Unfortunately, in 1996, voters voted to remove the words "reformation" from the Oregon Constitution and remove the prohibition on "vindictive justice".

The lack of comprehensive drug and alcohol treatment/reform plans is one consequence of that vote.

• Bob R.

Link to Measure 26, 1996: http://www.sos.state.or.us/elections/nov596/voters.guide/MEASURES/MEAS26/M26EX.HTM

I guess the drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs weren't penciled into Mannix's plan.
All the prison programs for rehab and bettering prisoners, like education programs and vocational opportunities are in Salem. These same programs are virtually non-existent in the other prisons. But there are plenty of lifers who are serving time in Salem. At the same time there are plenty of prisoners who are scheduled to get out in three or five or eight years serving time in Umatilla or Ontario or the other Oregon prisons. Sound a little backwards?

Would someone please explain to me how we can have a separation between church and state while allowing statements such as these in governmentally printed materials?:

"Any Constitutional Amendment deserves solemn consideration. This amendment points up our true enemy: SATAN - that fallen archangel - and his demonic spirits. They enter people and they cause the people to do harm. Jesus said:

"I beheld SATAN as lightning fall from heaven" LUKE 10:18 SATAN beguiled Eve and procured the entrance of sin into the world. With sin came evil in all its forms and including premature death.

SATAN knows that his destination is the Lake of Fire - where the fire is not quenched and the worm turneth not. It is a place where there is grinding and gnashing of teeth. His plan is to take as many persons with him as he can. He is vindictive.

To thwart him we must abandon VINDICTIVENESS

Each person has been allotted the power of choice. This amendment points up the power of choice by the insertion of the words "personal responsibility"

Our divine and holy God has given us choice which is brief, and yet endless:

"Behold, I set before you this day a blessing and a curse." Dueteronomy 11:26"

This sort of Anti-Christian talk, let alone any religious arguements should be left out of governmentally published materials. If they want to hold a sign up at Pioneer Courthouse Square, by all means.

This guy killed someone. Hopefully he won't be getting out of prison, so why should he receive addiction rehabilitation at all? I'm all for treatment programs for addicts who aren't in prison and treating those who have committed minor crimes to help prevent them from committing major ones, but once you've murdered someone I don't care if you rot. In fact, I hope you rot.

I would rather spend public money on better schools, universal health care and many other necessary and worthy issues than spend any more money on a murderer in prison. His crimes are already costing the public thousands and thousands of dollars a year just to house him there. And he highlights the Dept of Corrections $1 billion plus budget! They wouldn't need such a huge budget were it not for this (insert expletive here)'s murder of another human being! I wonder just how much he and his prison colleagues are costing us a year!

This guy's letter really hit a nerve with me. He murders someone, blames the drugs, and is now complaining he's not getting proper rehabilitation. I wish he was this concerned about his addiction before he murdered someone .

I would suspect that rehabilitation is mentioned in his letter because HE WILL be RELEASED one day. This is an important fact to remember. We can play the game, "It should be..." blah, blah, blah... but that is not the FACT.

The fact is that many murderers for various reasons depending on their sentence and they actual crime that they committed, Murder 1, vs Murder 2, etc, may actually be released someday. In this regard, to not rehabilitate them is a crime. PERIOD.

Does one crime deserve another? They are in prison, afterall, serving their debt to society, are they not? Do we then punish them again by denying them the opportunity to better themselves so that when they do get out they will be able to contribute to society instead of heading back to prison?

I fail to understand the "black and white" logic proposed here, because that is simply not the way humanity works. We are not "black and white". There are shades of grey here. Shades of grey require a level of intelligence to deciper. I would expect more from proponents of this measure.

While working for the Oregon Judicial Department and the DUII Intensive Supervision Program (DISP) based out of the Multnomah County Courthouse, I witnessed first-hand the dangers of drug and alcohol abuse. The crimes committed by people under the influence of intoxicants harm innocent members of our community. Drunk driving is one particularly egregious example, and should be prosecuted aggressively. Also from my work with DISP, however, I came to appreciate the tremendous difficultly for some offenders to come to terms with their own addiction, and to make meaningful strides toward sobriety. Without the support of trained drug counselors, regular drug screening, and group therapy, their journey would be all the more difficult.

Reading Troy’s letter, I am encouraged to see that he is starting to take responsibility for the harm he caused others, and the hurt his crimes have caused our community. He will likely have many years to think about the life he led before prison, and the life he would like to have after prison.

