By Denise Welch and Sonny Lerma, Contributing Columnists
This year, Oregon’s Legislature will examine whether to pass reforms that reduce our reliance on incarceration as the primary public safety strategy. There is growing support to pass comprehensive corrections reforms that flatline prison growth, which has been skyrocketing in the past 20 years.
A small number of tough-on-crime advocates are trying to keep Oregon from entering the 21st century with our current public safety policy. They argue that our mandatory minimum laws are the reason for Oregon’s crime rate going down and any changes to those laws will doom Oregon to increases in crime.
So two important questions worth exploring in this debate are: What actually reduces crime, and will growing our prison system make us safer?
In the U.S., many people assume that putting people in prison is the only way to achieve public safety. But crime is complicated, and there are many factors that influence whether crime rates go up or down.
Although incarceration rates can have some impact, there are other factors that have much more influence, like the state of the economy, trends in drug use, trends in policing strategies, and levels of state and local funding for addiction treatment and mental health services.
If incarceration was the panacea to problems of crime, it seems logical that the higher a state’s incarceration rate, the higher the drop in crime. To debunk this myth, let’s compare the incarceration and crime rates of Oregon with a few other states. Oregon implemented Measure 11, our harsh mandatory minimum law, in 1995. As you can see from the chart (top), from 1995 to 2002, our incarceration rate skyrocketed. Oregon was locking people up at a much more intense rate than California, Washington or New York. But those states experienced about the same reduction in crime. New York even reduced its incarceration levels altogether and experienced even lower crime rates than Oregon.
So this comparison begs the question: What exactly did Oregon gain from that skyrocketing growth in incarceration that those other states didn’t? Sadly, we gained hundreds of millions of dollars of debt from building new prisons.
We simply can’t incarcerate our way out of crime. We need to start looking past the tough-on-crime rhetoric and start looking at the research. Oregon spends the majority of its limited public safety dollars on the Department of Corrections, and as our prison system has taken up a larger and larger amount of funding, we have seen less money go to the types of programs that actually break the cycle of crime, like addiction treatment and mental health services.
Other states have been getting smart on crime and recognize that the answer to safer communities is not a focus on bigger prisons. In fact, of the 17 states that have lowered their incarceration rates since 2000, all have experienced drops in crime. This chart (lower) shows three examples.
Oregon is on a trajectory to build another 2,300 prison beds in the next decade at a cost of at least $600 million. Modest corrections and sentencing reforms can flatline prison growth, creating savings that can be invested into what works to reduce crime.
Despite the research that shows we can reduce incarceration rates and crime rates, a handful of tough on crime advocates reject even modest reforms. Let’s hope legislators are more sensible.