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About Portland observer. (Portland, Or.) 1970-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 28, 2016)
Page 2 December 28, 2016 Harmful Mass Incarceration A new women’s Pursuing Justice prison won’t solve the problem b obbin s ingh J ulia y oshiMoto As we prepare to enter a new year, Oregon’s prison system is facing up to the real-world impact of mass incarceration. The U.S. locks up more people per capita than anywhere else on the plan- et. While awareness of the deeply damaging impacts of trying to use prison to solve many of our social problems is thankfully growing, we aren’t working fast enough to restrain prison growth in our state. Oregon, for example, faces the prospect of opening a second pris- on for women due to overcrowding at the Coffee Creek Correctional Facility, south of Portland. Cof- fee Creek opened in 2001 and is currently the only prison for wom- en in Oregon. It was designed to house 1,253 women, with a max- imum capacity of 1,280 inmates. When those numbers are exceed- by and Subscribe ! Fill Out & Send To: 503-288-0033 Emmett Till Bill Signed Name: President Obama signed the Em- mett Till Civil Rights Crimes Reauthorization Act Tuesday to allow the Department of Justice and the FBI to reopen civil rights crimes committed before 1980. The bill is named after the Chi- cago boy who was kidnapped and lynched in Mississippi in 1955 for whistling at a white woman. Telephone: Princess Leia Actress Dies Attn: Subscriptions, PO Box 3137, Portland OR 97208 $45.00 for 3 months • $80.00 for 6 mo. • $125.00 for 1 year (please include check with this subscription form) Address: or email subscriptions@portlandobserver.com L egaL N otices Need to publish a court docu- ment or notice? Need an affidavit of publication quickly and effi- ciently? Please fax or e-mail your notice for a free price quote! Carrie Fisher, the child of Holly- wood royalty, author, screen- writer and ac- tress who rose to fame with her role as the inter- galactic heroine Princess Leia in the “Star Wars” film series, died Tuesday after suffering a heart attack aboard a plane a few days earlier. Fisher was 60 years old. Driver Dies Hitting Bus Fax: 503-288-0015 e-mail: classifieds@portlandobserver.com The Portland Observer An elderly woman possibly hit the gas pedal instead of the brakes before colliding with the back of a TriMet bus Saturday afternoon. Established 1970 Mark Washington, Sr. e ditor : Michael Leighton e xecutive d irector : Rakeem Washington A dvertising M AnAger : Leonard Latin Office Manager/Classifieds: Lucinda Baldwin c reAtive d irector : Paul Neufeldt P ublisher : r ePorter /W eb e ditor : Christa McIntyre P ublic r elAtions : Mark Washington Jr. by b obbin s ingh ed, the additional prison capacity must be accommodated at the Or- egon State Penitentiary Minimum Security Annex in Salem. Unfortunately, for many months now there have been more than 1,280 women at Coffee Creek. Something must be done to address this overcrowding for the safety and well-being of the women housed there and the staff working there. The Department of Corrections’ proposal to open a second wom- en’s prison to solve overcrowding comes with a substantial price tag. It would cost nearly $4 million to get OSP-Minimum ready to open to women and a further $17.5 mil- lion to run it for two years. So far, legislators have been unwilling to support this huge cost and have in- The Week in Review Portland Police said Jeanne Car- roll Lincoln, 88, died after her Honda car rear-ended the bus on Northeast Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard near Alberta Street. Trooper Shot Investigating An Oregon State trooper remained in critical condition Tuesday after he was shot multiple times by a murder suspect in Sherwood on Christmas night. Trooper Nic Ced- erberg was shot by Hames Tylka in a shootout after Tylka murdered his estranged wife, police said. Woody Guthrie Song on Vanport Flood found A lost folk song about one of Ore- gon’s worst disasters, the Vanport Flood, was found by a music histo- rian in Seattle. The song was writ- ten by famous American folk singer Woody Guthrie, well known for his “This Land is Your Land” and who inspired generations of musicians. Guthrie lived briefly in southeast stead encouraged stakeholders in the criminal justice system to look for ways to reduce the women’s prison population enough to re- move the need to open OSP-Min- imum. It wouldn’t take much. A reduc- tion of just a few dozen women would be enough to avoid opening a second prison and it’s about time that Oregon started tackling the over-incarceration of women. Consider the facts of female in- carceration in Oregon as recorded by the impartial Oregon Criminal Justice Commission: In the last 20 years, the women’s prison popula- tion has tripled. While other states have woken up to the ineffective- ness of incarceration as a way of C ontinued on P age 15 Portland’s Lents neighborhood. North Carolina Boycott North Carolina’s NAACP Presi- dent called for an economic boy- cott of his state last week in protest of what he calls the state’s “consti- tutional overreach” It comes after Republican lawmakers passed new laws to limit an incoming Democratic governor’s pow- er, and the state’s prior HB2 bill which he has called “anti-worker, anti-civil rights, and anti-LGBT.” Funding for Gateway Green Portland Parks Commissioner Amanda Fritz and Portland Parks & Recreation Director Mike Abbaté an- nounced last week $2 million for the first phase of Gate- way Green, a new park situated between I-84 and I-205. “Gateway Green will be a re- gional destination in park-deficient east Portland, and a working exam- ple of how active recreation can be balanced with natural restoration and preservation,” Fritz said. ---------------------- USPS 959 680 ------------------ 4747 NE Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd., Portland, OR 97211 The Portland Observer welcomes freelance submissions. 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