Lawmakers in Oregon, a state that already leads the nation in electoral engagement, adopted legislation this summer that would make voting even more inclusive. If it is signed into law by the state’s Democratic governor, House Bill 2107 would instruct state Medicaid offices to automatically register people to vote when they open or renew a health plan. 

The bill could add tens of thousands of people to voter rolls by allowing the Oregon Health Authority to forward basic information it collects from people applying for Medicaid coverage—age, residence, and citizenship status—to election officials. These officials would then use it to register anyone who is eligible to vote and but not already signed up to do so.

This process, which would still give people the chance to decline being registered, is nearly identical to Oregon’s existing system of automatically registering people. But that system only applies at the Driver and Motor Vehicle Services department, leaving out Oregonians who don’t visit the DMV. 

“Voter registration shouldn’t be dependent on going to the DMV, because not everybody does,” said Isabela Villarreal, policy director for Next Up Action Fund, a group that helped bring automatic voter registration to Oregon in 2015, explaining that lower-income and younger Oregonians are less likely to use DMV services. “We just want to make sure we’re capturing every single person and allowing them to participate.”

According to the secretary of state’s office, 85 percent of all Oregonians who are not registered are enrolled in Medicaid, a program that serves people living near or below the federal poverty line. That’s roughly 170,000 people in this state of 4.2 million who could be added to the voter rolls if the state began automatically registering Medicaid recipients. 

“This is a critical opportunity to register people that have been historically and currently excluded from our electoral systems,” Villarreal said.

The reform, however, comes with a catch: It would not actually change anything unless Oregon wins the blessing of the federal government, which for years has held up similar proposals in other states and told Bolts it’s still reviewing the issue. Medicaid is a program administered by states but regulated by the federal government, which largely bars a state’s Medicaid office from disclosing information to other agencies without the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ authorization.

Colorado, for one, adopted a reform similar to Oregon’s in 2019, only to see the federal agency that administers Medicaid stall its application over privacy concerns. Colorado’s secretary of state, Democrat Jena Griswold, shared her frustration with Bolts last week, saying she struggles to even get answers from federal officials. “It would be great for Colorado to implement it,” she said. “We should be working to streamline people’s interactions with the government.”

Advocates for expanding voter registration hope that the growing number of states seeking to automatically register Medicaid recipients will motivate the Biden administration to revisit its stance and greenlight new  reforms in Colorado, Oregon, and elsewhere.

Oregon eight years ago became the first state to adopt automatic voter registration, or AVR, and today similar systems exist in almost half of U.S. states. The design differs greatly by state, but the core idea is simple: Instead of expecting people to take proactive steps to register, a government agency uses the information they already collect to register people, while still giving them an opportunity to opt out. 

AVR has been proven to boost registration and turnout, and make the electorate more diverse. In Oregon, roughly 94 percent of eligible residents are now registered to vote. 

But in Oregon, as in many states, AVR is limited to people who visit the DMV, an agency with which many people, especially low-income residents, just don’t interact. Oregon voting rights advocates say this helps explain why nearly 200,000 eligible voters in the state—roughly 6 percent of the voting-eligible population—remain unregistered. They’re hoping that reaching Medicaid recipients gets the state closer to universal registration.

Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections at Common Cause, a national voter advocacy organization, says including Medicaid recipients would make AVR systems far more inclusive. 

“These are the people who generally fall through the cracks in our voter registration system: people who might be more transient, people who are less affluent, people who are unable to take time off work to go vote, older individuals who don’t have their documentation in order,” she told Bolts. “These are the type of people that, in general, face more barriers to the ballot. If we can reach those people with something like this, I don’t see a reason why we wouldn’t.”

Oregon Governor Tina Kotek, who has until late July to take action on HB 2107, did not respond to questions for this story. Local observers told Bolts they expect she will sign the legislation.

Several other states, including Colorado, Massachusetts, Nevada and New Mexico, have already had the same idea and passed legislation to extend AVR systems to government health programs. “The DMV seemed like the big first place to get the most people registered,” Griswold, the secretary of state of Colorado, told Bolts. “We believe Medicaid is that second place.”

But the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the federal agency housed within HHS that oversees the Medicaid program, has left most of those states in limbo for years. Oregon may be next, as state officials there say HB 2107 cannot be implemented without CMS authorization. 

CMS rules bar state Medicaid agencies from using or disclosing client data for purposes that are not directly connected to the Medicaid program, but a state can request a waiver to implement a specific proposal, or ask CMS to determine that the way in which it plans to use the data is indeed legitimately connected to health care administration. Medicaid law experts say the prohibition exists to protect people from having their information used against them—police can’t turn to Medicaid for a person’s last known address, for instance, nor can prosecutors in states that punish abortion patients.

Colorado’s attempt to implement AVR through Medicaid has gone nowhere since 2019, first under the Trump administration through early 2021, and then under the Biden administration. When Colorado U.S. Senator Michael Bennet wrote a letter to CMS last year imploring the agency to green-light Colorado’s reform, CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure wrote back that the agency “had previously concluded that [the state’s proposal] appears to be inconsistent with the Medicaid privacy protections in current laws and regulations.” 

But Brooks-LaSure, who was nominated to the position by President Biden, also referred to an executive order Biden issued soon after his inauguration directing all agency heads to “evaluate ways in which the agency can, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, promote voter registration and voter participation.” Brooks-LaSure added that CMS is “exploring opportunities to enhance Medicaid’s role in promoting voter registration.”

CMS told Bolts in a statement on Monday that “this issue is under review.”

CMS did not say whether it had reached any new conclusion since Brooks-LaSure’s letter to Bennet more than a year ago. When Bolts first reached out to CMS seeking clarity, the agency said in a statement that AVR systems “may” breach Medicaid’s confidentiality rules but a CMS spokesperson reached out days later to say the agency’s initial response had been rushed and “provided in error,” and reflected the view of the Trump administration. The agency then issued another statement that kept the door open to new state initiatives.

“In keeping with the President Biden’s Executive Order directing federal agencies to promote access to voting, we recognize the importance of state Medicaid agencies assisting in expanding voter access and registration activities for the populations they serve,” CMS said. 

CMS did not reply to follow-ups requesting more information about its review process.

The picture gets fuzzier considering Medicaid services are already automatically registering people in Massachusetts. States Newsroom reported last week that the state had seen a large jump in registration as a result. 

Michelle Tassinari, an attorney in the Massachusetts Secretary of State’s office, told Bolts she is confident that the state is compliant with federal rules because Massachusetts asks people, during their initial interactions with the health agency, if they’d prefer that their information not be used for the purpose of voter registration. Washington state also registers people through its health agency using a similar approach, a process known as “front-end” AVR. 

Automatic voter registration looks different in Oregon, as well as in Colorado. Instead of being asked if they want to opt out of registering during their transaction with an agency, prospective voters receive a mailer later on; they must respond to it if they do not wish to be registered. Data show that this approach, known as a “back-end” system, registers many more people to vote than when people are asked up-front, and more states have been switching to this model.

CMS did not answer Bolts’ questions when asked if these design distinctions were relevant to how the federal government is assessing state-level AVR programs. 

This confusion reflects what officials in the states that are in limbo have experienced. 

Griswold told Bolts that she’d be happy to hear the federal agency’s specific concerns and reach a workable solution, including by adjusting the exact design of Colorado’s system, but that CMS hasn’t even created the opportunity or shared precise feedback.

“We do not see a big difference between AVR at the DMV versus at Medicaid offices,” Griswold said. “If CMS thinks there’s a big difference, we can always address that in the law, we can go back and tighten the law if they want. But they need to give us guidance.”

Griswold doesn’t dispute the importance of protecting privacy but she believes this isn’t that complicated or fraught. “I think you can design the system where states never interact with the underlying data,” she said. “We do not need to know anything about people’s medical information, nor do we want to know that information.”

Other election experts also point out that the design of existing AVR systems already integrates privacy protections. The goal, they say, is to make use of data the government already collects without weaponizing it.

“If it’s administered correctly, I don’t see it being any different than [automatic voter registration] through the DMV,” Lacey Donaldson, the elected clerk in Pershing County, Nevada, and the head of that state’s county clerk association, told Bolts. Nevada’s plans for automatic registration of Medicaid recipients is also in limbo due to CMS.

One difference between the DMV and health services is that Medicaid recipients interact with the state more frequently. In Oregon, Medicaid recipients must renew their plans and update their information—including their mailing address—annually, whereas many people go years without visiting the DMV. This means that administering an AVR system through Medicaid would be likelier to keep voter rolls up-to-date.

“This is a win-win-win-win for lots of different people,” says Amber McReynolds, a national expert in election procedures who was appointed to the U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors by Biden. “The people who want to make sure more people are registered to vote, for people who care about making sure voters addresses are accurate, for people who want more efficient government. It’s one of these concepts I always think that everybody should like.”

In Oregon, the concept was championed by Shemia Fagan while she was secretary of state. Fagan, a Democrat, resigned in May after Willamette Week revealed she’d been accepting lucrative consultant payments from cannabis entrepreneurs who have been top donors to her political career. Still, the legislation passed based on strong support from Democratic lawmakers who run both chambers; Republicans opposed the legislation. 

Other states may soon join the CMS waiting chamber. A new bill introduced last month in New Jersey proposes expanding that state’s AVR system to include Medicaid services.

“We’re hopeful that CMS will reconsider its reading of the law, which we think is currently incorrect,” Griswold said. “State pressure is mounting.”

The post Oregon Wants to Register Medicaid Recipients to Vote. Will Biden Officials Allow It? appeared first on Bolts.

Enrique Rivera turned eighteen inside Oregon’s MacLaren Youth Correctional Facility during the 2000 presidential election. Rivera had never been very interested in politics, but his father had taught him to care about the planet, so he was interested in Al Gore’s candidacy from an environmentalist perspective. But when he asked the facility’s officials about the election, he said they told him that prisoners couldn’t vote. 

In prison, Rivera started to connect the dots between voting and the criminal legal policies that had determined his fate. He had been charged as an adult under Measure 11, a harsh mandatory minimum ballot initiative approved by voters just a few years earlier, in 1994. “I realized that I was now in this situation as a juvenile, being charged as an adult, because folks decided that that’s what they wanted to happen,” he recalled. “I wasn’t just born into these laws that existed since time immemorial—people decided these things. I wanted to be a person that could decide things.” 

Rivera got out in 2004, and he’s been voting ever since. Recently, he submitted a letter to the state legislature affirming his support for Senate Bill 579, a bill that would allow incarcerated Oregonians to vote. The bill, which is sponsored by Democratic Senator Floyd Prozanski and a broad coalition of voting rights and social justice organizations, is now on its third try after failing to even make it out of committee in the previous two legislative sessions. Last week, it advanced past its first committee this session.

