Street roots
Aug. 17, 2012
Tough on crime advocates turn to new bag of tricks
BY DAVID ROGERS
C O N T R IB U T IN G C O L U M N IS T
n late July, Oregonians found out there
was new opposition to much-needed
criminal justice reform. Actually, it’s old
opposition that has developed a new front
group.
Steve Doell, director of Crime Victims
United, has apparently created a new group
called the Truth in Sentencing Project. The
Truth in Sentencing Project went on the air
in late July with a short radio ad in a new
effort to manipulate the public.
The ad tells listeners that Oregon’s
prison system is so costly not because of
high incarceration rates, but because our
average cost to incarcerate an inmate is so
expensive. Doell’s ad tells people that
“Inmate costs are $82 a day in Oregon. $52
a day in Idaho.” He suggests if we made
incarceration costs more in line with Idaho
we would save plenty of money.
What’s really going on here and what is
motivating these ads?
Steve Doell is one of a handful of staunch
defenders of Oregon’s antiquated mandatory
minimum sentencing laws. He is joined by
Kevin Mannix (author of Measure 11) and
the Oregon District Attorneys Association.
Together they are the remnants of a tough
but not particularly smart philosophy that
wants to keep Oregon’s mandatory
minimum laws exactly as is. Laws like
Measure 11 are responsible for the doubling
of the prison population in the last fifteen
years.
There is now an overwhelming amount of
research in the U .S . that shows we can
reduce crime at a fraction of the cost of
continuing to build and fill prisons. If we
I
David Rogers is the executive director of
Partnership for Safety and Justice. P S J is a
statewide, non-profit advocacy organization
dedicated to making Oregon’s approach to crime
and public safety more effective and more just.
flatline prison growth, Oregon can save
hundreds of millions of dollars and some of
those savings can be reinvested into more
cost-effective strategies that are better
designed to build safe and healthy
communities. We call this justice
reinvestment.
Doell, Mannix, and the district attorneys
realize that legislators and the public are
ready to take action to reduce our
skyrocketing prison spending through safe
and sensible sentencing modernization. The
writing is on the wall. The Governor’s
Commission on Public Safety will be
generating much need recommendations for
reforms later this year. Oregon needs to
move forward with a justice reinvestment
agenda because we can’t afford to continue
to close schools and cut life-saving services
while also being on a fast track to spend
hundreds of millions of dollars on building
new prisons.
So the relics of an old era are reaching
into a new bag of tricks. It’s called the bait
and switch.
They realize that they can’t convince
people to ignore Oregon’s unsustainable
So Doell is right in one way. If we want to
turn Oregon’s prison system into cheap and
dangerous human warehouses with
underpaid and undertrained staff in a state
with higher rates of recidivism and
victimization, we should be like Idaho. That
is one way to save money, but at a very high
cost.
The focus on lowering the cost of
incarceration per day also ignores the real
problem.
Last year the Oregon’s Legislative Fiscal
Office released a report called “Correction
Spending Trends.” The report was rather
unambiguous about what was going on in
Oregon: “If there is any one factor that has
increased the prison population and
correctional spending, it has been the
changes in sentencing laws since the mid-
1990s. Between 1994 and 2000, the average
length of sentence and therefore the
number of offenders under the supervision
of D O C has increased significantly.”
Furthermore, the state projects that with
no sentencing reform, we are on a trajectory
to add 2,000 new prison beds to our system
in the next decade at a cost of hundreds of
millions of dollars. The only thing that will
flatline prison growth is safe and sensible
sentencing modernization.
The Truth in Sentencing Project has
emerged as a new front organization for the
tough-on-crime advocates in Oregon. Their
focus on lowering the cost of incarceration
per day is a distraction designed to attack
public employees and slow down the needed
focus on updating our sentencing laws to
create a smarter, more sustainable approach
to maintaining safe and healthy
communities. Beware.
prison growth and spending. So now they
want to convince people that the best way
to address prison spending is not through
safe and sensible sentencing modernization
but instead by lowering the cost per day of
incarcerating people in Oregon.
Doell’s radio ad essentially asks people
why can’t Oregon just create a prison
system that is as cheap as Idaho’s if we want
to save money.
So here is what Doell is not saying.
Idaho’s prisons may be cheap but Idaho is
far from a model for smart public safety
strategies. Idaho’s recidivism rates are
almost 50 percent higher than Oregon’s,
which means that people who are released
from Idaho’s prison system are much, much
more likely to reoffend.
Last year Oregon was highlighted in a
national report by Pew’s Public Safety
Performance Project called the State of
Recidivism: the Revolving Door of America’s
Prisons. The report identified Oregon as a
standout for reducing recidivism and one of
the key factors was investing in prison
programs that help people make it when
they return to the community from prison.
Here is another dubious distinction
between Idaho and Oregon. Idaho has one of
the highest percentages of privately
operated prison beds in the country. The
private prison industry has a horrible track
record for poor conditions and abuse and
Oregon is lucky not to have any at the
moment. In fact, the reason Oregon
currently doesn’t have any private prisons is
when we were sending women prisoners out
of state to privately operated prisons in the
1990s, they had to be brought back to
Oregon because of rampant sexual assault.
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