« Meet the Contenders: Question #4 | Main | Nick Jaina - "Power" »
Thursday, January 10, 2008
News “I’ve seen everything stolen, from diapers to port, DVDs to shrimp.” The Mercury’s Day in Community Court.
Posted by on Thu, Jan 10 at 10:54 PM
Having thoroughly scrubbed and showered I’m now ready, I think, to write about my day spent in what is possibly Portland’s sickest building—the Community Court at the downtown Justice Center on SW 2nd. That’s right: I’ve been where this town’s rubber hits its road, when it comes to criminal justice:
COMMUNITY COURT: Friendly, welcoming…
I got to meet one of Portland’s fieriest defenders of constitutional rights today. He’s a man who thinks there are only about 25 words you need ever say to a police officer, and who is readying himself to challenge Randy Leonard’s new drug free zone replacement scheme, aimed at targeting Portland’s worst offenders for drug and, if necessary, mental health treatment. 
KNOW YOUR RIGHTS: Simply put, you ain’t talking…
Read all about it after the jump.
I say I’ve scrubbed and showered because having been warned three times today by different people about various “resistant strains” of bacteria inside the court building, it’s hard not to attribute a persistent itching sensation as I type to the beginnings of a staph-induced boil. Which as it turns out, is a hazard of the job for anyone in Portland’s judicial rubber-roading business.
“I’ve got a couple,” said my civic-minded tour guide, the public defender Chris O’Connor—rolling up his sleeve to show me the remains of what looked like a hornet’s sting on his arm, as we sluiced our hands with anti-bacterial gel before touching lunch. He also had a similar growth on his chin, but what struck me harder than the growths themselves was how proud O’Connor seemed of only having two. Clearly, his job is not for the faint of heart. 
O'CONNOR: FIGHTING FOR YOUR RIGHT...TO GET YOUR CASE DISMISSED...
O’Connor has been on at me to spend a day with him since September, when his office’s continued objections citing the so-called “constitution,” along with a consultant’s report showing Portland’s drug free zones were being employed disproportionately against black people, led Mayor Tom Potter to sunset them forever.
O’Connor is a sharp-eyed, sharp-witted barrel of a man. Yet despite possessing a frame that could clearly do you damage if it tried, he strikes you more like a fencer or a boxer than he does a thick-set thug. O’Connor has a lightness on his feet that extends into conversation: You don’t so much converse as joust with him—even a casual, lobbed remark is met with what one senses is a deep-seated instinct to smash away, verbally, like a tennis pro. Which, of course, comes in handy in court.
54 people went through Community Court today over the course of just five hours. That’s not including the six who didn’t show up, four who chose an alternate trial elsewhere and 3 who were sentenced to jail in absentia for failing to comply with their earlier obligations to community service. Some cases took less than a minute, some as long as five. Either way, it was quick-fire justice.
At one point I watched O’Connor continue two conversations simultaneously—one at full volume with the judge, about the case he was representing, and one in hushed tones with his client, in the dock, who seemed hell-bent on yelping out something incriminating, any minute. At no point did O’Connor appear flustered, or worse, lose his train of thought. He represented every defendant with either expertly feigned or genuine personal interest in his or her plight—it was exhausting, just to watch.
Community Court was created as a quick way for the District Attorney’s office to prosecute a whole host of misdemeanor crimes, from urinating in public to theft in the second degree, to prostitution. Each crime is ranked on a community service matrix by its seriousness and the number of previous offenses the defendant has committed.
The concept is this: That instead of clogging up our overloaded judicial system, people prepared to plead guilty to minor offenses without a jury trial agree to do community service, or undergo drug/alcohol/mental health treatment in order to have their case discharged or dismissed without going to jail. They must also waive the right to appeal their conviction, later.
Defendants are under no obligation to go through Community Court—today, 10 people refused it and were sent “across the street” for a jury trial in the Multnomah County Courthouse. That’s worth doing if you’ve got a good case for a not-guilty plea, or if you want to take your sentencing chances with a judge.
“The beauty of Community Court is its certainty,” says O’Connor—the most the matrix allows for a fifth offense on a level two crime is 56 hours community service or 30 days in jail, if the defendant fails to complete the community service on time. “If you go across the street you can end up with 18 months probation, and if you violate the probation, you can get six months in jail,” he says.
