Tacoma Juvenile Hall Is No Longer Holding `Healthy Delinquents'

TACOMA - Remann Hall was built in 1971 to hold the juvenile joy rider, vandal or schoolyard fighter. Today it holds rapists, drug lords and gun-toting gang members - when it can hold them.

Yakima-area law officers shot two recent Remann Hall escapees, 16-year-olds Robert Good and Ted Oreiro, after a high-speed chase. Good was killed and Oreiro was wounded in the hand.

Yakima County Prosecutor Jeff Sullivan said the shootings were justifiable and the officers will not be charged.

Good's death has once more put the spotlight on a patched and limping juvenile-justice system that is being asked to do much more than it was designed for.

``It was a very, very different world when we opened this place,'' Stephen Johnston, Pierce County Juvenile Court administrator, says of Remann Hall. ``I think the public still has the perception that we're some sort of glorified orphanage out here.''

Remann Hall and other state juvenile halls were filled 20 years ago mostly with what Johnston terms ``healthy delinquents.'' He defines those as minors who have committed small-scale property or other crimes while rebelling against their parents.

Today's offenders are more serious.

``We get the same kinds of crimes out at Remann Hall that we have downtown in the adult courts,'' says Superior Court Judge Frederick Hayes. ``We've got 11-year-old rapists. We have 15-year-olds who are well on their way to a life of crime.''

Hayes recently had a youth before him accused of firing a pistol into a car full of people.

Such increasingly violent offenders pose a serious threat at Remann Hall, where many security fixtures were added as an afterthought. Bars have been installed on corridor windows. Gates have been doubled, cell heating vents have been covered with metal boxes and a smoke-detection system has been installed.

Even so, a recent review by the architectural firm WMFL found dozens of deficiencies, including corridors that are too long for effective monitoring. Reviewers say the hall needs a better way to watch detainees than having staffers peer into cells through 8-square-inch windows in thick metal doors. And the 7-by-12-foot bare concrete cells offer little in the way of recreation or comfort.

Suspended ceilings in some common areas have allowed youths to crawl into overhead areas and work their way outside.

Some inmates stay at Remann Hall for as long as a year, but it has few educational or leisure facilities.

``I recently ran into someone at a cocktail party who complained to me about what his daughter encountered when she was picked up and thrown into Remann Hall,'' Hayes recalls. ``He told me it was nothing but a goddamned jail. I couldn't disagree.''

The hall suffers from a familiar juvenile-justice-system problem - lack of money. A construction project to correct some problems and increase Remann Hall's size was cut from $17 million to

$11 million by the Pierce County Council, and the whole package was defeated two times as part of a law-enforcement bond issue submitted to voters.

``The whole juvenile-justice system needs an overhaul,'' says King County Superior Court Judge Terrence Carroll.

Carroll is a member of a working group that plans to ask the Legislature for an all-encompassing review of the system. The group includes King County Executive Tim Hill, Prosecutor Norm Maleng and county Juvenile Court Administrator Harold Delia.