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About Street roots. (Portland, OR) 1998-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 27, 2013)
♦ Street roots Sept. 27, 2013 Better solutions are on the front end, not the back BY DAVID ROGERS C O N T R IB U T IN G C O L U M N I S T hen discussing re-entry barriers with a formerly incarcerated person a few years ago, I was struck by the need for Oregon to grapple with a rhetorical question the young man was posing. “When will we actually put corrections in the Department of Corrections?” I am not looking to get too philosophical here, but it seems like we do want our prison system focused on helping people succeed when they get out. After all, over ninety percent of people in our state prison system will come home eventually. So how do we make our public safety system better at reducing re-offense? How do we break the cycle of crime and re-incarceration? Clearly, we must zero-in on the role addiction plays in crime and the role treatment can play in crime prevention. With little fanfare in August, the Secretary of State’s office released an audit of access to addiction treatment among people leaving prison in Oregon. The report demonstrated how much more could be done while also highlighting a surprising new resource. The report begins by outlining the scale of addiction-related convictions in our state. Seventy percent of incarcerated people in Oregon have identified substance abuse problems. The Department of Corrections focuses its limited treatment resources on people identified as a high risk to reoffend. W David Rogers is the executive director o f Partnership for Safety and fustice. PSJ is a statewide, non-profit advocacy organization dedicated to making Oregon’s approach to crime and public safety more effective and just. Yet, the report also found that over 4,500 people assessed as high-risk who were released from 2008 to 2011 did not receive treatment. By any standard, 4,500 is a lot of people who could benefit from addiction treatment who are not getting it in prison and might not be getting it in the community either. So how do we fix this? The Secretary of State’s report did present one very interesting resource: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). Under the expansion of Medicaid under the ACA which becomes effective in January of 2014, a huge number of the people leaving prison may qualify for healthcare coverage under which addiction treatment would be fully accessible. This means that, with the right coordination, the expansion of healthcare coverage has the potential to relieve financially stressed counties of nearly all the costs of providing substance abuse treatment to people who could benefit greatly from it. So not only will the Affordable Care Act provide thousands of Oregonians with health care and treatment, we have an opportunity to also significantly reduce recidivism. For highlighting the benefits of the ACA alone, the Secretary of State’s audit was very useful, but the report raises critical issues that need much more conversation in Oregon. First and foremost, the audit indirectly underscores that addiction is a public health issue. Yes, addiction has public safety implications. People can commit addiction- driven crime. But we have been addressing addiction from more of a criminalization approach than a public health approach. It seems quite clear that if incarceration is our primary strategy to address addiction-driven crime, we will not succeed in breaking the cycle and we pay for it dearly. The audit points out that it costs Oregon $84 a day to keep someone in prison but $16 a day supervise people in the community and provide treatment. So why are some people being sent to prison in the first place if we can hold them accountable and get them effective treatment in the community? The truth is that we know diversion programs like drug courts work. The research is clear. But right now we are sending a lot people to prison for addiction-driven crime who aren’t getting what they need there. Remember the young man’s question: when will we actually put corrections into the Department of Corrections? Although I agree that our prison systems should be focused on rehabilitation, we are probably looking in the wrong direction if we think prisons are Oregon’s best crime prevention tool. We have to look more at front-end solutions and not back-end solutions. Expanding access to treatment in the community when people return from prison is great - it’s a good step. Ensuring people get access to treatment in prison is also a good step. But a better step is getting more people access to treatment and proven accountability interventions before sending them to prison at all. We still have some real work to do in order to shift toward a more effective prevention and public health-oriented approach to creating safe and healthy communities in Oregon. But we are beginning to ask the right questions. Lessons of Trayvon: Conference addresses youth, guns and violence BY LEW CHURCH C O N T R IB U T IN G C O L U M N I S T n response to recent events, from the Sept. 16 mass shooting in Washington, I D.C., to the acquittal this summer of George Zimmerman in the murder of unarmed, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida, a coalition of activist groups and organizers have initiated the all-day Oct. 1 Oregon Conference on Youth, Guns and Violence, at the First Unitarian Church on S.W. 12th and Salmon in downtown Portland, 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. There is room for hundreds of participants, with 12 workshops during the day, plus a community town hall, 6-9 p.m. on Tuesday night. Our coalition felt that issues of racial profiling, so-called “stand your ground” laws, the school-to-prison pipeline, mass shootings from Virginia Tech to Sandy Hook, the killing of Keaton Otis here in Portland and that of Oscar Grant in Oakland, and a culture of violence (locally and globally) that sees marginalizing the poor and “objectifying” shooting victims as “other” (whether those “others” are Newtown first graders, or Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona), demand a community response here in the Northwest. Members of our coalition, either at the Conference itself, or later in October, hope to bring Sybrina Fulton, Trayvon’s mom, to speak in Portland. We have also invited several national speakers (we will see if their schedules match our Conference date), including Newtown parents (two of them were in Hillsboro in August re the shootings), Gabi and Mark Giffords (they have toured seven states so far, this summer, for better gun laws), and we have invited local speakers like relatives of victims in the Clackamas Mall shooting. Sisters of the Road, Street Roots, Portland Jobs with Justice, Young Minds of Awareness at McCoy Academy, Portland Parents Union, PSU Progressive Student Union, and the Center for Intercultural Organizing, have all endorsed the conference, among others. J ^ U S IN E S ^ ^ E Q U E N ^ ^ ^ ^ ook your stay through Hotels4Change Sisters of the Road will be doing a workshop on “Criminalizing the Poor.” Other workshops will address fighting The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and the National Rifle Association in an effort to pass sensible gun laws in Oregon; a Healing Hurt People workshop with local doctors; a gun turn-in event with CeaseFire Oregon; a workshop by Portland Parents Union, plus workshops that address discrimination against gays, racial profiling, economic violence, adequate mental health services, and the war on women. Lastly, the conference will seek to identify concrete ways to curb the power of groups such as ALEC and the NRA. For the Conference, $10 donations at the door will be accepted, but no one will be turned away for being poor. For our Oct. 1 conference, like Aeschylus, we believe it is important “to make gentler the life of the world” — from Clackamas Mall and Thurston High to the streets of Florida, and from Gitmo to Damascus.