Of course, the system is not without its quirks of fairness. For example: A first charge of second degree theft (stealing goods worth less than $500) is a level one crime requiring 16 hours community service in exchange for a dismissal of the charges, or three days jail if the community service is not completed on time. Meanwhile, a first prostitution charge is a level two, requiring 24 hours community service for the dismissal, or five days jail if that’s not done on time.
“In my moral relativist universe, that seems unfair,” says O’Connor—especially when the DA’s office rarely prosecutes pimps. “It’s not like prostitution is intrinsically bad, in my eyes.”
This prompts me to think: Next time I’m tempted to sell my body, I’ll be sure to nick a $499 coat from Nordstrom instead. Of course, the DA rarely prosecutes male prostitutes, because Portland's vice policing is only institutionally biased against vulnerable, victimized women, and not men. I wish I were kidding.
Today’s 54 cases ran the gamut of eligible offenses, from offensive littering, through criminal trespass in violation of a parks’ exclusion, to distribution of an imitation controlled substance and failure to appear. The overwhelming majority of cases, however, were for shoplifting from Portland’s grocery stores.
“The Interstate Fred Meyer is the largest victim,” says O’Connor. “That, and Safeway, and the Jantzen Beach Target. They’ll steal meat, food, or clothing. Occasionally some poor kid will steal alcohol when they can’t buy it legally, but they never take the good stuff for some reason. I’ve seen everything stolen, from diapers to port, DVDs to shrimp.”
Most grocery store thieves took the 16 hours’ community service on offer to avoid 3 days in jail. Across two community courts in Gresham and NE/SE Portland, there is a 70% success rate for the program. Between September and December 2007, defendants served a total of 7818 hours of community service, and avoided a total of 1120 days in jail. That adds up: The value of the community service hours is $60,000, while the money saved on jail is $160,000. Only 30% of defendants who chose community service dropped out. And now, Spiderman:
MY SPIDEY SENSE: WOOO!!!!
Sorry. O’Connor’s got that in his office and I thought it might wake you up. I was dropping off myself, actually. He says his clients’ kids love it although I suspect he does, really. Now, the important part: The Community Court system, like all systems, is extremely unfair on those with mental illness. The most disturbing part of the day was seeing a middle-aged schizophrenic defendant, who seemed unable to comprehend his failure to complete the court’s earlier mandated drug treatment, get handcuffed by a sheriff’s deputy and taken into jail through the court’s sinister back door. This was despite O’Connor’s appeals to the judge that the defendant appeared too confused to understand what was happening.
Before the court was in session, the same sheriff’s deputy who handcuffed the mad (poor choice of word, I know, but he was mad…how else should I describe him?) guy had been loudly availing a court reporter with descriptions of his time serving on Oregon’s death row—where, to listen to him, he had been frequently assaulted. The experience had evidently diminished the sheriff’s deputy’s “soft skills” and I couldn’t help thinking he wasn’t the ideal mental health nurse for the present situation.
Roughly 60% of inmates at the Multnomah County Detention Center are diagnosed with some form of mental health issue, and for better or worse, community court seems to serve as a kind of un-safety net for those struggling to cope with life in our city.
Recently, Commissioner Randy Leonard and downtown cop Jeff Myers have instituted an $850,000 program to help the worst downtown offenders get more quickly into treatment and, ultimately, housing, by citing them straight into felony court, circumventing Community Court altogether. Whereas Community Court defendants are more likely to choose community service over treatment, those cited with felonies into the Project 57 program are all but forced to go through regimented drug treatment lasting 18 months. If they fail to comply with that, they get jail. If they do comply, they get bumped right up the list for affordable housing.
O’Connor sees the merit in Leonard and Myers’ new program, aimed as it is at replacing the drug free zones with a more targeted approach that includes criminal prosecution. But he can’t help pointing out its fundamental unfairness.
“You or I can go downtown with a crack pipe, and be charged with a misdemeanor,” he says. “But if we happen to be on Jeff Myers’ list, we’d be charged with a felony.”
Myers’ “dirty 30” list of downtown’s worst offenders might be effective in getting chronic offenders off the streets and into supported housing, but it also means different people are going to be charged more seriously for committing the same crime, O’Connor thinks.
“It’s a sad state of affairs when you force someone to commit a felony in order to get mental health or drug treatment that should be available to them without it,” says O’Connor—summing up his frustration with the system. “Not to mention that the fundamental lesson of the 20th Century seems to me to be that we shouldn’t put people’s names on lists, and then target them for special treatment.”
