If the reaction to the recent revelations about the government accessing our cell phone and Internet records is any indication, people will be shocked and angry that once again technology has been abused.

It would be interesting to know if the people who are the most upset about this are the same ones who are quick to make fun of someone who still keeps a landline. I’ve been the target of some of these folks. Like the time a coworker saw me writing a check.

“You still write checks?” she asked, a note of condescension in her voice.

When I moved to Portland three years ago and transferred my checking and savings accounts, the bank employee smiled and asked, “Do you want checks?” as if he were joking.

At the rate I’ve been using those checks, I won’t have to reorder for years.

We were never slaves to paper the way we are to technology. Now here we are.

How can it be surprising that our government uses technology to gather information on us? Private business and marketing researchers do. Search a subject on Google, and you may find yourself getting ads related to the same item on other Web sites you visit. This can be both annoying and useful.

I long ago decided there was no privacy on the Internet, so I didn’t give up my landline just because I acquired a cell.

While Americans were absorbing the news that the government was collecting their cell phone and Internet data, they also had to ponder a U.S. Supreme Court decision that could give away their DNA: It’s OK for police to take a swab from inside someone’s cheek if they are arrested for a serious crime.

At about the same time, here in Oregon the state Senate passed legislation governing how law enforcement agencies may use drone technology.

That probably won’t be enough to reassure two men I overheard at a Dec. 17 meeting of the governor’s Commission on Public Safety. Their concern wasn’t law enforcement misuse of drones.

While the commission was temporarily in recess, these two men sat behind me and talked about sex offenders accessing drones. One of the men worked in aviation, and the other was an attorney.

“Suppose a registered sex offender gets a hummingbird drone and gets it inside your house and takes nudie pictures of you in the shower – but only for his own use. Is he trespassing? Is it a criminal offense or a civil offense?” asked the attorney. “It’s going to be invasion of privacy, but was it invasion of privacy as a criminal act? I think it is a Class A misdemeanor.”

He continued with another scenario: “What about taking nudie shots through someone’s bedroom window without them knowing? … You don’t want that to be Class C … it’s scary, but it’s not the same as someone getting a drone and planning.”

The aviation guy said he lived on five acres: “Suppose somebody put a drone a hundred feet just above tree level, it would be difficult to prove whether they are on your property or somebody else’s property.”

The attorney offered that it would be “tortious interference of the enjoyment of your property.”

They discussed whether the state had an appropriate law or should be looking at a law.

“I’ll find you somebody in DOJ,” the attorney told the aviation guy. They moved on to the subject of satellites, but the attorney kept circling back to someone taking nudie photos.

I wanted to turn around and ask him, “What’s this obsession you have with nudie photos?” but I didn’t want him to know somebody was listening in on him (and taking notes, no less). Had he wanted privacy, though, he and his friend could have talked somewhere else besides a hearing room in the state Capitol.

How nice that Americans are becoming more interested in preserving their privacy. Once you’ve lost it, though, good luck getting it back.

It would help if we did not rush to embrace every new technology, every new advancement – particularly if it turns out not to advance anything other than a company’s bottom line.

I was recently reminded of  what life can be like without cell phones, emails, drones and DNA swabs when I watched a movie classic, “Our Vines Have Tender Grapes.” I spotted this at the library and wondered if it was one my parents had liked in their day.

“An enduring and quietly rhapsodic slice of Americana about a single year among the Norwegian immigrants in a Wisconsin farm town,” said the DVD jacket.

Then I noticed the screenplay was by Dalton Trumbo, who had once been blacklisted for being a Communist and had written an unforgettable anti-war novel called, “Johnny Got His Gun.” How would he portray a slice of Americana?

What’s striking about this old movie is how quiet life is. There are many small, happy moments and a couple of tragedies, but it all seems natural.  No soundtrack pushes the story along. People talk, work, take satisfaction in daily accomplishments – and hope for a new barn.

The characters interact with each other and with animals – not with electronic devices. The only phone is a hand-cranked version attached to the wall, and an operator is needed to make a call.

These Americans don’t need yoga or meditation to teach them to live in the present. They don’t need Xanax to help them sleep. It’s hard to believe they are our recent ancestors.

Edward Snowden told the Guardian newspaper that he did not want to live in a society where the National Security Agency can intercept emails and phone calls.

“I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things … I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded.”

Why, then, did he go to Hong Kong?

He should have looked around for a 21st Century equivalent of those Norwegian immigrant farmers.

– Pamela Fitzsimmons

Now that DeMuniz is no longer chief justice of the Oregon State Supreme Court, he doesn’t command the respect he used to. Perhaps that’s appropriate.