If it passes, Oregon would join Maine, Vermont, and Washington, D.C., in extending the right to vote to all voting-age citizens, including those who are incarcerated. Technically, this would make Oregon the first state to restore voting rights for people incarcerated with felonies after taking them away—Maine and Vermont never stripped people of the right to vote in the first place, and D.C., which adopted this reform in 2020, still isn’t a state—and proponents hope this propels a national movement forward.

The bill would extend the franchise to those with felony convictions among the nearly 15,000 people in the Oregon prison system, which incarcerates Black people at a rate significantly higher than their share of the state’s population. Oregon currently disenfranchises people who are incarcerated over a felony conviction, though people detained pretrial and with misdemeanors can vote, and it restores their voting rights upon their release. This bill would require ballots and other voting material to be sent to all registered voters at carceral facilities in Oregon, and people in prison would be considered registered at their last known address, meaning they would be able to weigh in on elections where they have family and community ties, rather than wherever their prison is situated. 

Oregon is known for being a leader on voting protections: the state has automatic voter registration and a universal vote-by-mail system, and has long allowed people with felony convictions who have finished serving their time to vote. This legislation represents perhaps the highest test of those commitments, and the public debate on the issue reveals a deep philosophical divide between those who believe voting is a fundamental right, and those who believe it is a privilege that can and should be taken away. 

The US constitution mentions the phrase “right to vote” a number of times, but that right has often been restricted and contingent on which populations were seen as deserving at any given time. Long after voting rights were extended to formerly enslaved men and women of all classes, the most durable example of disenfranchisement remains people in prison or with felony convictions. 

“Anything that infringes on a fundamental right like voting should draw strict scrutiny from the courts,” said Christopher Uggen, a sociologist and expert on felony disenfranchisement who teaches at the University of Minnesota. “That means we should look very skeptically at any attempts to restrict the franchise—but we have this big carve-out for people convicted of crimes, at least as interpreted by the Supreme Court in what’s been a durable precedent. It’s sort of saying, you know, it’s not quite a fundamental right—and especially not for these folks.”

Many states enacted felony disenfranchisement in response to the expansion of voting rights to Black people after the Civil War. “It is clear in the United States, it is tied to the threat of racial power relations being overturned or undermined or subverted in some way,” said Uggen. “Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal,” Michelle Alexander writes in her seminal book The New Jim Crow. 

Oregon’s felony disenfranchisement law dates to 1857 and can be traced back to the state’s attempts to exclude non-white people from settling there. Many laws that originated in racism “to this day haven’t been changed and continue to be shadows in our lives,” said Anthony Pickens. Like Rivera, Pickens got interested in politics while incarcerated. “I did a lot of reading at that time on the history of the United States, the history of movements and a lot of stuff from the Panther era,” he told Bolts. Today, he works as a paralegal for Oregon Justice Resource Center, one of the main organizations sponsoring the legislation. 

Pickens said he often shares the history of Oregon’s felony disenfranchisement law with skeptical interlocutors. “A lot of people honestly don’t have an understanding of that background and are shocked and surprised…somehow,” he told Bolts. 

To Pickens, allowing prisoners to vote would force politicians to see them as a constituent group and hopefully do more to prevent abuse and mistreatment behind bars. As it stands currently, incarcerated Americans have little recourse to address prison conditions short of strikes. “The majority of individuals that are incarcerated in our prisons and jails, they don’t end up having a voice and a lot of misconduct is able to be covered up or never even heard of because of that,” he said. 

In recent years, states around the country have enacted laws that expand voter eligibility and restore ballot access to millions of people. The most recent example is Minnesota, which adopted a law earlier this month to allow people on parole or probation to vote.

Given this momentum, Jessica Maravilla, policy director at the ACLU of Oregon, said she’s optimistic about Senate Bill 579 passing this time around. “Legislators are a lot more educated because there has been several years of this legislation,” she told Bolts. “We’re seeing a lot of movement in this area, there’s more than 20 states that are working to re-enfranchise incarcerated people. And so it really puts Oregon in a position to lead the way.”

 But there is still a sharp divide between the political success of measures advocating for the rights of formerly incarcerated people versus those for currently incarcerated people. Proposals to extend the franchise into prisons have indeed multiplied —especially since a national prison strike named this as a core demand in 2018. Since then, bills have been filed in California, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, and other states—but they have largely stalled, other than a landmark win in D.C. three years ago. 

The Oregon legislation’s supporters will also have to work to overcome the increasingly partisan associations of felony re-enfranchisement, which is likely connected to heightened polarization around both criminal justice reform and voting rights. “There was a time 15-20 years ago where it was the Republican governors who had political cover to do slightly bolder reintegration and reentry programs,” said Uggen, referencing then-Texas Governor George W. Bush’s signing of a 1997 bill restoring voting rights to Texans with felony convictions who had completed their sentences. “In recent years, it’s become a much more partisan story.” 

The bill could pass without bipartisan support, given that Democrats control both chambers of the state legislature.After passing the Senate Judiciary Committee last week by a 3-2 vote, the bill will move on to the senate’s appropriations committee before a full floor vote. In recent years, the bill has been hampered by fiscal estimates that would require more full-time staff to implement the bill. Oregon Justice Resource Center believes its chances are better than when it was introduced last year, during Oregon’s short biannual 35-day legislative session, but OJRC policy director Zach Winston said at a recent briefing that the sponsors are open to pushing out the start date in order to lessen concerns about implementation. 

The Oregon GOP has been consistent in its opposition to the legislation. A Republican senator from Portland told the Senate that the bill would “allow the worst evil––the ability to vote while incarcerated for child rape and other horrific crimes.” Republicans also argue that people in prison will vote for politicians they perceive as softer on crime. In 2021, the communications director for the Oregon Republican Party said that if the right to vote is extended to prisoners, “they might be electing your county commission and city council pretty soon.” 

The deep-seated beliefs about crime, punishment, democracy, and redemption that the subject of prison voting tends to bring up were on full display at a late-January Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on SB579. Rivera’s letter of support was one of an unusually high number of written testimonies submitted on both sides of the issue. 

“The fact that felons are felons means they are losing their liberty/right to vote,” wrote one woman. “After all, we don’t want them voting for someone who would pardon or commute their sentence for votes, now would we.” Another person wrote: “Let people experience the consequences of their poor choices. Stop protecting the criminals and start protecting the victims and the truly innocent people!” 

This level of emotion around prison voting is somewhat unique to the United States, according to Uggen. Many democracies around the world have either restored the right to vote to incarcerated people, or never took it away to begin with. Nearly every European country allows some or all incarcerated people to vote. France has in recent years worked on reforms to increase voter turnout from prisons after restoring the right back in 1994. “US crime policy is heavily driven by emotion and stigma,” Uggen said. “I was asked once at a talk radio show whether I believe that Charles Manson should decide who the President of the United States should be.” 

By contrast, Uggen said, “I attended a conference in Barcelona not long ago, where the fulcrum of debate was whether you can hold office from prison. I get a little whiplash going from there to Florida.”

One sign of this increased polarization is the talking point that Democrats only support prison voting because they want to pad their voter rolls. Supporters of the bill, by contrast, argue that felon re-enfranchisement is a civil rights imperative that promotes civic engagement and keeps people connected to their communities.   

This idea of re-enfranchisement as partisan political play didn’t jibe with Rivera’s experience in prison. “A lot of folks came from very rural communities, so their upbringing was a bit more conservative,” he said. “I don’t think that these folks would have voted for somebody that they saw as like a liberal or whatnot, regardless of their stance [on criminal justice policy].”

Maravilla also stressed that ACLU Oregon does not see prison voting as a partisan issue. “We’re looking at this as an equal rights bill on access to democracy, so we have reached out to Republicans as well,” she said. “We have had conversations with constituents of Republican legislators who are very much in support of this legislation. We’ve also spoken to a lot of incarcerated individuals who consider themselves Republicans who support this bill.”

The Senate Judiciary Committee hearing received a number of letters from currently incarcerated people. One was from John Landis, who submitted testimony from the Snake River Correctional Institution in Ontario, Oregon. 

“I am a registered Republican and I believe all American citizens have a right (even a duty) to vote,” he wrote. “I served my country in the US army to protect citizens’ rights.” 

Phillip Bates, who is incarcerated at the same facility, also wrote in. Bates noted that while incarcerated, he went out of his way to place his name on the non-active voter registry. “To switch to becoming an active voter would mean the world to me,” he wrote. “Allowing me to vote would tell me that I am worth something.”

The post Oregon Tries Again to Restore Voting Rights in Prisons appeared first on Bolts.

One of the first things they saw when they walked into the prison was the wheelchairs. 

One after another, something like 40 chairs and walkers were lined up neatly outside each cell, stretching away into the distance. It was a jarring sight even for Kyle Hedquist, who’d worked for many years as a hospice volunteer during the decades he spent locked up there. 

Hedquist never thought he’d get out of prison. When his sentence was commuted in mid-2022, he certainly didn’t expect to be back so soon. But in mid-January, he found himself on the Oregon State Penitentiary’s E Block, this time accompanied by high-ranking prison officials and a dozen state lawmakers—all staring at this endless line of equipment for prisoners who were too elderly or sick or disabled to walk on their own. 

It was a powerful testament to an uncomfortable truth about America’s prisons: Increasingly, they contain elderly people, who are serving life or many decades for crimes that were adjudicated in the wake of the United States’s turn towards harsh sentencing schemes like mandatory minimums and three-strikes laws. Many of these people will die inside-–despite the fact that nearly every state possesses some form of compassionate release program that could allow terminally ill prisoners to spend their final days at home.

Oregon has a higher percentage of aging prisoners than most states. Hedquist was there that day to show legislators the prison infirmary where he had worked, in hope that they might support legislation, Senate Bill 520, that would overhaul the state’s compassionate release system. Hedquist was hired after his release as a policy and outreach associate by the Oregon Justice Resource Center, an advocacy organization that has been trying to improve the compassionate release process in Oregon for years.

Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a national organization that supports criminal justice reforms, has been researching the issue for almost two decades, discovering that in almost every case, compassionate release is more of an idea than a reality. Last year, the organization released a report grading each state’s compassionate release system. Amidst generally poor results, Oregon failed in every category that FAMM used to measure systems—scoring higher than only five states, including two that had no compassionate release programs at all at the time. “It’s kind of a bare bones system,” said Daniel Landsman, FAMM’s deputy director of state policy. “It just falters in every category.” 

According to data FAMM obtained from the state’s department of corrections, only seven out of 47 applicants won compassionate release in Oregon in 2019, while six people who had applied died before their cases could be processed. In 2020, no one who applied got out via compassionate release. 

“We would say that those low numbers don’t reflect how many people are discouraged from even trying to apply by the complexity of the system, how opaque it is, the lack of a clear path through it or timeline,” said Alice Lundell, OJRC’s director of communications. “It’s very difficult to quantify how many people are just not even attempting this because it is beyond them, particularly in a very poor state of health to even begin.” 