He adds: “Why use the justice system to focus on what is essentially a public health issue?” And he’s right: Portland, like every other city in America, is really facing a public health and affordable housing problem. We shouldn’t be asking men whose core competencies include the administration of a Taser in drive-stun mode, to lead the charge in solving it.
O’Connor plans to rigorously challenge Leonard and Myers’ new approach when the first cases start trickling through over the coming months. In so-doing, he may be the essence of George Bernard Shaw’s unreasonable man—without whom “progress is impossible,” incidentally—but for his stubbornness alone, I can’t help but admire him.
“If the defendant is on their list, we’ll subpoena the list,” he says. “And if they aren’t prepared to make the list public, well then, why are they prepared to use it?”
What Portland really needs isn’t successive quick fixes to its broken mental health and addiction services. We should be printing money and throwing it at those kinds of services, to be provided immediately for people who need them, without forcing them to commit crimes, first. Of course, you’d probably ask what the hell that has to do with a misdemeanor charge for allegedly pissing in public. But then, that’s the crux of the issue, for me…remember James Chasse?
Is Portland a city that would rather sweep its streets of the thousand or so people who are consistently a nuisance to those of us who simply want to sip a cappuccino in peace outside Blue Hour? If so, shouldn’t we just be honest and buy our nuisance people a bus ticket? Or wouldn’t it be cheaper to hire a thousand social workers to follow those people around on a daily basis, instead of chucking almost a million dollars of taxpayer money at yet another system that may or may not work, and which, at its very least, is likely to face certain constitutional challenges? We’ll see.
Regardless: Thanks, Chris—for a day’s most informing experience. I’d recommend spending a similar day with him in Community Court, especially to any City Commissioners who might have had the energy to read all the way through this. I know I, for one, learned a great deal.
Comments
*That percentage of people in the jail with diagnosed mental illness is probably officially closer to 20 - 30%. It depends who you ask and how you define mental illness. If people are really interested in the condition of mental health patients in the jail they should start by reading the reports of the special grand juries that have reviewed jail conditions. [ available here: http://www.mcda.us/articles.php ]
*Prostitution is NOT a dismissible offense. No matter how many hours of community service a person does in community court they are never eligbile to get a first prostitution case dismissed unlike say, a person charged with theft of up to $500 dollars or misdemeanor drug possession. So Matt, you will be stuck with a prostitution conviction on your record if you sell your body but if you grab the coat and successfully complete the court program your theft case would be dismissed. Why the real victim of exploitation is punished while an admitted thief [a crime more universally condemned than prostitution] gets off with no conviction is an interesting question and one I hope you follow up on. But don't try this at home folks - your second time in community court nothing is dismissible and you end up with a conviction (though no probation, jail, fines or fees if you succesfully do the community service).
*In defense of the court system, no one is ever forced into the Drug Court program. The year and a half program (an average) is voluntary and offeres a chance for treatment and a dismissal of a felony drug case. It's unfair to say that a defendnat is forced because if you simply go to trial and lose or enter a guilty plea outside of drug court you will, in many cases, get a low level of probation supervision and there is a strong chance that you may not get any treatment ordered at all by your PO.
thanks matt, keep it up.
$850,000 / 30 = $28,333, is about the right price for a year at a skid road hotel + a barefoot social worker to dog them. The question is, as with all punitive and coercive measures, aka harm reduction, is how long will the fix last?
The answer - well documented for criminals and people with mental illness - about as long as it takes to get the f*ck away from your persecutors. People with addiction respond a bit better, with the right persons presenting the right set of barriers and opportunities (see Central City Concern's Mentor Program) at the right moment.
There's clearly more to be known before judging Myer's & et al patch (it would be nice to have a public accounting of the $850,000, it's expectations and outcomes). I suspect it's actually just the tip of an iceberg of costs as these 30 humans are presenting costs at a variety of agencies. And expect if the fix "takes" for a duration the costs of maintaining those 30 will bloom.
So is rehabilitation pointless? No. I've seen the worst become the best, which is the foundation of my faith in humans. It happens and it’s a miracle. But prudence at least should guide political and policy leaders to place an equal "fix" at an earlier point in the continuum of human misery.
What a great piece you have written here -- thanks.
The motivating factor behind my approach of getting people with addictions or mental illness into treatment is my belief that all people, including those who find themselves living on the street, can and should be given a chance to live a happy, productive and prosperous life.
