Oregon: The Rand Report on Measure 11 is Finally Available

Article by Brigette Sarabi

For years, there has been talk that the Rand Corporation, an internationally known, non-partisan research and consulting company, was working on a report on the effectiveness of Oregon’s Measure 11, the mandatory minimum sentencing law approved by Oregon voters in 1994. In 2000, when Citizens for Measure 11 Reform were working on a ballot measure campaign to repeal Measure 11, they tried to get information from Rand on what they were finding out about Measure 11’s effect on the criminal justice system. But they had no luck—and were told that no information was yet available. Here at Western Prison Project, we also tried to get information from Rand in late 2000, and were told that the report wouldn’t be available for several months. But as the 2001, and then the 2003 legislative sessions came and went, there was still no report.

We know that in the first half of 2003, a draft report was given to the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission, which had actually commissioned the report. Someone leaked it to the press, and there was a flurry of editorials. Some editorials said that the report showed that there was little connection between Measure 11 and the drop in Oregon’s crime rate. Others, notably one from the Klamath Falls Herald & News, thumbed their nose at the report and said it didn’t matter what it said, “we” knew Measure 11 had reduced the crime rate. But ordinary taxpayers who might want to look at the report themselves were still out of luck – the draft report wasn’t available to the public.

In June, 2004, the Western Prison Project commissioned a brief report “Crime Trends & Incarceration Rates in Oregon,” which was produced by nationally known researcher Judith Greene (who, coincidentally, is co-author of other Rand reports on Truth-in-Sentencing policies). We provided this report to the working group on adult sentencing appointed by the Governor last year. In response, Crime Victims United prepared a rebuttal which referenced the unreleased Rand report.

The Oregon Criminal Justice Commission, which commissioned the report from Rand, has yet to release a final version to Oregon’s lawmakers or the public. The reason for this is unclear, although many people (both in Oregon and within the national research community) suspect that Rand’s findings might be politically unpopular, presumably because they didn’t say Measure 11 was the cure-all for Oregon’s sentencing system.

Fortunately, the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission received federal funding from the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) to pay for the Rand study. In early January, the NIJ posted the latest copy of the report (which has been peer reviewed but not fully edited) to their website. Hopefully, the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission will soon provide a final copy of the report to Oregonians who are interested in seeing it. But in the meantime, people with Internet access can obtain a copy of the 130 page report from the NIJ website.

The much briefer report on crime and incarceration rates commissioned by Western Prison Project is also available on the Internet. In it, Judith Greene presents  statistics and analysis showing that Oregon did indeed experience a major drop in violent crime from the mid-1990s to the present, but so did states that had not passed harsh mandatory sentencing laws like Measure 11.  “In fact,” states Greene, “as is illustrated [by a] comparison between New York and Oregon, there appears to be no direct relationship between incarceration rates and crime rates. During a decade of declining crime rates, states with larger increases in the use of imprisonment have achieved, on average, lower rates of crime reduction than…states that have relied less on increased use of prison.” The comparison between Oregon and New York, which experienced nearly equal reductions in violent crime, make this clear. Between 1995 and 2002, Oregon’s incarceration rate jumped by 66.2 percent, while New York enjoyed an incarceration rate reduction of 8.4 percent.

The newly released report from Rand says this: “Crime rates, particularly for violent crime, declined in Oregon after 1995. While our findings are consistent with the possibility that Measure 11 may have been at least partly responsible for this decline, such findings do not provide clear evidence of a causal link. An examination of other factors, which is beyond the scope of the present study, would need to be made before definite conclusions can be drawn.”

Read Judith Greene's report Crime Trends and Incarceration Rates in Oregon.

This article originally appeared in the Winter 04-05 issue of Justice Matters.