Applicants are first required to be terminally ill or elderly and medically incapacitated to qualify, though no definitions for these terms are supplied. These extremely sick or dying people must initiate the compassionate release process themselves and then complete a lengthy and complicated petition on their own that involves a medical report documenting their condition, a detailed post-release plan including treatment and housing, and a personal recommendation from the prison superintendent. 

In the unlikely event they clear each of those hurdles, their petition arrives at the state’s board of parole, which in any given term, “may or may not have a medical professional on the board—usually they don’t,” says Hedquist. “They’re only looking at the crime, saying, ‘Well, hey, this dude’s got a 40 year sentence for A, B and C. We’re not going to let him out.’” 

Aliza Kaplan, who runs the Criminal Justice Reform Clinic at the Lewis & Clark Law School, says the prison superintendent recommendation requirement in particular makes it extraordinarily difficult to advance past that point in the process. “We are lawyers who have a lot of access and know people—and we couldn’t get anyone to write us back or talk to us about our cases,” she told Bolts.

Kaplan’s clinic has stopped even trying to use compassionate release as a mechanism to get people out of prison. The enormity of the system’s failure became particularly stark during the pandemic. “My law school was shut down,” she said. “I was sitting in my office anyway. And I was being inundated with letters and phone calls from folks in prison and family members afraid that their loved ones were going to die.” She went on: “There was nothing to even offer people because I knew that the law on the books, the compassionate release law, was never going to help them.” 

In a 2019 essay for PEN America’s Prison Writing Contest, Hedquist detailed his experience working in hospice. “Death, I would learn, comes on its own terms and in its own time,” he wrote. But the urgency that attends the last few months of someone’s life is nowhere to be found in the compassionate release system. “The board of parole gets to these cases when they get to them,” said Zach Winston, OJRC’s policy director. 

SB 520, the proposed compassionate release legislation, seeks to revamp the compassionate release process to make it more of a viable option. First, it creates a duty for prison officials to recommend terminally ill people with less than a year to live for compassionate release, taking the onus off of the critically ill person themself to start the process. It also gives doctors more control over the process, establishing a board of medical professionals to evaluate compassionate release requests, and attempts to crack down on the mechanism’s delays by requiring the board to rule on applications within 45 days, or within 14 days if the applicant has a prognosis of less than a year to live.

The doctors’ recommendation would have greater weight in the final outcome by setting a higher burden for carceral officials to overturn it: Landsman said the bill would establish a “presumption of release to people who have been proven by medical professionals to truly be terminally ill or medically incapacitated.” People could still get denied if they were found to be a danger to public safety or, more likely, didn’t have a robust post-release plan. 

Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility, an organization that works on public health and social justice issues, is also sponsoring the legislation. “This bill ensures that Oregon’s compassionate early medical release process is health-centered and that [adults in custody] can better exercise their right to access the medical care and treatment that they need,” the group told Bolts in a statement. 

SB 520 was reintroduced in Oregon’s legislature for the 2023 session after failing to pass in 2021 and 2022. Oregon Republicans denounced the legislation for “letting people out of prison,” stripping it of the end-of-life context, which advocates say proved damaging to their efforts amidst the glut of soft-on-crime attacks on Democrats in advance of the national midterm elections. But Oregon Democrats defended the governor’s mansion and their large legislative majorities in November. 

One sticking point for the compassionate release bill last session was its budget. Proponents make the point that the bill would save money for the state by shifting the burden of paying for the care of sick and dying people in prison. “Prisoners are not eligible for their veterans benefits, and many of these guys are veterans,” Hedquist said. “Prisoners are not eligible for Medicare, Medicaid, because they’re incarcerated. And so these are direct tax dollars.” But Winston of OJRC said that the bill had been hindered in prior sessions by estimates that it would require new staff to implement. 

 There are bills to reform compassionate release pending in a handful of other states this year. Illinois established a new mechanism for the first time in 2021, leaving Iowa as the only state without one, and California overhauled its compassionate release system last year to enable more people to leave prisons. Still, many states’ compassionate release systems remain barely functional; past reporting by Bolts and New York Focus has found that a few prison officials in New York State routinely deny hearings to terminally-ill New Yorkers, for instance.

Like California’s new law, where prisoners serving life without parole remain ineligible for compassionate release, some Oregonians still won’t be able to access compassionate release even if the legislation passes. People convicted of any of 21 crimes that fall under Measure 11, a mandatory minimum ballot measure approved by voters in 1994, are categorically excluded. Amending Measure 11 would require a two-thirds majority in the state legislature, though Hedquist called the carve out “a bitter pill.” 

There could be other barriers as well. With the departure of Kate Brown, the term-limited governor who greatly expanded clemency, and a good deal of rookie lawmakers who may not be versed in the nuances of crime and prison policy, Kaplan is worried that criminal legal reform bills won’t be a priority this session. SB 520 is currently sitting in the Senate’s healthcare committee. 

“A lot of new legislators means that those of us who do criminal justice work need to spend time educating people and you know, it’s going to make all criminal justice legislative matters harder this year,” she said. 

That was the point of getting lawmakers to visit the prison infirmary, Hedquist says. “Unless you have a loved one in prison, you almost have zero connection to the prison,” he told Bolts. “And so when you talk about voters, when you talk about senators—if they don’t know someone in prison, they just don’t know. And you can’t pass good legislation if people don’t know.” Many of the lawmakers, he suspected, had never been inside a prison. It was just an abstraction for them, a matter of policy.

For Hedquist, it was anything but abstract. It was ten people dying a month of Hepatitis C in the ‘90s; it was bathing dying lifers, playing cards with them, hearing their deathbed confessions. “Hospice was really the place where you could strip away all that prison was or all that prison tried to make us be and just be human to human,” he said. 

He wanted to make that a reality for the lawmakers too. “It’s almost like once you see it, you can’t unsee it,” he went on. “So if anything, some of these folks are going to be in a position where they can’t just close their eyes and turn their head and say, ‘Well, I’m sure DOC will figure it out.’”  

The post In Oregon’s Prisons, Terminally Ill People Are Left with Little Recourse appeared first on Bolts.

Her decision was the largest gubernatorial act of commuting people’s death sentences since 2003. Seventeen people who began the week under a sentence of death no longer face the prospect of the state killing them. 

“It’s certainly unacceptable to me that I would leave office without taking one final action to ensure that none of these individuals will be executed by the state,” Brown told NPR. Brown had, even before this step, established a legacy for her “historic use” of her clemency powers.

Over the years since the U.S. Supreme Court reauthorized the use of capital punishment in 1976 after a brief moratorium, only a handful of governors have taken similarly sweeping steps—most notably, Illinois Governor George Ryan, a Republican who in 2003 commuted the sentences of the 167 people on death row there. 

Brown’s mass clemency comes at a time where new death sentences and executions are at low levels nationwide. As the Death Penalty Information Center wrote in its year-end report, released this week, 2022 was the “[e]ighth consecutive year with fewer than 30 executions and 50 new death sentences.” There are 2,400 people on the nation’s death rows today, however, with blue California and red Florida leading the way.

But her actions also highlighted the stark partisan divide on the death penalty today, with two Americas drifting apart in their leaders’ willingness to carry out or block executions.

On the day Brown granted her clemency, Mississippi was preparing for the final execution in the United States this year. The state executed Thomas Loden Jr. on Wednesday, despite ongoing litigation against its lethal injection protocol. In all, 18 people were executed in the country this year, with Texas and Oklahoma carrying out five executions each. Arizona carried out three executions, Missouri and Alabama two each, and the final one in Mississippi. 

All six states that carried out executions this year are currently led by Republican governors.

Democratic executives have largely blocked executions. No sitting Democratic governor has overseen one; the last to do so was Virginia’s then-Governor Terry McAuliffe, who oversaw what became the state’s final execution, of William Morva, in 2017. McAuliffe later announced his opposition to the death penalty, and Democrats abolished it in 2021 shortly after taking control of the state government. In 2020, Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, commuted the sentences of the three people on Colorado’s death row while signing a bill abolishing the death penalty.

With Brown’s latest act of clemency, there are now 24 states that have no one on death row. 

That number came close to inching up to 25 on Tuesday. At the urging of Nevada’s Democratic Governor Steve Sisolak, the state’s Board of Pardons was set to consider a motion at its quarterly meeting to commute the death sentences of everyone on Nevada’s death row.

But Carson City Judge Jim Wilson on Monday blocked that item from the meeting’s agenda, ruling that the state had not given enough notice to victims’ families. Sisolak is set to be replaced in January by Republican Joe Lombardo, a sheriff who pledged to “reverse Sisolak’s soft-on-crime policies.”  

Sisolak acknowledged during Tuesday’s board meeting that there would be no vote on his proposal. “Placing this matter on the agenda was done as an act of grace, and with the understanding that the death penalty is fundamentally broken,” he said. “The administration of the death penalty is not fair and not equitable and cannot be corrected.”

District attorneys had rushed to ask courts to stop the commutations after Sisolak’s proposal. Wilson, the judge, is himself a former DA in Elko County. Nevada prosecutors have a lot of clout: Last year, state Democrats failed to repeal the death penalty despite running the legislature after a bill derailed in the state Senate, where multiple Democratic leaders have day jobs as prosecutors in Clark County, where the DA’s office is prone to seeking death sentences. Sisolak’s comments at the time also helped stall the bill. 

“The fact that prosecutors in Nevada once again took steps to ensure the government is able to execute people is of little surprise since they continue to use the threat of execution as a means of coercion in criminal prosecutions,” Athar Haseebullah, the executive director of the ACLU of Nevada, told Bolts.

“I am glad the governor made this most recent push for commutations, but the last four years provided Nevada leaders, including the vaunted Democratic trifecta, multiple opportunities to address this issue and we walk away on this issue four years later in the same predicament we were in four years ago,” Haseebullahhe added. 

The partisan divide is similarly complex in other states.

Some Republican governors have been far more aggressive than others in carrying out executions. And Democratic Party leaders have also been split on how much they should do to bring capital punishment to an end. And major tests loom in 2023 for Democratic officials—in Arizona, as well as in the White House.

Brown’s announcement in Oregon could put more pressure on her Democratic peers, starting with President Joe Biden.

Biden campaigned on a promise to “eliminate the death penalty” and Attorney General Merrick Garland put a moratorium on executions in 2021. But Garland’s Justice Department is continuing to support ongoing capital cases and his administration on Dec. 15 cast a vote against a United Nations resolution calling for a global death penalty moratorium. In a memorandum explaining its vote, the United States Mission to the United Nations stated, in part, that “the U.S. does not understand the lawful use of this form of punishment as contravening respect for human rights.” 

Of particular importance on the federal level is the fate of the more than 40 people on federal death row now. Former president Donald Trump launched an execution spree after more than 15 years of no federal executions, ultimately resulting in 13 federal executions under his watch. Since Biden took office, many opponents of the death penalty have urged him to use his clemency power to commute sentences and prevent a later president from carrying out a similar spree. Thus far, Biden has taken no action. 

