Unintended Consequences of Measure 61 on Mothers and Kids

Will children in Oregon’s foster care system wind up paying the price for Mannix’s foolhardy Measure 61? It’s a scenario that no one wants, yet it’s a distinct possibility as Measure 61 collides with existing federal law. Over 1,000 mothers may wind up serving long sentences for low-level crimes under the new law. Some of these mothers will lose custody of their children, forcing these kids into an already-overburdened foster care system while taxpayers foot the bill.

 

 

We have numerous examples of this sort of unintended outcome for mothers and children, thanks to our failed “War on Drugs.” Far from victory after over thirty years, this “war” has not only failed in its mission, but has funneled millions of people addicted to drugs into our country’s prisons and jails and thousands of children into foster care. Since the 1980s, the number of women in prison across the nation grew from 12,000 in 1980 to nearly 200,000 in 2002. Many of these women are mothers whose children have wound up in their state’s foster care system. Some of these foster care cases enter into the hundreds of thousands of dollars – an exorbitant expense compared to the cost of offering drug treatment options that keep families together.

 

The federal “Adoption and Safe Families Act” (ASFA) is the culprit in many of these cases. ASFA requires that if a child is in the foster care system for 15 out of the past 22 months, the state must sever parental rights so that the child can be adopted. Although in some cases, family members can take a child, ASFA also places restrictions on which family members can take care of a child, propelling some children into the system when their parent is convicted of any crime with a sentence over 22 months.

 

Measure 61’s mandatory sentences start at 36 months. For mothers serving a mandatory 36-month sentence whose children wind up in the foster care system, ASFA would require termination of the parental rights of these parents, even though in many cases, these are drug-related crimes more easily dealt with by drug treatment and reunification with their children.

 

 

The Oregon Criminal Justice Commission has estimated that Measure 61 will put 6,000 new people in prison, and that 1,500 of them will be women. That’s on top of the 1,000 women already in state prison in Oregon.

 

In 2002 a Department of Corrections survey found almost 70% of women incarcerated in Oregon’s prisons had children under the age of 18. If that figure holds true over the next few years, Measure 61 could mean incarcerating about 1,000 more mothers in Oregon’s prisons – placing their children at risk of entering the foster care system when their family could benefit from required drug or alcohol treatment instead.

 

 

Measure 61 creates mandatory minimum sentences for a range of drug and property crimes even as Oregon is seeing a downturn in arrests for these crimes. Measure 61 would require a minimum sentence of three years for a number of drug and property crimes – even for people who have never been in trouble with the law.

 

Women will be particularly hard hit by Measure 61’s failure to take people’s specific circumstances into account. Women arrested for drug-related offenses are often playing minor roles that are more often about their relationship with a husband or boyfriend than their own criminal activity. These are exactly the kinds of circumstances that judges need to be able to take into account when sentencing someone.

 

But since Measure 61 is a mandatory sentence law, a judge would have no choice but to impose the sentence, in numerous cases forcing the end of a mother’s legal relationship with her children instead of requiring treatment. If this law passes, a judge will be forced to send a mother to prison and cannot consider: 

Current law provides for a range of sentences under Oregon’s sentencing guidelines which take into account a person’s prior criminal history and allow for the judge to consider additional circumstances which may aggravate (increase) or mitigate (decrease) the final sentence.

 

 

Oregon doesn’t have to head down this path, and hopefully won’t, if we defeat Measure 61 this November. Instead, we can follow the example of California voters and how they have decided to address drug possession crimes. California voters, tired of the number of people sent to prison for drug crimes, passed a law that changed the way drug addiction is treated in their state.

 

In 2000 California voters passed Proposition 36, which diverts all non-violent simple possession drug abusers out of the criminal justice system and provides treatment in community-based centers across the state. Since 2001 the state has seen a 32% reduction in the number of people incarcerated for drug offenses. Since 2001, an estimated 60,000 drug-addicted people successfully completed treatment in the state’s community-based programs.

 

California, which has long held the notorious distinction of spending more on prisons than on higher education, has avoided building a new men’s prison and has closed a women’s prison due to the success of Proposition 36. With the cost of treatment averaging $3,000 per person compared to incarceration which runs around $25,000, it is estimated that California has saved $1.5 billion as a result of savings produced by Proposition 36. And that doesn’t include the reduced costs because of the lower burden on the foster care system, or the costs associated with lowering drug-related crime.

 

While Oregon voters would clearly reject any sort of idea that we should institute long sentences for drug possession, they might be misled into supporting long sentences for crimes that are fueled by drug addiction. Kevin Mannix, the man behind Measure 61, is counting on that confusion to mislead voters into voting for Measure 61 even though it will mostly affect people addicted to drugs. Many of the crimes included in Measure 61 are related to drug-addiction, which is why Measure 57, which will allows judges to require drug treatment and funds drug treatment, is a better solution for mothers. Funding drug treatment and allowing judges to require it will keep mothers and kids out of the state’s foster care system.

 

In Oregon, where the number of women in prison has grown at twice the rate of men over the last decade and we already have too many mothers in prison, we need a better solution than Measure 61. We can’t afford to burden our state foster care system with hundreds of children and their families when these families could benefit from required drug and alcohol treatment.

 

If Measure 61 passes, not only will Oregon march further down the wrong path of investing in prisons rather than treatment, but our failure will have devastating consequences for our families and communities.