Thanks Emily Green and Street Roots for a well-researched cover story about Measure 11 and its terrible impact on kids of color.
Measure 11 gives the prosecution a claw hammer with which to bludgeon young defendants, by charging them with a more serious crime than was committed, then using the threat of mandatory sentencing to scare the daylights out of them should they even thinking of relying on their constitutional right to trial.
The plea bargaining tactic in itself has become so commonplace that only 3 percent of federal cases, 6 percent of state, even go to trial in this country. Taken together with Oregon’s Measure 11, it becomes a lethal one-two punch. And juveniles, of course, are particularly easy to terrify.
Since its passage in 1994, we have built three new state prisons, at Umatilla, then Lakeview, then Madras. It is time we repeal Measure 11 and take back this terrible power we’ve handed to the prosecution.
Too many people are in prison! And we middle class white folks need to do more than read The New Jim Crow in our book groups.
– MARTHA GIES
Portland
This article appears in 2016-04-08.