Most of the research around the country shows that states that rely heavily on incarceration as the primary approach to public safety squander taxpayer dollars ineffectively. As the Oregon Department of Corrections (DOC) budget has skyrocketed to over $1.3 billion, it becomes clear that moving away from costly and unproductive mandatory minimum sentencing is critical.

We realized that in order to move the legislature to consider meaningful sentencing reform, legislators would need to lead the effort for reform. With that in mind, we were actively involved in creating a process to do just that.

House Bill 3563 creating a Public Safety Strategies Taskforce passed and was signed into law with significant bi-partisan support. The law creates a taskforce made up of two state representatives from each party, two state senators from each party, and two representatives from the governor’s office. The taskforce is charged with recommending strategies to improve the state’s approach to public safety using “cost effectiveness” as a primary factor. Sentencing reform will need to be a major area of consideration.

This taskforce creates a process where legislators will take a long hard look at the colossal prison growth in Oregon while making recommendations for policy change for the 2009 legislative session. That will also be a year where DOC will be asking for hundreds of millions of dollars for building the next prison. We believe there will be significant political motivation for change combined with what we hope will be strong recommendations from the Public Safety Strategies Taskforce.