Marquis and Marteeny and frankly all prosecutors in Oregon are falsely sanctimonious. By their telling, they want to keep overly draconian laws in place for reasons that are purely altruistic. But how altruistic is sending someone to prison?
Of course Marquis hedges a bit by pretending that he only wants to use the possibility of felony charges as a stick to get recalcitrant addicts into treatment, vaguely implying that he would never actually take such measures, but such a threat means absolutely nothing if the threat isn’t made good from time to time, right, and that’s exactly what will happen.
Apparently Josh Marquis thinks that prison is an excellent treatment option for those addicted to drugs. It’s a wonder that he hasn’t won some kind of humanitarian award. I mean, these are the kinds of idiots who are running things in our country, in Oregon, even in Portland.
The real issue here is that the public is finally beginning to wake up to the abuses and overreach of the DAs office. All over the country we see that prosecutors routinely withhold evidence from defense attorneys; they fight exonerations; they jail victims of rape; and they do all of this with absolute impunity as there are virtually no laws which govern their conduct.
What this change really signifies is that DAs are gradually losing power, prestige and influence. Prosecutors are the real gatekeepers of both the jail and the prison. The more people who end up in either place, the more their franchise grows, and the more power they have within law enforcement and criminal justice circles. If you were to put a number on this franchise, and if you were to include within in the statewide cost of jail and prison, it would easily reach into the billions of dollars in Oregon alone.
When people start tinkering with the laws to cause fewer people to end up in this awful and corrupt system, people like Josh Marquis, John Foote, Rod Underhill, Marteeny and the rest of the bunch start to become very nervous because these numbers are needed by the people who run jails and prisons to justify their budgets.
Actually, the dramatically falling rates of crime in Oregon present a real challenge to these budgets, and people like Josh Marquis have to come up with creative ways to get people into the jail, and to keep them coming back. As a member of the public, have you ever stopped to ask yourself why the courts and the jails and the prosecutors and judges still need all of the resources, and in fact more, than they did when crime in many categories was double or triple what it is now?
Alone these prosecutors have enormous power within their communities, but when they combine forces, they have statewide political reach. They shape legislation, and they are feared by politicians. They are also given an unrestricted public forum in newspapers like the Willamette Week and the Oregonian whenever they need to send a message.
Several years ago, for example, John Kitzhaber formed the Commission on Public Safety in 2012 to look for ways to check the growth of Oregon’s prison system. These were Kitzhaber’s comments from the time: “If we are unwilling to act on this issue, we will, by default, be choosing prisons over schools and condemning untold numbers of today’s students to a future in our system of corrections rather than in our system of postsecondary education.”
One of Kitzhaber’s main concerns was the eye-popping annual cost associated with keeping over 14,000 men, women and children behind bars every year. Citing Measure 11 and other conservative initiatives that many observers have long fingered as the drivers of mass incarceration, Kitzhaber sought to consider ways to temper the growth of prisons in Oregon.
Guess who immediately sprang into action to oppose Kitzhaber’s proposed reforms? IF you guessed The Oregon Association of District Attorneys, you’d be absolutely correct. So there is an established pattern going way, way, way back among these conservative district attorneys. In fact, it might be best to liken their tactics to the NRA: whenever there is a mass shooting, Newton, most notably, you’d think they’d eventually admit that maybe some form of gun control might be a good idea. Nope. What they do instead is the exact opposite. They use the most obvious against their case *for* their case. The bottom line here is that these are incredibly powerful people, and they will do whatever they can to hang on to their power.
If Kitzhaber had gotten his way, the State of Oregon would now be sitting on at least $300,000,000 that has gone instead to keep its prison system expanding. Does this misallocation of taxpayer money matter at all? Was Kitzhaber right about choosing prison over educating kids? Well, if you live in Portland, you often hear talk about the need to lay off teachers. Here is but one such story: http://www.kgw.com/news/education/pps-looks-at-layoffs-due-to-projected-budget-shortfall/424286819