The failure of the Nevada Board of Pardons to commute death sentences before the end of Sisolak’s term leaves the door open to executions since Nevada has 57 people on death row. Nevada has not executed anyone since 2006, but prosecutors this year tried to secure an execution date before a supply of lethal drugs expired.

Apart from the federal government and Nevada, the other jurisdictions with people on death row and Democratic executives at this time are California, Kentucky, Kansas, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. None have held an execution in over a decade, many much longer.

In California and Pennsylvania, Democratic governors have imposed moratoriums but have not pushed for mass clemency. Governor Gavin Newsom retained his office last month in California; in Pennsylvania, Governor Tom Wolf, who set up the moratorium in 2015, will soon be replaced by Governor-Elect Josh Shapiro, the outgoing attorney general. Shapiro, who had a mixed record with criminal justice progressives as attorney general, said this year that he agreed with Wolf’s approach and that he would not sign a death warrant while governor. 

But an incoming Democratic governor will soon be under scrutiny in Arizona, a state that carried out multiple executions last year, and test the party’s consistency in blocking executions.

In November, Katie Hobbs became the first Democrat since 2006 to win the gubernatorial race and she already faces decisions—including her appointment to a vacancy on the state’s Board of Executive Clemency, a body that must recommend clemency to the governor—that will shape Arizona’s criminal justice future.

A Hobbs spokesperson did not respond to questions about her plans for addressing the death penalty and executions in her state. 

Arizona’s outlook is complicated by the fact that it is not yet clear whether Hobbs will be working with a Democrat or Republican attorney general come January. The November race was so close—Democrat Kris Mayes led by 510 votes in the initial tally—that an automatic recount is underway. Outgoing Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, fought in court to restart executions in Arizona after a several-years halt following the botched execution of Joseph Wood in 2014. The state executed three people in 2022, and Brnovich has asked the Arizona Supreme Court to set an execution date for Aaron Gunches.

Oklahoma stands out among the states led by Republicans. Recently re-elected Governor Kevin Stitt is on a killing spree, the state set 25 executions over a two and a half year period, through the end of 2024, although two of the planned executions (Richard Glossip and John Hanson) have already not gone ahead. 

Earlier this year, Stitt pressured the chair of Oklahoma’s pardon board to resign due to his support for clemency petitions. The board had repeatedly urged Stitt to commute the death sentence of Julius Jones, a man who had maintained that he was innocent for decades; Stitt did eventually agree, breaking with Attorney General John O’Connor, a Stitt appointee who has supported his execution spree and clashed with the board in pushing for Jones’s execution. 

O’Connor, however, lost his re-election bid in the Republican primary this year to Gentner Drummond, who ran as what The Oklahoman described “an attorney general who would be independent of the governor’s office,” and the approach that Drummond will strike on capital punishment-related issues is a big question heading into 2023.

Texas, like Oklahoma, continued apace with five executions, lower than it has in past years (except for 2020 and 2021, when the pandemic even led Texas to halt executions for some time), but still the most in the nation this year. The state largely re-elected its leaders last month.

For all his bluster in fighting prosecutors who oppose the death penalty, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, with the second largest death row in the country behind California, has not carried out an execution since his first year in office, when he oversaw two executions. But the supreme court that he reshaped has made it considerably harder to challenge death sentences. 

Botched executions and ongoing litigation over the availability of lethal drugs stalled the death penalty in a number of GOP-led states. DPIC dubbed 2022 “The Year of the Botched Execution,” finding seven of the 20 execution attempts were visibly problematic as a result of executioner incompetence, failures to follow protocols, or defects in the protocols themselves. 

Ohio Governor Mike DeWine is going to finish his first term in office having not carried out a single execution despite more than 100 people facing death sentences in Ohio. The governor has issued multiple reprieves as pharmaceutical companies continue to refuse to sell lethal drugs. In Tennessee, similarly, after questions arose about the state’s preparation of execution drugs for a scheduled execution in April, Governor Bill Lee issued a reprieve to stop that day’s scheduled execution. Soon thereafter, he went further and orderied a review of the state’s execution process and a halt to executions for the year. 

In Alabama, however, Governor Kay Ivey chose to stay with the more aggressive group of governors — until there was, effectively, no other option than a pause. After one horribly botched, three-hour ordeal in executing Joe Nathan James Jr., the state proceeded to attempt two other executions that were both halted before lethal drugs were administered. Only then, on Nov. 21, did Ivey order a “top-to-bottom review” of the state’s clearly failing execution process and request that no execution dates be set during the review. 

The news out of Oregon didn’t change the state’s day-to-day reality: Oregon had not carried out an execution in 25 years. Still, opponents of capital punishment celebrated Brown’s commutations as a critical move, stressing that a future governor who supports the death penalty could have lifted the moratorium on executions currently in effect in the state.

“Our state still has the death penalty. Two out of three candidates for governor in last month’s election were committed to resuming executions,” Bobbin Singh, executive director of the Oregon Justice Resource Center, told Bolts. “While the winner, Tina Kotek, said she would continue the moratorium, it’s a reminder there’s no guarantee that Oregon will be free of executions while we have people under death sentences.”

Despite Brown’s clemency, the state retains the death penalty on the books. State Democrats passed a law in 2019 that very significantly restricted its use, but repealing it altogether would demand a constitutional amendment and referendum. (Oregonians last voted on the death penalty, inscribing it in the state constitution, in 1984.)

“Voters would have to overturn it at the ballot,” Singh said, “but we shouldn’t underestimate how influential Brown’s leadership will be in moving us toward abolition.”

The post Landmark Push for Clemency in Oregon and Nevada Show Split Paths on Death Penalty appeared first on Bolts.

Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt knows he has an image problem. 

Schmidt, who took office during Portland’s racial justice protests in August 2020, says he feels squeezed between two sides—a common sentiment among prosecutors who have promised a progressive approach to the job, some of whom now face recall efforts and primary challengers. While right-leaning residents have blamed Schmidt for rising gun crime and an increase in visible homelessness in the region, many progressives who helped elect him now question his commitment to reforms that he campaigned on but hasn’t yet delivered, like restorative justice programs and sweeping sentencing reforms.

Now halfway through his first term, Schmidt is asking county officials to add $2.7 million to his office’s $44.8 million budget for a new program that he says aims to build trust with a skeptical community. Dubbed the Multnomah County DA’s Access Attorney Program (MAAP for short), Schmidt’s proposal would assign four pairs of prosecutors ​​to the county’s four regions, focusing each attorney’s work on crimes taking place in their particular geographic area. Schmidt says those eight attorneys would share office space with local community groups and forge relationships that help the DA’s office better understand neighborhood-level issues impacting crime and, ideally, find solutions that go beyond police and prosecution. 

“I think having us back into community spaces to build relationships, to show that we are doing the work and we do care… I think that can go a long way to actually work on community challenges that people are facing and also push back against that narrative that nobody’s doing anything, because it’s just not true,” Schmidt said during an interview with the Mercury and Bolts about the program. 

Some of Schmidt’s local progressive critics, though, worry that the program would double down on the traditional tools of law enforcement to address Portland’s problems just as the county has made strides toward pursuing alternatives. They are concerned that MAAP would mark a retreat into old-school approaches at a time criminal justice reform is facing vigorous pushback from opponents throughout the country.

In recent years, the county’s board of commissioners has shifted funding from the DA’s office to other areas of county government to support more social programs, like behavioral health services and supportive housing. But Schmidt’s proposal for neighborhood prosecutors is a large request for additional funding. The county’s board of commissioners is expected to consider the DA’s request in coming weeks and decide by the time of their annual budget vote on June 16, and three of the board’s five commissioners have already expressed their support of MAAP in public forums.

Schmidt’s proposal isn’t a novel idea in Multnomah County, but rather the latest iteration of a neighborhood prosecutor program that garnered national attention for the local DA’s office in the 1990s. That earlier program, which dedicated particular prosecutors to individual neighborhood police precincts, was inspired by the tough-on-crime style of law enforcement that Schmidt has pledged to move the office away from—and thus he envisions something very different with his newest version. 

With MAAP, Schmidt has proposed installing his neighborhood DAs in the offices of trusted nonprofits and community centers, an attempt to project the image of the DA as a community service provider rather than only an authority figure. If someone in the area is frustrated with repeated car thefts on their block, for example, they could arrange a meeting with their neighborhood prosecutor to flag the problem or learn what kind of evidence they could collect to help law enforcement in any ongoing cases.

Schmidt’s revival of the neighborhood DA program has garnered cautious support from some community groups, while also alarming local civil rights leaders who aren’t convinced by the rebrand. Kelly Simon, legal director for the ACLU of Oregon, is worried that more resources to the DA’s office will only exacerbate racial disparities already seen in local charges and sentencing. Simon also said she was uncomfortable with Schmidt’s framing of prosecutors as a social service. 

“The ‘access attorney’ frame is interesting to me, because DAs don’t represent individuals impacted by crime, they represent the State of Oregon in every case they work on,” Simon said. “The only tool that prosecutors have is punishment. We have a lot of significant challenges from housing to mental health in the community, but punishment isn’t a good tool to respond to that.”

Schmidt maintains that his neighborhood prosecutor program is not intended to increase prosecutions. “That will happen, a little,” he acknowledged. “But really though, what it’s about is having our prosecutors in the community who know what we’re working with—and we can partner with other organizations and come up with a solution… My intention is to be helpful, not more harmful.”

The Multnomah County DA’s Neighborhood Unit was the first of its kind in the nation when it was created by then-DA Michael Schrunk in 1990. Schrunk created the unit in response to rising crime in Portland’s Lloyd District area, all characterized by Schrunk as “quality-of-life” crimes: car thefts, robberies, prostitution, dumping, and vandalism. Local businesses had lobbied Schrunk to create the program and even pitched in some funding for the new neighborhood prosecutors. 

The neighborhood prosecutors worked to turn law enforcement-friendly Lloyd District residents and business owners into “citizen informants,” educating them on what kind of evidence prosecutors needed to convict someone for low-level crimes like drug dealing. A 1997 story on the program published in the urban policy magazine City Journal described the process this way: “Residents then watched, kept logs of traffic into houses suspected of drug activity, and contacted officers with their information.”

After crime fell in the Lloyd District, Schrunk got public funding to open eight additional neighborhood DA offices across the county. The program dovetailed with the increase of “broken windows policing” or “quality of life law enforcement” across the country, like stop-and-frisk in New York City, that disproportionately targeted people of color. 

A 2016 investigation by Street Roots reported that neighborhood prosecutors—“your friendly neighborhood prosecutor”—often prioritized non-violent behavioral offenses that churned people through the local justice system. MCDA data obtained by the publication showed that 24 percent of people charged with “quality-of-life” crimes were Black, while less than 6 percent of Multnomah County’s population was Black. This data, paired with the public’s growing discomfort with private businesses covering a portion of the neighborhood DA salaries, slowly pushed the program out of favor until it ended under countywide budget cuts later that year. 

