Typically, we at CADF love to say, “we told you so.” This is a rare exception. Over a year after CADF and allies began advocating to end the ill-fated program, the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office (“KCPAO”) has finally decided to “pause” its inaptly-named Restorative Community Pathways (“RCP”) diversion program. Last month, County Prosecutor Leesa Manion quietly shelved the four-year-old program, which had seen first-time juvenile offenders sent referred to programs meant to keep them out of prison but in the grand scheme doing anything but. By at least one count, more than half of the more than 226 who entered the RCP on felony referrals wound up reoffending on a felony level within two years. More than one-third diverted for misdemeanors reoffended, too. “Some folks may interpret [a 53% recidivism rate] as a 50-50 shot of success,” said Manion, and while she doesn’t view it so bluntly, the finding “bolstered [her] decision” to “temporarily” pause felony referrals to the RCP.
For a program once hailed as a pillar of “restorative justice,” this was a sad but predictable end. Launched in 2021, then-County Executive Dow Constantine made it a centerpiece of Seattle’s early-2020s dabble in fantastical criminal-justice reform. It was not the only such program to fail, but its vaunted launch renders its quiet demise especially stark, The idea was bold but—as CADF early cautioned—fatally simplistic. First-time offenders (read: those caught) would avoid sentences and criminal records for certain “low-level” offenses if they completed the RCP, which offered an unfocused mélange of buzzwordy activities, involving “community navigators” to monitor each youth’s progress in “four areas of support and accountability.” Okay. Just by 2023, King County had already poured $16 million into the RCP and a companion gun-violence initiative, entrusting roughly 18 local nonprofits to ensure compliance but with the scantest of public oversight.
Despite—or perhaps because of—the unrealistically high hopes, the RCP rapidly devolved into a thinly monitored exit ramp. Officials assigned to oversee the RCP quickly fell—and stayed—asleep at the switch. Or, worse still, actively collaborated in the program’s winding demise. Even now, there is little clarity on where all those taxpayer dollars ended up. One recent audit of four King County programs revealed a “whopping $6,700” increase over a mere six years—from $22 million in 2020 to $1.5 billion in 2025—including “unauthorized payments” to RCP contractors. This should clearly not be the end of the matter. The breadth of the RCP’s failure demands a full and robust audit of the RCP’s role in this broader scandal. We do not agree—as one advocate prosecutor put it—that King County residents “don’t need to know how things are going” and will “know if things haven’t gone right because the kid has committed another crime.” In any event, now we do know; boy-howdy, do we know.
Not that proponents weren’t warned. Even before CADF stepped in and elevated the program’s failures to statewide attention, several mayors from the southern half of King County urged the KCPAO to reconsider. Echoing these implorations, King County Council member Reagan Dunn motioned to pause the RCP, but the push fell on deaf ears, with the Council voting 5-1 against Dunn’s initiative. Even after some high-profile embarrassments – such as revelations that the county had subcontracted $266,000 to a youth diversion nonprofit run by a registered sex offender with fake credentials. Still, the KCPAO stuck to its guns—literally. In May 2024, a 16-year-old RCPer allegedly shot and killed a woman who was trying to break up a melee. Soon after, it emerged that the suspect had been referred to RCP for brandishing a gun at school. But he never showed up to mandatory meetings. For ten months nobody at the program bothered to inform the KCPAO of his truancy—and no one at the Office ever cared to ask. While the County Council finally agreed in January to have the County Auditor investigate, the KCPAO’s recent pause could imperil the probe. And early numbers did not strike confidence. In just 2023, out of 323 juvenile cases referred to alternative diversion programs like RCP, only 227 ever enrolled, and only 135 completed the program—a paltry 42% graduation rate. Some contracted nonprofits failed to ever reach out to “participants” and it often took up to year before the KCPAO was notified—again, if they were.
This summer’s recidivism report was the final straw. Manion tapped Seattle University economist Claus Pörtner to conduct an independent review of RCP results. Pörtner tracked 902 youth cases diverted to RCP since its start–676 misdemeanors and 226 felonies –finding that more than half reoffended within two years. and checked who reoffended over two years. Fortunately, the popular pressure became too strong to bear, and Manion opted for a “pause” of felony referrals, providing the KCPAO room to “continue to build and improve diversion.” Good luck with that.
Proponents are sounding the same false alarms, stressing that recidivism is “one data point, but it’s not the whole story.” Call me old fashioned, but a high rate of recidivism by itself proves that a criminal-justice system is not serving its core function. Defenders argue that the program has quietly delivered benefits that aren’t captured in a simple re-arrest rate. According to one RCP official, “[t]he support we offer to harmed parties, and the safety and healing we build with young people, isn’t just a smart investment—it’s a pathway to true public safety.” How, though? At bottom the RCP is still a program expressly designed to reduce re-offense rates. A mission at which it has abjectly failed.
Few are against pursuing creative criminal-justice methods—CADF among them. We and others have consistently critiqued the RCP precisely because it gives a bad rap to the very idea of offering alternatives to straight jailtime. Its pause also shows that “progressive” (read: cavalier) criminal “justice” projects tend to fail everywhere, including in Seattle—a City we love dearly but that in recent decades has been a petri dish for all manner of ill-guided progressive projects. Remember the CHAZ? Those guys didn’t even want the alternatives. Even there, public patience can—eventually—wear thin. Good intentions and huge budget outlays cannot sustain any public-private venture in which the former does not oversee the latter in real-time. that outcomes matter. The RCP handed cases off to nonprofits with minimal tracking—on a wink and a handshake, more or less. It took almost five years for the adverse consequences of this failure to reach the fever pitch that even the most progressive Seattleites could no long “la-la-la-I’m-not-listening” their way through. What’s next for King County’s most troubled youth? As one official so-obviously put it, “What you’ve got to have is a diversion model that people will agree on – that is transparent and cost-effective and is clearly working.” No duh. If King County does decide to replace the RCP, it must ensure there are mechanisms in place to maximize enforcement and to course-correct in real-time. Pinky swears are no way to reduce recidivism rates.
Alki,
Sam Spiegelman