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
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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.
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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
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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.
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