To ignore that we have seceded in keeping people out of the criminal justice system by successfully treating their particular affliction along with dismissing this effort as somehow unfair to those whose lives we are literally saving seems, at best, short sighted....if not misguided.
Mental illnesses and addictions left untreated cause otherwise good people to descend in a spiral that can only be described as a living hell. That is not an esoteric theory, but, rather, a daily reality that is a plague on many people within our community.
To create a willingness on the part of these tortured souls to get treatment, they have to have a couple of days of sobriety or medications to stabilize themselves so that they understand that treatment is what they need to save their life.
Project 57 is saving peoples lives and giving back to families loved ones that many had thought were lost forever.
I guess I am not clear on how p-57 actually is getting people into treatment. Maybe Randy Leonard can give us an example of how a person arrested for having a dirty crack pipe actually gets treatment or assistance through p-57?
As far as I can see the arrested citizen, even if held overnight due to a p-57 override of the normal release, will be released by a judge the following business day and sent to either community court or the felony drug court program. Where does p-57 get involved? Does it give more money to those programs? Randy, please tell us how the money is applied. Otherwise you just have vague ideas about helping people. Your idea of a few days in lock up to get sober or medicated is an intriguing idea, but doesn't match what actually happens in the Justice Center.
Excellent discussion, peeps.
Thank you, Matt, for reporting this, and sprinkling it with humor and humanity, but still offering the facts as you've found them.
Well done Matt! Excellent story. And thanks to all the commenters as well for their very thoughtful posts. What a a huge responsibility it is attempting to right some of the injustice in the world, and attempting to help some people turn their lives around (to the benefit of society as a whole). I'm glad to see there are such responsible and committed people engaged in this work. It's also wonderful that we got this very entertaining and informative report on some of their work from Matt.
The city of Portland has contracted with Multnomah County for one unit of jail beds at the Justice Center. One unit is 57 jail beds.
People caught buying/selling crack or meth prior to Project 57, for an example, were cited and released and not arrested. However, since the city now decides who occupies the 57 jail beds we pay for, people caught selling or buying crack are arrested and put into a jail bed. But jail by itself is not effective in stopping criminal behavior for people who are addicted to a substance or have a mental illness.
In combination with the money we spend on the jail beds, the city also started funding in-patient and out-patient treatment beds for those arrested under Project 57. The person, once in jail, is given the opportunity to leave jail on the condition that they enter the appropriate treatment program. The Portland Police Bureau tracks those people to make sure they stick with the treatment program. If they leave the program, they are immediately re-arrested and then given the choice again they were offered the first time they were arrested.
With two years of history with Project 57 we can now measure the results of how effective this approach (jai/treatment) has been to successfully treat people and get them out of the criminal justice system and into permanent housing and employment.
Since the inception of Project 57, there has been a 71% drop in the recidivism rate of the top 300 offenders in Portland that heretofore had overwhelmed the criminal justice system. Either jail or treatment by itself has never produced that kind of a result.
The pros who follow these kinds of statistics have told me this is a remarkable success rate that has not been experienced in any other city in the United States.
I personally track the data closely because I am aware of the huge voids in the criminal justice system and the mental health system...the biggest hole being the traditional lack of coordination between both of those systems.
Judges in Multnomah County our interested, given our dramatic results, in expanding our approach county wide.
I hope that answers your question, SP.
But the P-57 jail beds are not really used for more than one night in the case of a person charged with a simple drug offense. The judge, not the city or sheriff, decides who stays in custody and the judges have a policy of letting them out at the time of arraignment to report to the drug court or the community court. So that offer of getting out to get treatment really does not seem to be of very much use.
It's also strange that the attorneys and judges working in the community court and drug court have never heard of these treatment beds being offered to people in the manner you describe. You should really head down to the courthouse and watch a day or two of what actually happens to folks once they are arrested. I think there may be some confusion on the part of the city because while your program sounds promising, I don't beleive it is actually applied in the manner you describe.
Randy: I think Chris O'Connor might be available to spend a day taking you through the system on the road/rubber level. Are you interested?
So for the last two years people have been getting released from jail by the police without the knowledge of the judges, ordered into treatment upon threat of being re-arrested, ordered to sign medical releases and then had their treatment progress monitored by the police all while their lawyers have never ever heard of it?
Judge Koch, the chief judge of Multnomah County, not only knows of the Project 57 jail/treatment program, he helped design it.
It sounds to me, Matt, like Chris might benefit from meeting with the people whose lives have been saved by our treatment model.