For the past two years, he has done his part to disrespect the rule of law.

DeMuniz retired from the state Supreme Court in January and began teaching at Willamette University.  And, as was recently revealed by Willamette Week, DeMuniz also became a registered lobbyist for the insurance industry.

Last month DeMuniz testified against proposed legislation that would require insurance companies to make faster settlements on environmental claims. He didn’t tell legislators he was speaking on behalf of the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America, which opposes the bill.

After the Willamette Week story appeared, DeMuniz apologized to lawmakers “for not making abundantly clear the capacity in which I appeared in my recent legislative testimony … .”

He promised that in future testimony or contacts with legislators he would “make it clear on whose behalf I am appearing.”

DeMuniz sullied himself even before he became a registered lobbyist for the insurance industry. During his last two years on the bench, he also served as chairman of the Commission on Public Safety, where he functioned as a lobbyist for Gov. John Kitzhaber.

DeMuniz liked to say that he and the commission were “tasked” by Kitzhaber to lower Oregon’s prison costs. But DeMuniz did more than fulfill a duty.

He carried great buckets of water for the governor from the very first meeting of the commission.

Standing next to Kitzhaber at a press conference held midway through the meeting, DeMuniz declared: “We know now what can keep us safe. … We can make us safe by being smart on funds.”

The commission hadn’t even completed its first meeting, and already DeMuniz had decided what was needed – spend less on public safety, while using words to reassure citizens that they will be safe.

His haughty demeanor was on display from that first meeting. He made it clear that he had no use for voter-mandated Measure 11, which requires minimum sentences for certain violent crimes.

DeMuniz seemed perplexed when some of the commissioners wondered aloud about whether they could make the case to the public if they tried to overturn portions of Measure 11.

“Why does public perception make any difference to what we are trying to do here…” DeMuniz said at the first meeting. “What science says these sentences are the minimum required for justice and for the victim?”

Two years later, his commission delivered its recommendations. Among them: Remove second-degree robbery and assault and first-degree sex abuse from Measure 11; reduce penalties for driving while suspended; reduce penalties for repeat property offenders; increase earned time by 10 percent so eligible inmates could reduce 30 percent of their prison sentences.

Those recommendations were rolled into House Bill 3194, still working its way through the legislative process. DeMuniz attended the Feb. 13th meeting of the Joint House and Senate Committee on Public Safety for a work session on the bill.

By then he was no longer chief justice of the state Supreme Court. He sat at the witness table in front of the committee like anyone else invited to testify, and he looked up at the state senators and representatives seated on the dais. He now seemed so … small.

HB 3194’s evolution hasn’t been smooth, even though the 10-member Joint House and Senate committee includes two senators and two representatives from DeMuniz’s old commission. It would take a two-thirds vote of the legislature to overturn portions of Measure 11, and there isn’t a super-majority of legislators who share DeMuniz’s ease in ignoring the will of the voters.

Since DeMuniz’s appearance before the committee in February, the Measure 11 recommendations have been dropped.

In its latest amended version, HB 3194 would still hand some offenders a break on sentencing by not including certain prior convictions in their criminal history.

Last week, Lane County District Attorney Alex Gardner appeared before the committee and urged them not to do this.

“That notion that a person’s prior conduct ought to shape the punishment is common-sensical to what the community expects,” he said.

As currently amended, HB 1194 would consider prior convictions based on the date the conviction was entered into the court record.

“It doesn’t make sense to depreciate the criminal history because of the time it (the conviction) was entered,” Gardner said.

He already has a problem with criminal defendants blowing off their court appearances. This amendment would make it worse.

“It would add an incentive, a reward, to those who just skip court,” Gardner said.

Although Lane County recently passed a public safety levy, it will be a while until that money is flowing and his county can hire more jail staff.

“We are still going to be completely dysfunctional for property offenders. … We won’t be able to get those people to sentencing. … These guys we get back in our community are going to be a danger for us that we can’t manage.”

Gardner sounded frustrated, almost pleading with the committee.

“I want the sentencing judge to have a hammer big enough to protect the community. … This has been the standard for more than 20 years for Lane County. If it goes away tomorrow, holy cow, I’m not a chicken little kind of guy … .”

The most unrepentant, recidivist property criminals don’t want to be reformed, he said.

“They hang out in Lane County and victimize people.”

Now that DeMuniz is no longer chief justice, he might have a better chance of meeting one of Oregon’s unrepentant recidivists – he no longer has a state police trooper to act as his driver.