Schmidt said he was inspired to rebuild his office’s neighborhood prosecutor division after talking with other prosecutors around the country at a recent DA conference. He says he modeled MAAP after a program in Cook County, Illinois, that places “community prosecutors” in neighborhoods across Chicago to help “problem-solve individual, neighborhood or community issues that may or may not be criminal in nature but impact the quality of life.” That program has had a proven impact on reducing the rate of violent crime, with a much smaller impact on property crimes. 

Along with eight additional prosecutors, Schmidt has proposed funding for eight other positions to support the neighborhood DA offices—two victim advocates, an office assistant, a legal assistant, two investigators, a data analyst, and a “social service navigator” to help connect crime victims with resources. He says he plans on hiring experienced attorneys—either promoting from within his office or hiring new prosecutors—who won’t carry the full and oftentimes crushing caseloads shouldered by their colleagues at the county courthouse.

Schmidt says he hopes the program gives people whose concerns have historically been ignored by the office more access to prosecutors and their resources. He says neighborhood prosecutors will attend community meetings and other local events to meet people in the area and make themselves more available to the public. He called the program “a democratization of power.”

Schmidt says he also hopes the neighborhood DAs help ease current anxieties around crime—even if those worries are rooted in flawed assumptions. While homicides by gun have skyrocketed in Portland since Schmidt entered office, overall crime rates in Portland have held steady in that time period. 

“We can look at the data, but that doesn’t change the fact that people don’t feel safe in our community,” said Schmidt. “And that’s a problem.”

Although it’s not yet clear where the MAAP offices might go, Schmidt has proposed placing them in community spaces across the county. Schmidt said he met with numerous community organizations, some of which have expressed cautious support for the idea, to get their feedback before proposing it to county officials. 

“I’m really hoping they’ll be a good liaison to our community and a true resource,” said Nancy Haque, director of LGBTQ+ rights nonprofit Basic Rights Oregon (BRO). Haque said that, after years of watching victims of hate crimes and their families feel ignored by law enforcement, she would like to see MAAP attorneys truly act as victim advocates in the community. 

“It does seem like there’s an opportunity for the DA’s office to create change by making themselves more of a resource for the LGBTQ communtiy,” Haque said. 

Haque added that BRO’s support of the program hinges on Schmidt’s involvement. “We’re supporting this program at this particular time under the leadership of someone who’s trying to create progressive change at the DAs office,” she said.

Other groups were even more cautious with their support for the idea. Social justice nonprofit Unite Oregon declined to be interviewed about MAAP, but sent the Mercury and Bolts a statement saying the organization “supports the program at its early stage and will continue to evaluate its ability to impact the communities we serve in a positive way.”

Moms Demand Action, the Northwest Carpenters Union, Portland Business Alliance, and Business for a Better Portland have issued more full-throated endorsements of the program. Like with the 1990s iteration of the neighborhood prosecutor program, business leaders are eager for the DA’s help, especially in the wake of the pandemic’s economic downturn.

“Many of our independent retail and restaurant members are struggling with the impacts of crime on their businesses,” said Ashley Henry, director of Business for a Better Portland. “We know that there is no single solution to these challenges, but ensuring that there is more connection between law enforcement and the community is certainly a critical step. Having an additional resource from the DAs office on the ground, in direct communication with businesses and neighbors about the issues they face, is among those steps.”

Schmidt, whose progressive proposals have often attracted criticism from local law enforcement, has garnered their support for MAAP. Portland Police Bureau spokesperson Nathan Sheppard told the Mercury and Bolts in an email that the bureau would “embrace” the return of a neighborhood DA program. 

“Having the help and guidance of the same attorneys who will be trying these cases in court increases the chances of a positive outcome for victims,” Sheppard wrote. “It’s important to remember that the goal in arresting someone is not merely to book them into jail (many times suspects are out within hours) but to have the cases resolved with successful prosecution.”

Some community organizations are skeptical of MAAP’s promises. Simon, with the ACLU of Oregon, fears that, despite Schmidt’s best intentions, the program could disproportionately prosecute marginalized communities for “quality of life” crimes.

“At the end of the day, the program is increasing the number of prosecutors in Multnomah County and putting those prosecutors in communities that have historically been harmed by prosecution practices,” Simon said. “If repair work is not done first to build trust, I’m afraid that will be repeated.”

Simon said she sees value in DAs doing more to understand the communities they work in, but she doesn’t believe that approach should be limited to just eight prosecutors.

“If we don’t require that kind of engagement from every prosecutor we will continue to see systemic racism, frankly,” Simon said.

Chris O’Connor, a longtime public defender currently with Multnomah Defenders Inc., worries about how the new program and messaging from the DA’s office might influence defendants. O’Connor says he already encounters clients in court who are often under the mistaken impression that the DA is on their side.

“People get confused about which attorney is working for you… We get that all the time,” O’Connor said. “This program creates a misunderstanding that the DA’s office is working as counsel for communities, which is ethically dubious. Prosecutors can’t be a social worker.”

O’Connor called Schmidt’s proposal a “PR stunt.” If the county genuinely wanted to help the community, he said it could use the MAAP funds to instead hire community lawyers to help advocate for people who aren’t familiar with the court system, or go further and help bankroll more public defender programs. Multnomah County is currently experiencing a historic deficiency in public defenders, to the point where people who can’t afford a lawyer are being held in jail for weeks without access to an attorney. On May 16, a group of Oregonians with criminal charges sued Governor Kate Brown and the state’s public defense department for violating their constitutional rights to an attorney in a reasonable amount of time. 

“There are ways to fund access to legal services that don’t involve a [prosecutor],” O’Connor said. “It’s the wrong tool for the wrong problem.”

The post ‘Your Friendly Neighborhood Prosecutor’: Portland DA Seeks to Revive Broken Windows-Era Program appeared first on Bolts.

In a new campaign video for Washington County District Attorney Kevin Barton, a narrator asks: “Why does safety matter?” Several people then give vague answers about family and community until a woman with a worried expression delivers perhaps the most direct response: “Because I don’t want our county turning into Portland.”  

Although more than a thousand Portlanders live within Washington County, Oregon’s second most populous county, Barton has made the city a bogeyman in his race for a second term in the nonpartisan prosecutor’s office. Ahead of the May 17 election, Barton has accused his opponent of wanting to defund law enforcement and framed himself as the only barrier keeping suburban Washington County from descending into Portland-level lawlessness. 

“We have the advantage, I think, of watching Portland’s mistakes and not repeating them,” Barton said in an interview with the Beaverton Valley Times last October. “One of those mistakes is the defunding of the police and public safety systems within Portland. We know that simply taking money away and taking resources away from public safety is a dangerous road to go down.” 

Like many U.S. cities, Portland has seen an increase in violent crime since 2020—a year that brought a global pandemic, racial justice protests, investment in police alternatives at Portland City Hall, an increase in visible homelessness, and turnover at the district attorney’s office in Multnomah County, which encompasses most of Portland city limits. Barton’s ads allude to the fact that in 2020, Portland officials also shifted $15 million from policing toward community programs and a pilot project to send mental health clinicians to some 911 calls instead of armed officers, reducing the city’s annual police budget by about 3 percent compared to the previous year; Barton’s ads do not, however, mention that the police budget headed to Portland City Council for approval next month is about $15 million more than what the city approved in 2019, the largest in the city’s history.

In a recent community forum hosted by Washington County, Barton rejected the idea that his campaign was trying to divide voters in the Portland region. “I’m not creating any type of division between Multnomah County and Washington County, the leaders in Multnomah County are crazy,” said Barton.  “They have ruined the public safety system.”

Fears about Portland “defunding” police have been central to Barton’s campaign against his opponent Brian Decker, a former public defender who also has experience working as a federal prosecutor. In campaign ads, Barton accuses Decker of being “an extremist who wants to defund police and abolish prisons.” Barton, who declined to be interviewed for this story, as justification points out that Decker helped establish the Washington County Justice Initiative, a nonprofit whose website calls for “defunding police, prosecutors, and prisons.” 

Decker says Barton’s ads are an inaccurate portrayal of the kind reforms he actually supports. “I have said we need to fund essential police services and we need to reallocate funds to fund addiction treatment, homeless services, mental health care, and other social services,” Decker said. “Most people in Washington County agree with that, but Barton conflates that with zeroing out the budget of the police, because he knows that rhetoric will rally his right wing base.”

Previously a Republican bastion, Washington County has veered to the left since the 1990s, with a steady succession of Democrats representing the county at the state legislature. While the district attorney’s office is nonpartisan, Barton’s politics skew conservative—especially compared to Decker. 

This is Barton’s second contested district attorney’s race, which itself is a rarity in Oregon. In 2018, Barton beat out Max Wall, a well-financed progressive candidate who joined the race at the last minute. Thanks to Wall’s support by billionaire George Soros, the campaign became the most expensive district attorney race in Oregon’s history. Decker, who currently has $238,000 in his campaign coffers, has raised much less than Barton’s previous challenger, while the incumbent has just over $277,000 in cash on hand, including hefty donations from Nike founder Phil Knight, Columbia Sportswear CEO Tim Boyle, and local conservative political action committee ActionPAC. Decker’s biggest donations have come from Aaron Boonshoft, a local philanthropist funding an Oregon campaign to decriminalize sex work, Oregon Department of Justice attorney Nicholas Greenfield, and former Oregon Democratic Senator Chip Shields 

The outcome of the May 17 election could influence criminal justice policy in Oregon’s second-largest county. Decker criticizes the incumbent for favoring long sentences, charging an inordinate amount of youth as adults, and offering little in terms of actual rehabilitation to incarcerated people. Decker says these factors contribute to Washington County having the highest recidivism rate in Portland’s tri-county metro area. Decker is also interested in bringing restorative justice programs to Washington County, which can allow crime victims to choose a mediation process with a defendant over a trial, allowing both parties to resolve their issues and reach an agreement outside of the carceral system.

“We need more options,” said Decker. “When you act like locking people up is the only strategy, and then you come across a case where that’s not the right solution, you end up doing nothing to create a safer community. I want to use every appropriate resource.” 

He says his past work prosecuting criminal cases qualifies him for the DA job, while his work as a public defender in Washington County would help him reform what’s not working in the county’s criminal justice system. 

“Washington County is the most extreme county I’ve ever worked in, and that’s because of the tough on crime, war on drugs, lock ’em up and throw away the key fanaticism coming from the DA’s office,” Decker said.

Barton’s lobbying work indeed illustrates a certain resistance to reforms. He has discouraged lawmakers from scaling back Oregon’s mandatory minimum sentencing policy for violent crimes, called Measure 11, which charges adolescents as adults, and pushed back against a bill that would require judges take domestic abuse into consideration during sentencing if it was a contributing factor to a defendant’s criminal behavior. Barton also opposed Measure 110, a law that decriminalized small amounts of illegal drugs and funded substance abuse recovery programs. Barton has instead promoted what he calls “responsible reforms,” including the creation of a pilot diversion program for criminal defendants with mental health issues and a new resource center for children impacted by domestic abuse. 

