COMMENTARY | Instead of 2nd women's prison, Oregon can invest in other efforts to strengthen families, communities The 2017 presidential election and the uncertainty it’s caused make it imperative that we work in our homes, workplaces, neighborhoods, ...
19 Jan 2017 - Shannon Wight
COMMENTARY | Expanded incarceration disregards people’s potential, magnifies disparities When the vast majority of incarcerated women battle addiction, are victims of assault or have mental health diagnoses, criminal justice can be squarely classified as ...
22 Sep 2016 - Talia Gad
We have work to do to tackle many community problems, especially in the context of poverty Homelessness. Housing. Crisis. Those three words have become commonplace in our city over the past three years. It’s for good reason too. The skyrocketing rents a ...
25 Aug 2016 - Israel Bayer
COMMENTARY | Prosecutors, legislators have power to choose how to better spend $10M on women convicted of crime At the end of September, the Emergency Board of the Oregon State Legislature will consider a request from the Department of Corrections for nea ...
18 Aug 2016 - Shannon Wight
COMMENTARY | How can we eliminate presumption that law enforcement involves application of superior force? A wise friend of mine once gave me advice on coping with a paralyzing sense of helplessness. Gordon said, “Find a starting point that seems right to ...
21 Jul 2016 - Andy Ko
Diverse interests come together to support the state’s promising program for criminal justice reform On May 14, Oregon’s Office of Economic Analysis released its March 2015 quarterly review of the state’s economic health. (You can read the entire report, ...
25 May 2015 - Shannon Wight
Oregon looks to model Washington's Family Offender Sentencing Alternative to allow certain parents to serve sentences in community supervision rather than prison Oregon has recently committed to an exciting new path to improve its public safety syste ...
27 Mar 2015 - Shannon Wight and Elizabeth Hilliard
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” President Obama added, “But it does not do so on its own. It does so because there are hands of ordinary people doing extraordinary things every single ...
31 Dec 2014 - PSJ Staff Members
Everyone with a warrant or who thinks they might have a warrant should turn themselves in on Jan. 1. What would happen if everybody with a warrant turned themselves in on the same day? In one jurisdiction, if only 25, 50 or 100 people were willing to do ...
29 Sep 2014 - Chris O'Connor
More than 4,000 people leave Oregon state prisons each year, and many more are released from county jails. This population suffers from disproportionately high rates of untreated infectious and chronic disease, mental health disorders and substance abuse ...
28 Jan 2014 - Gina Anzaldúa