To help Troy, and others who struggle with drug and alcohol addiction, I strongly support efforts to provide drug and alcohol counseling from an early stage in the incarceration process. Abstaining from drugs and alcohol merely because an inmate is in prison without access to these substances is far from equivalent to abstaining from drugs and alcohol because an inmate has made a commitment to sobriety after receiving treatment, and making often painfully self-aware choices to change his or her life. To reduce recidivism, we must not leave inmates wrangling with complicated issues of addiction to go it alone.

We can be simultaneously tough on crime and progressive on drug and alcohol rehabilitation.

Rob Milesnick

While working for the Oregon Judicial Department and the DUII Intensive Supervision Program (DISP) based out of the Multnomah County Courthouse, I witnessed first-hand the dangers of drug and alcohol abuse. The crimes committed by people under the influence of intoxicants harm innocent members of our community. Drunk driving is one particularly egregious example, and should be prosecuted aggressively. Also from my work with DISP, however, I came to appreciate the tremendous difficultly for some offenders to come to terms with their own addiction, and to make meaningful strides toward sobriety. Without the support of trained drug counselors, regular drug screening, and group therapy, their journey would be all the more difficult.

Reading Troy’s letter, I am encouraged to see that he is starting to take responsibility for the harm he caused others, and the hurt his crimes have caused our community. He will likely have many years to think about the life he led before prison, and the life he would like to have after prison.

To help Troy, and others who struggle with drug and alcohol addiction, I strongly support efforts to provide drug and alcohol counseling from an early stage in the incarceration process. Abstaining from drugs and alcohol merely because an inmate is in prison without access to these substances is far from equivalent to abstaining from drugs and alcohol because an inmate has made a commitment to sobriety after receiving treatment, and making often painfully self-aware choices to change his or her life. To reduce recidivism, we must not leave inmates wrangling with complicated issues of addiction to go it alone.

We can be simultaneously tough on crime and progressive on drug and alcohol rehabilitation.

Rob Milesnick

RM, READ THE LETTER!!!. The writer didn't say he "murdered" someone, he said he "committed many crimes, including causing the death of another human being while under the influence of drugs." "Causing the death" could mean accidentally killing someone while driving under the influence, or any other lethal but unintentional result of a minor crime or simple drug-induced stupidity. I don't know what his crime was, but not all homicides are "murder" and not every act that results in someone's death warrants life imprisonment.

A significant number of prisoners have drug problems that helped put them in prison in the first place. If we don't want to release dangerous people into society, it is very much in our interests to try to straighten out their heads while we have them under 24/7 control. Turning them lose untreated does nobody any favors.

There is an interesting article in the online edition of the Economist regarding prisons:

By comparing recidivism rates for the two groups, Messrs Chen and Shapiro estimated whether tough conditions made bad men worse. They concluded that they did: similar prisoners held in higher security jails were 10-15 percentage points more likely to be re-arrested after being released. Since they estimated this effect to be larger than the deterrent effect identified by Mr Katz and co., they concluded that humane jails make for safer streets.

Don't go writing off prisoners because they made some bad choices; there are plenty of people who have overcome their problems to lead successful lives and contribute to society. Our prisoners need to have access to rehabilitation and other beneficial programs to aid in their rehabilitation. "Humane jails make for safer streets." The article discussed outsourcing prisoners to private prisons. It's an interesting read. I have only problem with outsourcing: sometimes, it takes convicted individuals far away from their family. I find that extremely unfair. Part of rehabilitation is reconnecting and/or staying close to the people you love.

Unless we as a society are prepared to lock everyone up forever who is convicted of any crime, we must therefore take whatever reasonable, measurable, and affordable steps are available to us to help prisoners not re-offend upon their release. This does not mean to coddle, reward, or ignore. It means to provide tools and avenues of reform and rehabilitation to those who have the need and desire to reform (and they are many.)

• Bob R.

I have only problem

Oye! I have only ONE problem. Oops.

Also acknowledging EP's and Dkj's follow up, as well as the comment of Rob Milesnick.

I think it's natural for many people to be so traumatized by crimes that people commit against each other, that they want to throw up their hands and have as little further to do with them as is possible. Beyond the basic emotional satisfaction, I doubt that indulging in that reaction on a long term basis is really going to make things better for anyone.