Barton’s demonizing of Portland and weaponizing of the debate around police funding worries Bobbin Singh, director of the Oregon Justice Resource Center (OJRC). 

“Barton says he doesn’t want to turn into Portland, which is saying he doesn’t want to talk about racial justice issues or talk about accountability within law enforcement,” said Singh. “As a Washington County resident and person of color, when I hear rhetoric like that, it’s alarming.”

Washington County has grown to be Oregon’s most racially and ethnically diverse county, according to the 2020 Census. Singh sees Barton’s approach is in line with a national conservative backlash to the racial justice protests of 2020, which sends a clear message to the county’s residents of color. 

“Either Barton is doing it intentionally to create this wedge between voters, or he doesn’t know what he’s doing and he’s ignorant to it. Either way, it’s reckless and dangerous and sends a strong signal that we’re not welcome here.” 

For Singh, Barton’s campaign draws historic parallels to the political environment following the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

“The response to the civil rights movement of the ‘60s was tough on crime policing,” said Singh. “Any time we see success on civil rights, like the response to George Floyd’s murder, we see a national pushback that’s tough on crime. I think that’s what we’re seeing here.”

Shannon Wight, deputy director of Safety and Justice Oregon, an organization that lobbies for criminal justice reform bills, says Barton’s campaign has painted him as a progressive reformer by evoking the idea of “responsible reform” and acknowledging past harms the criminal justice system has inflicted on marginalized communities, showing he’s at least paying attention to larger calls to change the system. By invoking Portland as an allusion to violent crime and homelessness, however, Wight argues that Barton is pointing to problems he helped engineer by “prioritizing locking people up, tough sentencing policies, and ignoring people’s real needs.”  

Blaming Portland’s rise in crime on marginal changes in police funding and wrongly claiming that his opponent wants to zero out law enforcement budgets seems to be working for Barton. 

Tigard Mayor Jason Snider, one of seven Washington County mayors who have endorsed Barton, said he spoke with Decker and agreed with him on many fronts—for instance, “I agree that we don’t need to be throwing the book at people for minor crimes.” But what made Snider uncomfortable about Decker, he said, “was hearing that he had a ‘defund the police’ agenda. There are a lot of things that need more investment in the community, like mental health and recovery, but that doesn’t mean we need less police.”

The post Portland Plays the Bogeyman in Neighboring DA Race appeared first on Bolts.

The filing period for candidates to run for prosecutor closed in five states over the past month, adding clarity to the question of where the midterms may shake up the criminal legal system’s status quo. With primaries looming as early as May, criminal justice reformers are pressing their case from North Carolina’s biggest cities to Omaha and the Portland suburbs.

Public defenders and legal aid advocates are running in Arkansas, Nebraska, and Oregon, enlivening proceedings in places like Little Rock and Salem that have not seen a contested election in decades. In North Carolina, where racial justice protests drew thousands into the streets in 2020, challengers are now running on reform promises. And Utah brings the uncommon sight of a Republican reform incumbent who faces a tough-on-crime challenger. 

But away from those fireworks, the filing deadline is more often than not the end of the road for a prosecutor election, as most races only drew one candidate. In Oregon, whose filing deadline passed on Tuesday, just two of 15 DA elections feature multiple contenders. 

The situation is only slightly less desolate in Arkansas and North Carolina, where filing deadlines passed last week. Roughly one-third of their elections will be competitive this year. In each of Nebraska and Utah, the two most populous counties at least will have contested elections. (In Texas, as Bolts reviewed last month, 76 percent of elections are uncontested this year.)

Still, those elections that will be contested offer rare opportunities to confront local injustices. Arkansas, for instance, has a unique law that criminalizes falling behind on rent, empowering local prosecutors who choose to use it. And North Carolina allows children to be prosecuted at an unusually young age, though the state reformed its statutes last year. 

Below is Bolts’s preliminary guide to the prosecutor elections in those five states.

Arkansas

Larry Jegley has been the prosecutor in the state’s most populous judicial district (Perry and Pulaski counties, home to Little Rock) since 1997, and yet he has never faced an opponent—not once, over eight elections. This year Jegley is retiring, and voters will get a choice for the first time in decades. And it may be a historic election: Alicia Walton is running to become the first Black prosecutor in the history of a district whose population is 37 percent Black.

Walton, a public defender, vows to reform what her website calls a “fundamentally flawed” criminal legal system. Her opponent Will Jones is the chief deputy prosecutor in a neighboring district who worked under Jegley for more than a decade. 

Another public defender, Sonia Fonticiella, is running for prosecutor in the eastern part of the state, in a district that covers Clay, Craighead, Crittenden, Greene, Mississippi and Poinsett counties. She will face deputy prosecutors Martin Lilly and Corey Seats. And in Northwest Arkansas (Madison and Washington counties), incumbent Matt Durrett faces Stephen Coger, who says incarceration is too high in the district and that he would change bail and jail practices, though Coger also attacks Durrett for being too lenient toward people accused of higher-level crimes.

The state has five other contested races, all in smaller jurisdictions (twenty districts drew only one candidate). The full list of candidates is available here.

These are nonpartisan elections scheduled for May 24.

Nebraska

Each of Nebraska’s 93 counties will elect its prosecutor this year, but stakes are highest in the only two counties with at least 100,000 residents with a contested election.

Both races pit a Republican incumbent against a Democratic challenger who proposes some reforms in counties that went for Joe Biden in 2020. In Lancaster County (Lincoln), County Attorney Pat Condon faces Adam Morfeld, a former lawmaker who founded the progressive organization Civic Nebraska and helped lead efforts to expand Medicaid in the state.

But the state’s premier battle is in Omaha: Douglas County Attorney Don Kleine switched to the GOP two years ago after the Democratic Party accused him of furthering white supremacy; he had brought no charges against the man who killed James Scurlock, a Black protester. In November, Kleine will face Democratic challenger Dave Pantos, the former director of Legal Aid of Nebraska, whose platform is largely centered on reform themes.

North Carolina

Mecklenburg (Charlotte) and Wake (Raleigh) counties, each jurisdictions of more than one million people, mirror one another this year. 

In each, a Democratic DA is seeking re-election but must face a defense attorney in the May primary. In Charlotte, challenger Tim Emry has been part of the local coalition Decarcerate Mecklenburg, which has sought to reduce jail population during the COVID-19 pandemic; he faces DA Spencer Merriweather. In Raleigh, Demon Cheston, whose criminal defense practice involves capital punishment cases, is challenging DA Lorrin Freeman. Cheston and Emry are each running on progressive platforms that include never seeking the death penalty and accountability for police officers who lie or commit misconduct. During the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, Charlotte and Raleigh drew thousands of protesters who demanded action against racial injustice and more accountability for the police. 

Other populous North Carolina districts are hosting competitive DA elections as well.

In Forsyth County (Winston-Salem), the race will come down to the November general election. In this county that voted for Biden by 14 percentage points, Republican DA Jim O’Neill will face Democrat Denise Hartsfield, a retired judge who is also a former prosecutor and attorney with the Legal Aid Society.

There are also Democratic primaries to watch in Buncombe (Asheville), Durham, and Guilford (Greensboro) counties, though some of the candidates who filed do not appear to be running active campaigns as of publication. In Buncombe, the incumbent faces tough-on-crime attacks from at least one challenger.  In Durham, two defense attorneys filed to run against DA Satana Deberry, who has built a reformer profile, rolling out bail reform and clearing thousands of old fines and fees. Deberry testified in Congress earlier this week on behalf of progressive prosecutors. “Stop pretending reform is the real threat to public safety,” she said.

The North Carolina primaries are on May 17th. The full list of candidates is available here.

Oregon

Even by low national standards, Oregon has a striking problem with democracy when it comes to its DAs. It has long been marred by a pattern of DAs resigning shortly before their terms conclude—with governors filling the resulting vacancies by appointing deputy prosecutors who then get to face voters as incumbents. That dynamic struck again in 2022, though only in one county. What’s more shocking is that only two elections out of 15 drew multiple candidates.

At least both of those races offer voters a real choice on the direction of local criminal justice policy.

Populous Washington County, right next to Portland, features a clear-cut divide between DA Kevin Barton and challenger Brian Decker, a public defender who is active in various reform drives and advocates for investing in programs that fall outside the criminal legal system. Barton is attacking Decker’s views as “dangerous” and holding up neighboring Portland, which is led by a reform-minded DA, as a boogeyman. (Barton’s 2018 election featured a similar contrast, and he won with some ease after an uncommonly expensive campaign.) Further south, in Marion County (Salem), public defender Spencer Todd is challenging DA Paige Clarkson, saying he wants to turn the page of “tough on crime” policies. Marion County has not had a contested DA race since at least the 1990s.

Oregon’s DAs are notoriously active in opposing criminal justice reform legislation, making these elections meaningful for statewide policy as well. However a coalition of three reform DAs formed in the wake of the 2020 elections, with the new DA of Multnomah County (Portland) banding together with those of smaller Deschutes and Wasco counties to defend reform bills. But the group is set to lose one of its three members as Deschutes County DA Jon Hummel is retiring. He will be replaced by Steve Gunnels, a longtime prosecutor who is the only candidate who filed. (The Multnomah and Wasco DAs are not on the ballot this year.) 

Oregon’s DA elections are nonpartisan elections that are scheduled for May 17. The full list of candidates is available here.

Utah

David Leavitt is the rare Republican prosecutor who grabs headlines for championing criminal justice reform. As county attorney of Utah County, he established new diversion programs after he came into office, and last fall he announced he would no longer seek the death penalty. “It simply demonstrates our societal preference for retribution over public safety,” he said of capital punishment in a public release. 

Leavitt’s re-election race will test the GOP’s appetite for such changes. He faces Jeffrey Gray, an assistant Utah solicitor general who touts his ties to law enforcementand promises to bring back the death penalty if elected. 

Over in Salt Lake County, Democratic prosecutor Sim Gill triggered a national furor during the Black Lives Matters protests of 2020, filing gang enhancements against protesters accused of spilling red paint in front of his office, which threatened sentences of up to life in prison (the charges were later amended). Protestors were criticizing Gill’s decision to decline charges against officers who killed 22-year-old Bernardo Palacios-Carbajal earlier that year. But Gill is in relatively good shape in his reelection bid this year; he drew no challenger in the Democratic primary, which can be decisive in this blue-leaning jurisdiction. Republican challenger Danielle Ahn has no campaign website or campaign account as of publication.

Utah only has two other contested prosecutor races: one in Washington County where a GOP incumbent faces a Libertarian challenger, and one in the very sparsely populated Grand County.

The primaries will be held on June 28, followed by the November general elections. The full list of candidates is available here.

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Anthony Pickens’ best memories from his 24 years in Oregon prisons involve voting. From the mock presidential elections held every four years to the elaborate campaigns he ran to win leadership roles in prison clubs, Pickens’ experience with the democratic system behind bars brought entertainment, exhilaration, and a sense of community to an otherwise bleak environment. 

