Please provide your feedback.

Zero Youth Detention (ZYD) is a call to action by King County Executive Dow Constantine to 1) take immediate steps to lead with racial justice to reduce the use of secure detention and 2) to set in motion longer term change to services and systems that ultimately make the need for secure detention and the juvenile legal system a rare occurrence while toward driving better outcomes for King County’s youth, families, and communities. Whether it’s possible to reach ZYD may not be known today, but if the vision is not set to ZYD, we will never know.

The Road Map to Zero Youth Detention is the strategic plan that will outline concrete actions to help limit legal system involvement in the lives of youth. The Road Map, due to the Executive on August 30, 2018, recognizes that King County alone cannot make progress on achieving zero youth detention. Schools, the State, communities, and the legal system must collaborate on achieving better outcomes for youth.

We’re sharing a brief summary of the Road Map. We want to know your thoughts on the key features of the Road Map: what’s missing and what you think the Road Map got right. The final report will build out these categories with actionable items, outline roles and timeframes, and include success metrics.

The categories are based on four overarching objectives (the goals the County wants to achieve or work towards) and each goal includes strategies (means to achieve the objectives). Community led recommendations, community based reports, and internal County feedback informed the creation of the framework. The summary you are reviewing is draft; it will be refined through public input such as through this survey. The four objectives of the Zero Youth Detention initiative are:

1. Lead with racial equity: Eliminate racial disproportionality in secure detention
2. Prevent:  Keep youth from ever encountering the legal system
3. Divert: From having a case filed in court and from secure detention
4. Effective: Reduce the length of legal system involvement and increase healthy outcomes for youth

PLEASE NOTE: The information collected through this survey will be essential in advancing the Zero Youth Detention initiative and specifically for developing the Road Map. In its approach, King County seeks to elevate the voices and experiences of those most directly impacted by the juvenile legal system. For this reason, the survey includes demographic and legal system involvement questions.The ZYD team will not use any personally identifying information while analyzing and summerizing employee feedback. OpenGov does give participants the option to view how others have responded to the survey. However, there is an option to post your response anonymously. 

If you have questions regarding this draft summary or would like to provide additional feedback please email ZYDInfo@kingcounty.gov