Prison is a society removed from the free world, but it's a society nonetheless. Put a bunch of people together, some of them inevitably sustaining problems they had that led them to be there in the first place has almost got to add up to be a hellish society. Not treating inmates for whatever problems they had that brought them there or those they acquired once they came in means hell to pay on the part of society in general once they're released.

This business of kicking people out of prison with little or no treatment or support is really a recipe for disaster, frequently a guarantee of failure. Everyday in the newspaper, we're reading about the things they do out in our neighborhoods.

Rehabilitation is a very difficult task in a prison setting, as is drug treatment. Some would say impossible. In the good old (pre NAFTA) days you could teach folks a useful and marketable blue collar trade while in prison, but look around in the non-prison community and see all the folks without jobs, hope or skills. How is an ex-convict going to do better in the job market than the millions of other victims of globalized Republican greed?

I for one would like to legalize all street drugs and make them available at prices so low that it would eliminate the need for addicts to kill, rob and steal in order to support their habits. There are lots of moral issues involved which I leave to you philosophers and theologians, but the practical and financial issues take priority for me. Think of all the banks and convenience stores that would not need to be robbed, the clerks and dealers who would not need to be shot, the cars, televisions and laptops which would not need to be stolen, and the public property (stop signs, alumnium guardrails, bleachers, etc.) that would not need to be stolen and melted down. Not to mention the huge reduction in identity theft, check bleaching, street corner begging, etc. If drugs were legal, then only video poker addicts would have a need to steal to support their habit, and we all know that the State of Oregon is all in favor of continuing that particular vice (for the good of the children).

The additional benefit would be that you could take your children down to one of the designated "tweaker parks" on Saturday mornings and watch the addicts slowly commit suicide through their drug(s) of choice. If that won't keep your kids off drugs, nothing will.

It costs more to keep someone in prison than to keep the same person on welfare, and it costs more to keep someone on welfare than to give that person a decent education in the first place.

Maybe if we reclassified education and welfare as a tax-saving get tough on crime program, the Republicans would get behind them.

BlueNote, I think that's a good point about the potential for rehab in prisons being compromised by the outsourcing of blue collar trades to foreign countries. Even if inmates were to get treated for anger, depression and addictions, what are these people going to be able to do for work once they get out if there's no legitimate work available?

There may be some valid arguments for drug legalization in terms of lessening negative consequences of addiction and countering crime, but there still has to be something for people to do with their time that allows them to make a living. It's never going to work just having a bunch of legally maintained addicts sitting around with time on their hands and nothing to do. I really think society has to face up to the need for creating work for many, many people, even though that work, for the provider of the work, may not represent a profitable enterprise in a conventional sense.

Most of the latter two paragraphs of your comment are too sarcastic for me. I don't think the suggestions made are helpful either.

Some interesting discussion here, to say the least. The letter wasn't a surprise to me. At a meeting of the Governor's Alcohol and Drug Council a while back, we heard from an ex-inmate who said he only received treatment when he was incarcerated for the fourth time...and only after aggressively demanding help.

It is important to keep in mind that something like 96 percent of all inmates in the state prison system WILL be released someday...so it's in our interest, as well as theirs, to give them the tools to make a successful re-entry.

That billion-dollar corrections budget does include funding for slightly more than 100 new treatment beds--the first new ones in the system in 20 years (yes, the Mannix prison-building orgy didn't envision rehabilitation services). With this added capacity, the Corrections Dept. expects to be able to meet about half of the demand for treatment services. Half.

Again, this shouldn't be a surprise in a state that ranks 45th in overall access to treatment (and 49th among 18 to 26 year olds). This is one of the many reasons the Governor's Council and many other groups tried, without success, to promote the beer tax increase and allocating a share of OLCC sales revenues to prevention, enforcement and treatment.

"'Causing the death' could mean accidentally killing someone while driving under the influence, or any other lethal but unintentional result of a minor crime or simple drug-induced stupidity."

Wow,that makes me feel so much better. I'm glad we've differentiated murder/intent to homicide. We should clean him up and release him.

OK, off snark now. Besides the snark, I agree with other people here who think the money is much better spent on things like education, poverty reduction, services for the mentally ill.

Kari, You may want to inform Bob R.: Article I Section 15 of the Oregon Constitution still contains the word reformation. Crime Victims United of Oregon proposed and advocated for the amendment to Art. I Sec. 15 and argued for the retention of reformation.