But Pickens’ vote didn’t count outside prison walls because Oregon, like nearly every other state in the country, bans people imprisoned for felony convictions from voting while incarcerated. In recent years, advocates for ending felony disenfranchisement have pushed for Oregon, a state on the vanguard for policies expanding voting access, to abandon the practice and become a rare state to enable all U.S. citizens to vote. Yet lawmakers have effectively declared a proposal to extend voting rights to the nearly 12,000 people currently incarcerated in Oregon prisons dead-on-arrival at the legislature this year. Despite a strong base of support for the bill from Democratic party officials, including the secretary of state, resistance from Oregon’s GOP leaders and anxiety over upcoming state-level elections appear to have again killed prison voting in a state that seemed primed to lead on the issue. 

Pickens, who began lobbying for voting rights while incarcerated and continued after his release from prison last October, said it’s disappointing that the issue remains so intractable. “A lot of the laws being passed by lawmakers directly impacted us and our families and the communities we planned on returning to,” Pickens said. “We are still citizens of the country regardless of being incarcerated.”

House Bill 4147, which Democratic lawmakers introduced in Salem late last month, would allow people in prisons to register to vote and vote by mail—as is standard across Oregon—with their ballot counted in the last county they called home before their sentencing. The bill mirrors a proposal that died in committee last year after representatives from Oregon Department of Corrections argued the law would hamper mailroom operations inside the state prison system. Oregon Republicans quickly decried this year’s bill as more evidence of “Democrats’ shameful pro-criminal agenda.”  

The prison-voting bill now seems to have little chance of advancing before the end of Oregon’s 35-day session, which began February 1. Hannah Kurowski, a spokesperson for Oregon’s House Democratic Caucus, wouldn’t discuss HB 4147 except to say that it likely won’t get a committee hearing this year. 

Elona Wilson, director of Oregon voting rights advocacy group Next Up, accused the state’s Democrats of being too afraid to debate the issue. “We just went through redistricting [in Oregon], and folks are scared of certain seats being lost,” Wilson said. “We must push the Democrats who have the power in the legislature to find their bravery in doing the right thing. Fear has played a huge role in the history of this legislation and it’s on us to overcome it.” 

State felony disenfranchisement laws were largely a product of racism tied to the extension of voting rights to Black Americans after the Civil War. Much like poll taxes and literacy tests for voters, prison disenfranchisement was one of many tools states used to prevent Black voters from casting a ballot. 

“Disenfranchisement was not designed to make communities safer or to punish people who break the law,” said Zach ​​Winston, a policy director with the Oregon Justice Resource Center (OJRC). “It was about the systematic exclusion of Americans in elections based on race.”

The racist legacy of felony disenfranchisement continues today: A 2020 study by the Sentencing Project found that over 6 percent of the US’s entire Black population is prohibited from voting due to their felony conviction, compared to less than 2 percent of the country’s non-Black population. That disparity is also reflected in Oregon’s prisons, where 9 percent of the state’s incarcerated population is Black, despite Black people only making up 2 percent of the state’s total population. 

Oregon is one of 48 states with felony disenfranchisement laws on the books, however those laws vary from state to state. People convicted of felonies in some states are barred from voting until they leave prison, while other states prohibit people from casting a ballot until they finish probation. In some states, people with a felony conviction lose their voting rights for life, leading to staggering rates of exclusion of up to 10 percent in Mississippi. Oregon is one of the 20 states that already allow anyone who is not presently incarcerated to vote, a number that soared in recent years as a wave of Democratic-run states like California, Washington, and New Jersey, took the step of restoring people’s voting rights upon their release from prison.

But only two states, Vermont and Maine, also allow people to vote while they are incarcerated. They have never disenfranchised residents over a criminal conviction, so people incarcerated there do not lose the right to vote. While incarcerated, they can vote at their last place of residence via mail-in ballots. (It should be noted that both states have the highest percentage of white residents in the country.) In 2020, the District of Columbia joined those two states and completely ended felony disenfranchisement with a landmark law that restored voting rights to people in prison. 

Keeda Haynes, voting rights campaign strategist for the Sentencing Project, said Oregon seemed poised to join those three jurisdictions—and technically be the first state to abolish an existing disenfranchisement statute—when lawmakers first proposed it last year. But Republicans in the legislature derailed the conversation with concerns about staffing costs and fears of empowering convicted criminals. Haynes says she heard myriad reasons why lawmakers weren’t comfortable with prison voting, all of which felt more emotional than practical. “It often comes down to, ‘We don’t want people convicted of murder and rape voting,’” Haynes said. “But there’s no explanation why. Other than that, the argument is mostly, ‘It just doesn’t feel good.’” 

Efforts to enable incarcerated people to vote have grown in recent years, especially after people in numerous prisons launched a coordinated strike in  2018, demanding better treatment—and, in some places, the right to vote. Sympathetic lawmakers filed a number of bills to get there in recent years, including in Hawaii, Massachusetts, and Virginia, but none passed other than in the District of Columbia. In 2022, there are active bills to this effect in at least Oregon, Illinois and New York. Haynes said, whichever state passes it first, it will undoubtedly empower other states to move forward with similar legislation. “There is a national push for this,” she said. “The US is at a point where we are looking at ways to strengthen our democracy. This is one way we can do that—and Oregon has the opportunity to lead the way.”

Oregon’s Secretary of State Shemia Fagan, who oversees the state’s election system, has expressly supported HB 4147, as has Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt, who represents prosecutors in the state’s most populous county. Portland Democrat Sen. Kayse Jama, a co-sponsor of HB 4147, says ending felony disenfranchisement is in line with Oregon’s history of trailblazing voting rights policies. Oregon became the first state to vote entirely by mail in a presidential election in 2000, a trend that has been picked up by at least seven other states (and emulated by many more during 2020’s pandemic-hampered election). In 2015, Oregon passed a first-in-the-nation automatic voter registration law, a system that has now been adopted in 21 other states. 

“Oregon is known to be a leader in making democracy accessible,” Jama said. “This [legislation] is just another way of us taking the lead in the nation. I would hope my colleagues share those values.”

Not in 2022, it appears. No Oregon Republican has come forward in support of HB 4741 after their leadership condemned the bill. Kurowski, with the House Democratic Caucus, suggested the legislation would have better luck next year, when Oregon will hold its longer, 160-day session, saying, “Oregonians take voter enfranchisement very seriously and it’s an issue that merits further discussion.” OJRC’s Winston believes that Oregon’s upcoming primary elections for state legislators are partially to blame for the inaction this year. “In an election year, certain things are harder to pass,” he said. “But this is a civil rights issue and everyone should see it as a priority.”

Winston, who also served time in prison, said allowing people to vote while incarcerated is key to their rehabilitation process. “It’s so important to be connected to your community when you’re in prison,” he said. “Voting helps rehabilitate a person by allowing them to take responsibility in their communities. That’s what we should be supporting.”

After being released from prison in October 2021, Pickens was hired as a paralegal for OJRC. He shared Winston’s thinking about the role voting plays in rehabilitation.“When you’re involved in the community, when you’re able to make decisions on things that have personally affected your life, you feel like you belong to something,” Pickens said. “If you don’t feel like you belong to something there’s a good chance you won’t tend to it or care for it. Which is how a lot of people feel when they leave prison.”

Pickens has yet to vote in an election since leaving prison last year, but he filled out his voter registration card as soon as it landed in his mailbox. “I really can’t wait,” he said. “Having the ability to be involved in your own democracy is redemptive work.”

The post Oregon Stalls Effort to Allow Voting from Prison appeared first on Bolts.

Oregon would technically be the first state to abolish felony disenfranchisement, since Maine and Vermont never practiced it in the first place, and D.C. is not a state.

Advocates say this milestone is long overdue given the racist roots of felony disenfranchisement rules and its connection to punitive norms. They hope that by making history in Oregon they can pave the way for other states to expand voting rights as well.

“Prison is about the loss of liberty, not the loss of citizenship,” Anthony Richardson, who is incarcerated at the Oregon State Correctional Institution in Salem, told The Appeal: Political Report in an email. Richardson, who gave a presentation to lawmakers on disenfranchisement in 2019, said not having the right to vote makes him feel like less of a citizen. He has been incarcerated since he was a minor, so he has never voted.

Representative Andrea Salinas, a Democrat who is sponsoring the legislation in the Oregon House, told the Political Report that the issue is personal because her cousin was incarcerated multiple times and ultimately died by suicide. 

“When the advocates came to me with this bill, I was like, ‘This is what my cousin Andrew would have needed—a piece of what he would have needed to stay connected to the community,” she said.

Bobbin Singh, executive director of the Oregon Justice Resource Center, who is advocating for the bill, agrees that enabling incarcerated people in Oregon to vote would help them transition back into their communities upon release. “This type of punishment … doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “It has no correlation to public safety.”

Oregon is one of 19 states that enables at least anyone who is not incarcerated to vote, even if they are on probation or parole; other states have more restrictive rules. But very few states allow all people with felony convictions to vote throughout their incarceration. 

The bill’s proponents point out that stripping people of their rights in prison has major implications for racial justice given the vast disparities in the state’s criminal legal system.The proposed bill would restore the voting rights of people incarcerated over felony convictions in Oregon—a population of at least 13,000 as of the 2020 election that is roughly 9 percent Black in a state whose Black population is just 2.5 percent.

Singh says that ending felony disenfranchisement would be a significant step toward eliminating laws created in the Jim Crow era that are rooted in white supremacy.

Richardson echoed that assessment, noting that Oregon first disenfranchised people in prison “over 160 years ago, during a time of forced labor, exclusion laws, lashings, lynching, and policies designed solely to benefit white men and oppress people of color,“ and “continues to forbid Oregonians in prison from being valued as human beings in this state.”

The bill already has 15 co-sponsors between the state Senate and House. One of them is Floyd Prozanski, the Democratic senator who leads the Judiciary Committee, where the legislation now sits. Prozanski, a former assistant district attorney who now works as a municipal prosecutor when the legislature is not in session, said he supports the legislation because he’s a firm believer in making  the criminal legal system more restorative, and not punitive.

“Individuals who commit crimes need to be held accountable, but they should not be stripped of their rights as a citizen,” he said. “As a citizen, they should have the continued right to vote and have a say in their government, even if they are incarcerated.”

The bill also may have prominent supporters outside of the legislature. Mike Schmidt, the new DA of Multnomah County (Portland), told the Political Report during his campaign last year that he was supportive of abolishing felony disenfranchisement. “If that’s something that we can be doing to get people enthusiastic about participation in society, it just seems like such a no-brainer to me,” he said.

Shemia Fagan, Oregon’s secretary of state, told the Political Report that she is open to considering it as a way to expand upon the work her office has done in recent years to increase ballot access in Oregon.