I've actually probably already met lots of them, but yes, I'd love to meet them and find out about the process they went through to get treatment through the city. I'd also like to find out why the dozen and perhaps hundreds of clients that I've represented in cases marked p-57 were not given the same opportunity. Can you give us some names, criminal case numbers or even some sample blank release forms or police or sheriff policies on this issue?
Randy says, "Since the inception of Project 57, there has been a 71% drop in the recidivism rate of the top 300 offenders in Portland that heretofore had overwhelmed the criminal justice system."
How is the top 300 offenders in Portland determined?
And when does it stop? For example, you say you have 71% drop, but do you now have a new batch of 300 to base what top offenders qualify as?
Would you two stop fighting and talk to each other about what appears to be an interesting issue?
Randy: Are you being sold a line of bull by the cops? Is this a "phantom" program, for some defendants?
NB: You'll notice I just tried to QUELL tension at city hall, readers, in order to get productive. That's categorically a first.
We had a council public session on project 57 this past summer that included the documentation for the stats I have used here. I will have that report posted on my web site by this coming Monday.
If you want more detailed info., the Portland Police Bureau has as much of that as you would like. Central Precinct Commander Mike Reese can give you as many specifics as he is permitted under the law to release.
I would guess your clients did not get offered treatment when being held under a Project 57 offense because of the limited amount of treatment beds we had before this January 1st. Just last month I got the council to agree to spend another $850,000 for more treatment beds. They approved the extra amount over the $500,000 we are already spending for all of the reasons I have written about here.
You are both welcome to have a presentation made to you about the specifics of this program including our expanded efforts, if you would like. Just email me and I will set it up.
Actually, the Project 57 report is already on my web site. You can find it here
http://www.portlandonline.com/shared/cfm/image.cfm?id=170232
Holy crap. A presentation!? I'd enjoy that. Chris?
How about a Debate Club that's part presentation, and part discussion on whether this is the way to go?
What Amy said! It's my understanding O'Connor and Leonard are meeting next week for a fight. I mean, er, for O'Connor to show Leonard what he's seeing on his side of the system.
Public policy in action, folks. Right here on Blogtown.
Actually, Matt, Chris and I agreed to get together next week to talk about kickin your ass.
Actually, Matt, Chris and I agreed to get together next week to talk about kickin' your ass.
Actually, Matt, Chris and I agreed to get together next week to talk about kickin' your ass.
Sorry...I got excited that I was saying "ass".
Really, really great article. I very much enjoyed seeing how this system works (and in some cases how it doesn't). Thank you.
Normally I'd delete duplicate comments, Randy. But in this case I'll let them stand as a lesson to you.
I hope your discussion next week is fruitful and remember: I grew up in the tough underworld of SouthEast London. The tough, suburban, private school underworld, I mean.
I fight dirty.
The system does work but it's not a walk in the park. After losing everything including my children and having 2 theft charges to keep me from most jobs, to a 3 year meth addiction. I found great help in the courts, the mental health agencys my community service, childrens services and the few friends that still believed in me.
The avenues to better mental health and no drugs are there for you, you have to choose.
I found people in the system to hold my hand through the process all the way to my daughters comming home and being given my parental rights back.
They all had a job to do and so did I. If I didn't do what was expected of me they let me know it and I thank them for that.
Comments Closed
In order to combat spam, we are no longer accepting comments on this post (or any post more than 45 days old).
Our Friends
- UrbanHonking
- Your Daily Awesome
- Portland Metroblogs
- Hype Machine
- Lelo in NoPo
- Furious Nads!
- Oregon Media Insiders
- Huffington Post
- Loaded Orygun
- Food Fight Grocery
- Jesus Christ's Blog
- Willamette Week
- BlueOregon
- Pampelmoose
- The Etchasketchist
Our Enemies
- Russian Amputee Brides
- God Hates Fags (Westboro Baptist Church)
- Portland Indy Media
- Oregon Republican Party
- Jack Bog's Blog
- The Stranger
- Men Who Look Like Kenny Rogers
- Any Dumbass Still Using MySpace
- Portland Monthly
- Life Decisions International
- Courtney Taylor-Taylor
- The Earthly Minions of Emperor Klaktu
All contents © 2006 Index Publishing • Privacy Policy • Contact Info • Production Guidelines
Excellent feature Matt. It's great to read this kind of story, it covers information that rarely gets attention in any of portland's media outlets but is obviously important to anyone who's even remotely civic minded.
More please!