Remann Hall programs turn around at-risk kids’ lives. Can they help prevent violence?

The top of Remann Hall’s afternoon docket on April 5 was cause for celebration.

A teenage girl beamed sitting beside her public defender before a juvenile court judge. Her curly-brown-haired baby smiled and cooed on her knee.

Unlike many criminal court hearings, there was good news for the defendant, called respondents in juvenile court. The criminal case against her would be dismissed. She had completed months of community supervision, also known as probation, which can come with mental-health, substance-use and family therapy, alongside other educational and social programs.

There are three tables in this courtroom – not two – one each for the defense attorney, a prosecutor and a probation official to confer about cases as independent stakeholders. They each reflected on watching the girl’s tremendous progress. A family member watched from the gallery.

“I just want to thank you all for the support along the way,” the teen said in court proudly.

The judge, calling her by her first name, congratulated her again and apologized there wasn’t more time to celebrate her achievement. She walked out of the courtroom as if a huge weight had been lifted off her.

That’s how most cases end for kids in Pierce County Juvenile Court– with a clean criminal record – after Remann Hall’s two-decade transition away from incarceration and toward community-based rehabilitation.

In the past three years, more than 70% of cases referred by police were not formally charged, court data show, most often in favor of diversion programs that bring immediate resources. More than 80% of all kids who were charged and completed community-based probation in 2018 and 2019 did not re-offend within two years. Fewer than 20 kids were sentenced to incarceration in a state Juvenile Rehabilitation facility in each of the past two years.

Court officials see those numbers as evidence of success. But watching the number of kids dying by violence increase over the last two years, they have a growing worry: the number of firearms involved in cases.

The rest of the Remann Hall docket on April 5 was a mixed bag: drinking at the movie theater, car theft, school disturbances, assault on a family member, strong-arm robberies.

But the teen caught drunk at the movie theater? He had a loaded gun with him.

The school disturbance? He had a gun, too.

The robberies? The respondents were armed with guns.

Local officials point to the proliferation of firearms throughout Tacoma and Pierce County – not necessarily more kids committing crimes – as the source behind a festering rise in bloodshed, particularly among youth of color.

Juvenile public defense attorney Melissa Gomez told The News Tribune that two of her clients have been shot dead since the beginning of the year.

“A lot of these kids have a gun because they don’t feel safe going to school,” Gomez said. “A lot of our kids come from broken homes and have trauma and are just looking to fit in.”

The solution to preventing violence? Court officials say intervention has to happen long before kids end up in Remann Hall, but they see potential in programs like the ones offered through their probation and diversion programs if they were implemented throughout the region.

“Kids are on the margins, and parents don’t know what to do. A lot of times resources are not readily available. Here we have evidence-based programs, these things that are shown to work,” Juvenile Court administrator TJ Bohl told The News Tribune recently. “And what we hear from kids all the time when we do surveys with them is there’s not enough places for them to go to hang out and to be kids.

“If county leaders and officials are wanting to listen to that and respond in a way that’s helpful: Kids need places to go, to be with positive people. Positive places to learn, to try things, make mistakes, and that’ll be OK … I think that would be really powerful.”

Remann Hall’s approach to youth justice

In 2022, law enforcement referred 1,415 cases, to the juvenile division at the Pierce County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, court data show. The cases involved 1,033 kids, about 1% of Pierce County’s 92,000 or so youth ages 10 to 17.

More than a quarter of those cases, 398, didn’t have charges filed, either because prosecutors didn’t think there was enough evidence or they deferred until law enforcement could investigate further. Some pending 2022 cases could still be charged, Bohl said.

About one in five kids referred to the juvenile court in 2022 listed an address in Tacoma, court data show. Puyallup accounted for 17%, followed by Parkland with 13% and Spanaway with 11%. Both Lakewood and non-Pierce County addresses totaled 7%. The remainder came from other areas in the county, including Bonney Lake, Steilacoom, Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Firecrest, Graham.

Nearly half of last year’s cases were handled through diversion and pre-diversion programs, according to court data. The most common offense by far in 2022 was misdemeanor assault — which accounted for 410 referrals — followed by harassment, theft and malicious mischief.

Court officials say the goal of diversion is to reduce kids’ contact with the legal system, offer services more quickly, strengthen the community’s capacity to support young people and address race-based disparities. Black children are more than five times as likely as white children to be referred to the Pierce County Juvenile Court by law enforcement, according to court data.

Pre-diversion happens before a case is ever filed and when the child is younger than 12 or a crime had no victim. First-time family violence or drug and alcohol offenses also are sent to pre-diversion.

“You can get the help right away within 24, 48, 72 hours depending on the program,” Bohl said. “So it’s immediate accountability ... And hopefully, that can shift your path, and you won’t ever come back into the system.”

Remann Hall had 154 pre-diversion cases in 2022, court data show. About 530 went through more formalized, traditional diversion where kids sign a contract with the Prosecutor’s Office.

State law gives prosecutors broad discretion in juvenile cases except for many violent felonies, where charges must be filed. Remann Hall’s philosophy is to embrace diversion programs for as long as possible, and then reduce formal charges to the lowest corresponding offense as a last resort.

