Opinion
Opinion | Changes to Portland police union contract are possible with impasse
Hannah Saiger, originally from New York City, is spending this year in Portland on Tivnu: Building Justice, a Jewish social justice gap year program. She works for Cascadia Clusters, which conducts construction projects for houseless Portlanders, and Kindness Farm, which grows fresh produce for houseless and low-income neighbors and teaches regenerative agriculture practices. With the…
Opinion | In Oregon, prisoners learn violence, not rehabilitation
Basim Floro is imprisoned at Oregon State Penitentiary. This article is an excerpt from a book he’s writing about his incarceration at Oregon state correctional facilities. Read more of Floro’s writing. Damn, will life ever be the same? That’s the thought many people incarcerated think when they step behind these bars. Sadly, their families have the…
Kaia Sand | Empathy is built through Street Roots’ journalism and vendors’ prose
Quite simply, we are committed to writing it down. We do so in recognition of the thousands of people who survive deprivations right before our eyes and the many more we can’t see, who are housing insecure and skimping on basic needs to survive; in recognition of the hundreds of years of systemic injustices that…
Kaia Sand | ‘Imagine how well it would work if the city and the people who made decisions stood behind it’
In rolling out the Portland Street Response pilot, the teams must keep going to continue to build trust with unhoused communities, and the city must not do this on the cheap. Those are my takeaways from talking this morning with program coordinator Ebony Morgan at CAHOOTS, the mobile crisis response program in Eugene. Portland City Council is slated…
Vendor Profiles
Street Roots vendor profile | He’s found stability in Portland
Daniel Toole has been wandering. For the past four years, he has traveled across the United States. “I’ve been to 21 states and three different countries: Peru, Canada and the U.K.,” he said. He’s been searching. “I’ve been exploring my own soul,” Daniel said, “questioning my spirituality, questioning the basic principles: What is a community?…
News
Hundreds in Oregon still await new trials a year after Supreme Court ruled on non-unanimous juries
Update: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday, May 17, in Edwards v. Vannoy that its 2020 decision in Ramos v. Louisiana, which struck down non-unanimous jury convictions, does not need to be applied retroactively. But the court left it up to states to decide whether to retry the cases that were affected. In a statement, Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum…
Cancellation of popular program for Oregon prisoners prompts action in the Legislature
When Oregon prisons closed to all visitors in an attempt to keep COVID-19 out last spring, one woman in custody at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility was in a state of panic. She turned to the Oregon Justice Resource Center for help. “I am writing this letter in hopes of saving my life,” she wrote to…
Why Rep. Tawna Sanchez hasn’t shied away from controversial legislation
On a warm spring Tuesday last week, Oregon Rep. Tawna Sanchez (D-Portland) presented a history lesson on Christopher Columbus to the Senate Rules Committee. The committee is deciding whether to change the name of the second Monday in October to Indigenous Peoples’ Day across the state. One senator, Sanchez said, suggested they omit the part…
