod Dembowski said at the time. 

But the county never ended up sending that many people to SCORE. There were just 21 people sent from the county at SCORE on Wednesday. In the last two weeks, that number has been as high as 37.

King County, since the beginning of the pandemic, has worked to reduce its jail population to try to deal with overcrowding and reduced staffing by limiting jail bookings for nonviolent misdemeanors.

The overall population at King County’s two jails fell from more than 1,900 to about 1,300 during the pandemic, as the county moved to increase alternatives to incarceration. It later crept back up before declining again. As of Thursday, there were 1,385 people at the county’s two jails and an additional 21 the county had sent to SCORE.

The county has, in recent months, begun shifting more people from its jail in downtown Seattle, which Constantine has pledged to close, to its smaller jail in Kent. There were 810 people at the downtown jail on Thursday, compared to more than 1,200 earlier this year.

The four deaths this year at SCORE are notified on the jail’s website, but appear to have drawn little public notice prior to PubliCola’s story.

They include a 65-year-old man who died March 25 in what the jail said was “believed to be a medical event.”

Three other deaths, the jail said, were all due to unknown causes. They include a 43-year-old woman who died at SCORE on May 19, a 25-year-old man who died at SCORE on June 27 and a 42-year-old woman who died at SCORE on Aug. 12.