“They get many bites of that apple,” deputy prosecutor Diane Clarkson, section chief for juveniles and adult misdemeanors, told The News Tribune recently. “Typically, they’re failed off diversion because they literally just aren’t showing up for the programs.”

Bohl says Remann Hall has a “menu of programs,” ranging from therapy and treatment to skills-building and recreation, such as horseback riding and skateboarding.

“Many kids in Tacoma have never even been on the water,” Bohl said about Remann Hall’s partnership with Tacoma Community Boat Builders, which has led to apprenticeships for teens. “Some of the kids that went through the last (running) program now have decided to try out for track at their school.

“So you’re just literally shifting young people’s trajectory, right?”

A big part of that success is receiving mentoring and feeling heard, court officials say. Many at-risk kids have high-stress home lives and face difficulty finding positive role models.

“They want to do the right thing,” said Gomez, the defense attorney. “They need guidance.”

If an offense is too serious or the child fails out of diversion, prosecutors formally file charges, and the respondent must appear in court with an attorney. That happened 332 times last year, amounting to just shy of a quarter of referrals. Remann Hall’s goal is to lower that to 20%.

Few of those kids spend time in the juvenile detention facility. Accounting for juvenile respondents and teens charged as adults, the facility had an average daily population of around a dozen each of the past three years.

As of March, 10 teenagers had been charged as adults in connection to violent felonies this year, including homicide, court data show. That’s up from six in 2022 and four in 2021, pointing to increased severity of violence, prosecutors say, rather than more cases.

“Completely different level of violence,” said Clarkson, the deputy prosecutor. She added later, “The gun violence has just skyrocketed.”

Bohl reflected on the shift from fistfights and settling scores on the playground in his childhood.

“Nobody had weapons or guns, and so it never elevated,” said Bohl, who’s overseen all operations at Remann Hall except for lawyers and judges since 2013. Before that, he worked in the probation department.

“I don’t know where all these guns come from, but everybody has a gun,” Bohl said. “It’s just so many times where it’s like, if you didn’t have that gun, that would have never happened. It’s disturbing that there’s so many guns out there.”

Teens tend to be tight-lipped about how they get guns, court officials say. Some have told probation counselors they carry a firearm for safety.

“They’re like, ‘Do you know where I live,’ or, ‘I don’t have a home right now, I’m living on the streets,’” juvenile court spokesperson Jinnie Horan said in a recent interview. “That’s what they feel like they need to have, not that they used it, not that they’re going to use it. But that’s just built into what their reality is.”

Like criminal referrals, violent crime also disproportionately impacts young Black people, according to court data.

Black children made up about half of violent crime referrals in 2022, compared to about 12% of the overall county population. About 60% of the average daily juvenile detention population was comprised of Black teens.

Meanwhile, county health department data for 2020 and 2021 show more than a third of youth assault victims in Tacoma were Black.

Bohl called the inequities troubling. He said the juvenile court has an equity team devoted to fixing them and a probation program specialized for Black youth called Pathways to Success.

“The system is designed to work just like it’s working,” Bohl said. “And so we really want to undo the disparities.”

Tacoma youth violence: Join us Thursday to discuss solutions with community leaders

Lessons for broader violence prevention

Bohl said it’s a sad reality that so many kids only get the help they need once they’ve been caught in the legal system.

“What you hear from our families so often is that they’ve tried a bunch of different things. And people have let them down or they didn’t qualify for this service or this service was full,” Bohl said. “And so the families who are already struggling, already stressed, high conflict in the home, they just need help.”

Bohl said he sees the school system as an important touch-point for youth that was strained during the pandemic.

“A lot of the kids that we worked with never went back (to school), because they were already on the margins,” said Bohl, who noted partnerships and data gathering with a number of local schools. “Ideally, we’d all be on the same page and really wanting to help kids and families, not push people into the justice system unduly.”

Bohl also noted the need for more accessible mental health services and social programs throughout the county, which would involve collaboration and complex structural changes.

Kaitlan Ohler, director at the Imagine Justice Project, plans to suggest those sorts of big-picture changes as a part of its state-funded Peace Point initiative to prevent youth violence. Last fall, IJP partnered with Tacoma Community Boat Builders and the Big Homie Program to begin community-based research by convening a group of local leaders, experts and people who have experienced violence and live in areas disproportionately impacted by it. IJP will release a strategic plan report in late June.

One of Ohler’s key takeaways so far is that the region doesn’t necessarily need new types of programs or more providers, but a model for collaborating and strategizing efforts. She also said many “micro-organizations” have difficulty tapping into government funding to expand their reach. She also said she was surprised by how many kids surveyed for the project have talked about needing more support at school.

“We don’t need one organization doing one really big program,” Ohler told The News Tribune recently. “We’re really going to thrive when we have a lot of organizations running a bunch of different programs.”

Ohler said the strategic plan will look at root causes of violence, such as poverty, trauma and structural racism. It will also acknowledge access to firearms in the area, unmet mental health needs and the sense of hopelessness many have felt since the pandemic.

Building systems to address those issues will take time, Ohler said, and some community members may be disappointed that they’re not recommending quicker fixes.

“For us, the work really begins after the plan comes out,” Ohler said. “I feel strongly that if we focus all of our energy on stopping someone from getting shot tomorrow, we’re not going to stop the cycles of violence.”