WA adults serving extra prison time for juvenile offenses may see sentences reduced

Bryin Thomas doesn’t have any memories of his father outside of prison.

“My earliest memory is [when I was] 3 years old and he was at the county jail,” Thomas said. “I just remember him putting his hand on the glass and me putting my hand on the glass.”

Thomas is 22 now. His father, Brandin Thomas, is still in prison today due to the “juvenile points” system, in which convictions as a juvenile automatically add time to a person’s sentence as an adult. Juvenile points were outlawed last year in Washington state — but an estimated 800 to 1,500 people are still incarcerated under the juvenile points system.

At 18, Brandin Thomas was charged in the 2004 killing of Hassan Farah, a teacher and father of three who was driving a cab in south Seattle at the time he was shot. Thomas was 20 when he was sentenced to 35 years in prison after pleading guilty to first-degree murder and attempted robbery. He’s 38 now.

“I know in my heart I’m not a reckless child anymore,” said Brandin Thomas. “I know that I would never hurt another soul.”

A bill in the state Legislature, House Bill 2065, is aimed at sending people like Brandin Thomas home. It will apply the 2023 ban on juvenile points retroactively. This means people who are in prison serving sentences lengthened by juvenile points will be able to get resentenced without the points factored in.

The bill passed the House early Tuesday morning, as lawmakers worked through the night. Legislators approved the bill on a 56-41 vote, with Democratic Reps. Clyde Shavers and Joe Timmons joining Republicans in opposition. The legislation now goes to the Senate for consideration.

The 2023 ban was originally meant to be applied retroactively. But Republicans said resentencing would harm victims, and prosecutors and judges were concerned about the strain resentencing would add to the already overloaded criminal justice system.

“By taking retroactivity out of the bill last year, its impact was substantially minimized, leaving hundreds of people behind,” said ACLU-WA policy expert, Chelsea Moore.

Without the juvenile points system, Brandin Thomas said he likely would’ve had 10 fewer years on his sentence. That means he would have probably been in a work-release program with limited freedom today — he might have even been able to go to his son’s graduation from Morehouse College last year.

“It would’ve been surreal,” Bryin Thomas said. “I don’t think words can clothe the idea of what that would have meant to me.”

The juvenile points system

The juvenile points system assigned point values based on the type of crime committed. In Brandin Thomas’ case, he has five points from three prior juvenile convictions. He said he had no idea those convictions were going to haunt him later.

“The juvenile system — it’s pretty much, you do something as a child, and they don’t really explain to you or your parents what the consequences are,” Thomas said. “You get in trouble, you plead guilty, they don’t explain nothing to you. That’s pretty much what happened to me.”

Brandin Thomas first got in trouble with the law when he was 12. He said he was never a “bad kid” but struggled in school due to learning disabilities and didn’t have much structure in his household, so he acted out.

Juvenile points are based on the racist “superpredator” myth, Moore said. A Princeton professor, John J. Dilulio Jr., coined the phrase in 1995, arguing that inherently violent juveniles — mainly Black boys — would pose a new crime threat to the United States.

Dilulio later apologized and disavowed his own theory, but nearly every state expanded punishments for juvenile offenders due to the “superpredator” myth, according to a New York Times documentary.

Today, the juvenile points system disproportionately impacts Black and Indigenous people in prison, who as youth in school are more likely than their white peers to experience harsh disciplinary action, including arrest, for the same kind of conduct.

More than 40% of incarcerated Indigenous people have a juvenile felony on their record, as do 39% of incarcerated Black people, according to 2023 data collected by ACLU from the Department of Corrections.

About 422 of those still serving sentences under the juvenile points system are Indigenous, said lead sponsor of the bill, Rep. Chris Stearns, D-Auburn, a member of the Navajo Nation.

The bill is supported by 57 Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians as well as 21 tribes and Indigenous organizations in Washington State. In September, the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians unanimously called upon the Washington State Legislature to retroactively end the practice.

“This bill really to me is about healing intergenerational trauma,” Stearns told lawmakers during a public hearing on his bill.

What does it mean to support victims?

The bill also requires the Office of Crime Victims Advocacy to establish a flexible fund to support victims and survivors impacted by the resentencing amid concerns from police, prosecution and some Republican lawmakers who believe the bill is not “victim-centric.”

Russell Brown, executive director of Washington Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, said prosecutors often go for sentences that will benefit families of victims — for example, sentences for sex offenders that are long enough for a child to grow up before the offender is released from prison.

If the proposed policy passes, Brown said it would be tantamount to breaking promises to victims’ families. But Moore said drawing a line between people who are harmed and people who cause harm isn’t so simple.

“Trauma is the number one predictor of future incarceration,” Moore said. “Our prisons are filled with traumatized people.”

“We also have to understand the ways in which people who are currently incarcerated are also people who have been harmed,” Moore added.

One study of Washington state youth entering the juvenile justice system between 2011 and 2015 found that up to 80% had a history of at least one traumatic experience.

Research also suggests the decision-making center of the brain doesn’t fully develop until a person is in their mid-20s, and teens are guided by the emotional and reactive amygdala, rather than the logical frontal cortex.

“Do I feel like I’ve paid my debt to society? I don’t know, because I don’t know what that looks like,” Brandin Thomas said. “However, I feel like I’m a changed man.”

The cost of retroactive resentencing

In 2023, prosecutors said making juvenile points retroactive was a “non-starter” due to the overloaded criminal justice system.

Moore said ACLU-WA took these concerns into consideration and the new proposed bill staggers caseloads to ensure the justice system can handle the extra cases. Several public defenders’ groups have voiced support and the Superior Court Judges’ Association, which opposed the original bill in 2023, does not oppose this year’s proposal.

However, prosecutors still say it’s “simply not possible” to resentence those impacted. County officials, meanwhile, say they’re not opposed to the content of the bill, but they’re opposed to spending millions of dollars from their own coffers to implement the policy.

“If the state chooses to make this policy change, we believe that the state should pay for the resulting costs,” said Juliana Roe of the Washington Association of Counties.

Bryin Thomas said he doesn’t know much about the details of the juvenile points system legislation. But he said he does know that the prison system has done what it’s supposed to do — rehabilitate his dad — and it’s time for him to come home.

“I would always say, ‘If you come home, I’m dropping everything I have here and coming back home,’” said Thomas, who now lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

“His response would always be: ‘Stay where you’re at. You have a lot going on for yourself. I’m coming to you to make up for the lost time,’” he said.