Page 12
One act doesn’t define you
BY ANDY KO
C O N T R IB U T IN G C O L U M N IS T
people are more than the worst
thing they have done or the worst
thing that has been done to
A ndy Ko is the
executive director o f
the Partnership fo r
Safety a n d Justice, a
statewide nonprofit
advocacy
organization
advancing public
safety solutions that
ensure justice,
equity,
accountability and
h e a lin g to achi^ge
sa/e and strong ,
communities.
S tre et Roots •
Commentary
them.”
We say that quite a bit at Partnership for
Safety and Justice. It is one way that we
explain why PSJ prioritizes criminal justice
reforms that address the system as a whole
and focuses on the people most impacted by
the system, including crime victims, people
accused of crime, and
the families and
communities of
both.
We are also
making the point
that people are
complex. We all
experience fear,
anger, hope and
despair. We love and
want to be loved. We need to be safe. When
we are harmed, we look for ways to heal. We
want justice.
That odd little phrase also expresses our
belief that no one is defined solely by a
single experience. People suffer crime, but
they are more than just “victims.” People
commit crimes, but they are more than just
“criminals.” All of PSJ’s work hinges on this
basic idea that people are more than the
lim ite d th in g s w e know o r a re to ld a b o u t
w
Feb. 17-23, 2017
not even voting for Trump
that he’d rather have President Trump make
that decision, not President Clinton.
Do I completely understand the choice
that Doug and my brother each made on
Election Day 2016? No. But, even if I
believed that the worst thing they and almost
63 miUion other American voters have ever
done was to vote Donald Trump into the
White House, people are always more than
the worst thing they have done or the worst
thing that has been done to them. Trump
voters had their reasons for going with The
Donald, and we ignore their concerns at our
society’s peril. We are living in a time that
demands solutions.
Lucky for me and Partnership for Justice s
staff, we get to work toward solutions every
day. One of our priorities this year will be to
keep Oregon from making the mistake of
Opening a new women’s prison. That
requires solutions. We’ll be working to
realign Oregon’s excessive mandatory prison
sentences for people accused of pertain drug
and property crimes, ensure that convicted
parents can be supervised in their
communities to care for their children,
expand a proven prison transition program
that keeps communities safe while relieving
pressure on the state prison system, and
preserve funding for local services that
reduce crime. Doing this work, we will be
asking lawmakers to understand that two-
dimensional representations of crime victims
and people accused of a crime are unreliable
as road signs for policy decision-making.
T ru m p
p r p m is i n g t o t r y to do so m e th in g
WSFS;1'd i v i d e d as1 a nation“*"
My other Trump voter is my brother. He is than at any time in the past half-century, and
19 months younger than I am; we might as
we have a president who seems intent on
well be twins. I can’t remember a time
pulling the country farther apart at every
without him. His daughter and I share the
opportunity. I don’t know where it will all
same name. We are very different and always lead, but I do accept the old cliché that every
have been. We fight. But, as children and
crisis is also an opportunity. Hopefully, the
young men, we did almost everything
opportunity to see people as more than
together. My brother cares about the Second Trump voters, crime victims, Clinton voters,
Amendment. For him, it’s all about the right
or people accused of crime will help widen
to bear arms, so the president’s next
our sense of what is possible and build
Supreme Court nomination is important to
momentum toward a shared commitment to
him.Long before Election Day, he decided
solutions. We’ll see.
possibly racist occupants of backwater
regions of all those states in the middle.
The only problem is that it’s not truthful.
Two of the people I know best and love most
in the world voted for Donald Trump. My
Trump voters are not racists or generic
haters. They are not unmoved by the stark
disparities in income and opportunity faced
by a massive number of our people. They
understand full well why people would risk
everything to come to the United States
seeking a better life for themselves and their
families. They care about things like the Bill
of Rights. They are not stupid, even if I think
their reasoning is based more on wishful
thinking than objective reality. They both felt
some degree of ambivalence toward Trump.
As one memorably declared, “Donald Trump
is a swine. But I’m still going to vote for
him.”
Doug and I have been friends - more like
brothers, really - since we were 12. In our
20s, he was one of the people who helped
me cope with the grief of my father’s death.
We grew up in a very rusty part of the old
Rust Belt that began losing factories, jobs
and families out of state in the ’70s. After
college and law school, Doug returned to live
in our hometown and witnessed its
continuing decline. He understands that
most of the jobs that Trump promised to
“bring back” to the U.S. were lost to
automation, not foreign workers. But he still
supported Trump, because in his view, only
u r a n n r o a r h t o d e v e lo n
iat reduce mass incarceration, HHdNto
ena racial
,ena
disparities in arrests and prosecution, and
address other problems that afflict our
criminal justice system depends on our
accepting both crime victims and people
accused of crimes as more than the labels we
affix to them.
I believe and accept all of this. But I still
have had a tough time applying that learning
to the recent presidential election. Given all
that is happening, it is a seductive self-
delusion to dismiss Trump voters as
undereducated, counter-factual, misogynistic,
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Tease or ridicule
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2
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