“There is more work to be done here and across the country though—including for adults in custody,” she said in an email. “I look forward to learning more about the bill introduced in the Oregon Legislature while building on our work to ensure everyone has fair access to the ballot.” Governor Kate Brown’s office would not comment on pending legislation.  

Singh and Samantha Gladu, executive director of the Oregon civil rights organization Next Up, said their groups decided in recent years to prioritize voting rights for incarcerated people because it was one of the policy ideas most discussed when they met with a group of young people in prison. 

Efforts against felony disenfranchisement have gained traction in recent years, with six states and Washington, D.C., expanding their electorates since 2019. Among them are California, where voters passed a ballot initiative in November that extends voting rights to people on parole, and Kentucky and Iowa, where the governors signed executive orders restoring the right to vote to some people upon completion of their sentences. 

But Washington, D.C.’s success last year was the first proposal to altogether abolish felony disenfranchisement that succeeded. Legislatures in 2019 in Hawaii and New Mexico moved bills past one committee, but were not successful in getting it passed. Lawmakers also filed bills allowing all incarcerated citizens to vote in Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Virginia, and other states.

The idea also gained steam during the Democratic presidential primary in 2019 when U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders committed his support to ending felony disenfranchisement, forcing the other candidates to go on the record about the issue as well. The For the People Act, passed by the U.S. House in March 2019 and unveiled in the Senate this week, would restore the voting rights of people with felony convictions who are not incarcerated.

At the state level, advocates are planning more efforts to enable incarcerated people to vote this year. The ACLU of Virginia launched an effort this month urging the governor to support that position. A group of Democratic lawmakers in Georgia recently introduced a bill to end felony disenfranchisement, although it’s highly unlikely to move forward in a state where the GOP controls the state government. 

With Democrats in control of all chambers of government in Oregon, voting advocates say the proposal is unlikely to face intense opposition, and Singh said he is “very optimistic” that it will pass this year. 

Advocates also say Oregon is well-suited for this move since its vote-by-mail system will ease voting from prison, which typically involves absentee ballots. The Oregon legislation would enable people to register to vote at their last address, as is the case in other states.

Oregon became the first state to vote by mail in a federal election in 1996, and in 2019, it passed legislation mandating that the state pay return postage for every voter’s ballot. As a result, advocates say the implementation of prison voting would be straight-forward and that election officials could easily put ballot drop boxes in each of the state’s prisons. 

“Mechanically and logistically, this is actually a very easy lift for Oregon,” he said. 

Salinas, the lawmaker, also thinks that Oregon is ready. “I don’t see a downside to this, quite honestly,” she said. “Oregon is so committed to expanding voting rights and expanding democracy, and that principle is so ingrained in Oregonians on both sides of the aisle.”

If Oregon were to pass the legislation, advocates say it could inspire other Democrat-controlled states to make it a priority. 

“I hope we’re on the front edge of a humongous wave over the next two to five years,” Singh said. “I’m hoping that by passing this, we can not only demonstrate to Oregonians but to the rest of the country that when we say we cherish the right to vote and political participation, we mean that.”

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Getting caught with drugs like cocaine, heroin, or methamphetamine normally leads to arrest, jail time, and a criminal record. But that could change in Oregon, which in November could become the first state in the nation to decriminalize possession of personal amounts of drugs, weighing between a gram or two depending on the substance.  

Known as Measure 110, or the Drug Addiction Treatment and Recovery Act, the citizen-led ballot initiative would swap arrests and criminal penalties for a noncriminal $100 citation, and it would fund more treatment services. This would mark a momentous shift in favor of a public health-focused approach to substance use, and a turn away from policies that incarcerate people or at least saddle them with a criminal conviction over behaviors tied to addiction. 

“What we’re really trying to do is move substance use out of a criminal justice model and into a healthcare model where it belongs,” said Haven Wheelock, one of the initiative’s chief petitioners. Wheelock also works at downtown Portland’s Outside In, providing services to homeless youth and people who use drugs. “Punishing people for a substance use disorder is an ineffective way of changing people’s drug use behavior. We know that because we’ve been trying for a hundred years to punish people into not using substances, and it hasn’t worked.” 

People who are booked in jail for substance use face heightened health risks given the substantial rate of overdoses and suicides in detention or upon release. And a criminal conviction over substance use often leads to mounting economic difficulties by limiting access to housing, employment, and student loans, which can make recovery more difficult. 

Measure 110 would wipe away the vast majority of criminal cases for drug possession, a state analysis found. It would not decriminalize offenses associated with drug sales, nor would it stop law enforcement against drug possession since this would be treated as a civil infraction.

Compared to other states, Oregon has a high rate of addiction while also ranking last in treatment accessibility, according to government surveys. To address these trends, Measure 110 has provisions that would use excess cannabis tax revenue, as well as savings from reduced policing and incarceration, to fund treatment and other health services.  

The $100 fine would be waived if a person agrees to a health assessment where they would be screened for a substance use disorder and other health needs by licensed professionals.

This initiative is modeled after reforms undertaken by Portugal. In the 1990s, Portugal faced an injection drug crisis that led to a growing number of overdoses and an outbreak of HIV. To tackle the issue, drugs were decriminalized; in addition, new policies focused on boosting treatment and prevention programs. 

“You can’t do one without the other,” Matt Sutton, a spokesperson for the New York-based nonprofit Drug Policy Alliance, told The Appeal: Political Report. The organization’s political arm has put more than  $2.5 million into the Measure 110 campaign.

Since Portugal changed its approach, drug-related deaths, drug use, and HIV infections have all plummeted.   

This matches a growing body of evidence in the U.S. that shows that tougher prison sentences do little to deter drug use, and that higher rates of drug arrests do not correlate with use patterns. Still, some law enforcement officials oppose the measure on the grounds that it will threaten public safety. “This is a terrible idea,” Washington County District Attorney Kevin Barton told a local Fox affiliate. “It will lead to increased crime and increased drug use.” 

The measure has broad support among trade unions, faith groups, human rights organizations, as well as some law enforcement officials like Multnomah County District Attorney Michael Schmidt.

Drug decriminalization is different from drug legalization. Wheelock likened decriminalization to a speeding ticket. “It’s still not legal, you’re not supposed to get caught with these things,” she said. “You’re also not supposed to speed, and people shouldn’t go to jail for speeding, that’s why they get a ticket.” 

But this continued role for law enforcement has some advocates worried that inequalities tied to policing will persist even if Measure 110 passes.

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The decriminalization initiative lands in Oregon during a volatile political moment. Since the May 25 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Portland protesters have risen up against police brutality and are demanding cuts to police budgets. When the campaign behind Measure 110 launched in February, Wheelock and her colleagues thought the political message with the broadest support would be one that emphasized expanding treatment. 

More recently, the campaign’s message has focused on racial justice, highlighting disparities in drug arrests and the harms of the drug war on communities of color, like over-policing and over-incarceration. “In light of these protests, people universally understand and are calling for decriminalization,” Wheelock said. “That’s definitely changed not just how the campaign talks about it, but what messaging people are feeling the strongest about.” 

A new campaign commercial reflects the political sea change. “Two and a half decades ago, I was arrested for a small possession of drugs,” Bobby Byrd, a Black Oregon resident, said in the Measure 110 ad. “It’s kept me from getting housing, apartments, getting places near my kids, now I have to travel three hours to go see them. … It makes me feel like I’m trapped.” 

At the request of the Measure 110 campaign, the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission conducted a racial and ethnic impact report analyzing the potential effects of the ballot initiative. The commission found the initiative would reduce simple possession convictions by 91 percent, and convictions of Black people by over 93 percent.

Despite the promises of reduced racial disparities and more funding for treatment, some politicians and players in Oregon’s addiction treatment industry have voiced criticism of Measure 110’s funding strategy. Though some still favor decriminalization, they are worried that Measure 110 could stymie efforts to raise alcohol taxes that would generate new revenue for substance use treatment. Rather than creating new revenue, Measure 110 would earmark existing funds from cannabis taxes. The ballot’s critics argue that means less money for other projects. 

This conflict led one of the measure’s backers, the Urban League of Portland, to “pause” its endorsement. 

“Unfortunately, alcohol taxes are a really big lift, and really hard to get passed,” Wheelock said in response to the ballot’s critics. “We are in a crisis where people are dying on the regular from their substance use disorders and this is something we can do right now.” She added, “In the long term, of course I’m going to fight for an alcohol tax to fund recovery services. This isn’t the end all be all.” 

Measure 110 was written with flexibility in mind, leaving open the possibility to fine tune how resources are spent in the future and adapt to the state’s evolving needs. If the measure passes, those who are criticizing it now could have a say in how spending is structured down the road. 

Others worry that the initiative will not be sufficient to stop the disparate harm of law enforcement. They note that the $100 citation could simply create a new form of fines and fees that target people of color and burden those with lower incomes. A 2017 report by the Drug Policy Alliance notes that “de jure decriminalization is often not enough—changes in law enforcement practices are needed as well.” 

A report by the ACLU also shows that Black people in every state remain far more likely to be arrested for cannabis possession than white people, even in states where the substance is legalized. Though arrests did decrease after legalization and decriminalization, the report found that the racial disparities in arrests persisted.  

“To substantially shift the experiences of people who use drugs in their communities, decriminalization must be coupled with meaningful police reform and efforts to build-up systems of support and care,” Leo Beletsky, director of the Health in Justice Action Lab at Northeastern University’s School of Law, told Political Report. “This is because police take advantage of wide discretion, continuing to surveil and control people who use drugs.” 

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Oregon has a trailblazing reputation in the realm of drug policy reform. In 2014, it became the fourth state to legalize cannabis. Then in 2017, it reclassified small-scale drug possession from a felony to a misdemeanor, which decreases penalties but does not apply to people with prior felony convictions. With all these wins, outright decriminalization was the next logical step for reformers. 

A separate ballot initiative in November, Measure 109, aims to establish licensed psilocybin (“magic mushrooms”) treatment centers, making it the first state to allow for the legal cultivation and sale of the substance for medical purposes. 

Advocates now hope that adopting these new reforms in Oregon could start a domino effect, akin to the one in favor of cannabis legalization, and start a national decriminalization trend. In July, the Drug Policy Alliance released a detailed framework for decriminalizing drugs at the federal level. 

There is indeed wide support for a new approach to criminal justice and drug policy in America. A 2018 poll found that three quarters of Americans believe the criminal legal system needs significant improvements, and 85 percent believe the main goal of the system should be rehabilitation. A 2014 report by Pew Research Center found 67 percent of people think the government should focus more on treatment for people who use illegal drugs like cocaine and heroin, compared to just 26 percent who think prosecution of drug dealers should be the priority.  

Oregon will soon find out whether the protests and uprisings against police have amplified support for ending the war on drugs.  

“Throughout the war on drugs, this has been continually used to hold down these communities and gut them of economic opportunity and resources,” Sutton, of the Drug Policy Alliance, said. “People are really seeing that now.”

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