Why should a state Supreme Court chief justice have personal access to a state police officer when so many communities have had to cut law enforcement? It isn’t as if judges are at greater risk of becoming crime victims.

If they were, DeMuniz’s tenure as chairman of the Commission on Public Safety might have produced a different result.

– Pamela Fitzsimmons

Related:

Deep in the Heart of Oregon

The Stats on Pew’s Credibility

Monologist Mike Daisey, who likes to say he served three years at Amazon.com, wants more stories about labor. He brought one of them to Portland, a monologue called JOURNALISM.

Daisey billed his work as a love letter to journalism, but it was more a letter of condolence.

Performing his other shows around the country has allowed him to “witness the disintegration of journalism.” He can see it in the physical diminishment of newspapers.

“The Web version of news is not robust enough,” he said.

Daisey loves journalists – the way they burrow into a subject, their tension,  their cynicism and world weariness and their preference for blunt realism over phony optimism: “Well, we’re getting fucked now.”

Speaking on their behalf he adds, “We didn’t sign up for this much fucking.”

Layoffs and cutbacks mean that one person does one-and-a-half person’s job, and then one person does two persons’ jobs. With each layoff, the work piles up, salaries go down. There is still a demand for journalism, but people no longer think they should pay for it. Just click on a headline, and there’s the news. For free.

As a former newspaper reporter and editor, I’m grateful that Daisey understands this.

But last year after an excerpt of his monologue, “The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” was broadcast on public radio’s “This American Life,” Daisey had to apologize for fabricating part of the story that was purportedly factual.

“The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” was based on a trip that Daisey took to the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China, where Apple products are made. Daisey described inhumane conditions, including employees working long hours under armed guards.

When a reporter for American Public Media’s “Marketplace” was unable to confirm some of the details, Daisey acknowledged that he had created elements to better serve the story he wanted to tell.

I was never outraged about Daisey’s dabbling in fiction because I don’t consider “This American Life” to be pure journalism. It’s entertainment. It’s performance. It wouldn’t surprise me if many of the show’s writers tweak their stories for dramatic effect or to make them funnier, much the same way that they inflect their voices for embellishment.

Even pure journalism plays with the facts. Reporters and editors can disagree on how a story should be told. Important facts can be left out of a story for any number of reasons – to pick up the pace of a story, to appease one group or another, to avoid controversy, to make a subject more sympathetic or less sympathetic, to placate an advertiser.  Just as bad: Reporters may approach a story with a template (sometimes forced on them by editors). The result is fill-in-the-blanks journalism.  (Ever notice how disaster coverage always sounds the same?)

Another reason I didn’t get too worked up about Daisey’s fiction was that I suspected that it was probably true. What do you think it’s like to work in one of those factories? How many of us really want to know the backstory of our electronic gadgets?

A year before his controversy, Daisey wrote this in an op-ed in the New York Times:

“As recently as 10 years ago Apple’s computers were assembled in the United States, but today they are built in southern China under appalling labor conditions. Apple, like the vast majority of the electronics industry, skirts labor laws by subcontracting all its manufacturing to companies like Foxconn…  . Mr. Jobs’s magic has its costs. We can admire the design perfection and business acumen while acknowledging the truth: with Apple’s immense resources at his command he could have revolutionized the industry to make devices more humanely and more openly, and chose not to. …”

The following year – and the same month that Daisey’s fabrication ran on “This American Life” – the New York Times ran its own investigation into these Chinese factories:

“The workers assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions, according to employees inside those plants, worker advocates and documents published by companies themselves. Problems are as varied as onerous work environments and serious — sometimes deadly — safety problems.”

Daisey didn’t need to resort to fiction; he needed to keep digging. But as he told his Portland audience, he was fired up and wanted something to happen.

“If I had used the tools I had at my disposal, I didn’t believe it would change anything,” he said.

If Daisey had never written “The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” which enjoyed a long run at the Public Theater in New York, would the New York Times have looked into conditions at the Foxconn factory? Would the Foxconn factory have ever agreed to make improvements?

Daisey has been unfairly compared to Jayson Blair.  A better comparison might be to a former Cincinnati Enquirer reporter who uncovered troubling business practices by Chiquita banana and was attacked for his methods.

Mike Gallagher spent a year researching Chiquita’s operations in Latin America and produced a series of stories in 1998 accusing Chiquita of – among other things – using harmful pesticides on workers, covering up a bribery scheme in Colombia, allowing cocaine to be carried on its fruit-transport ships and illegally controlling independent plantations.

Chiquita threatened a lawsuit – initially not for libel – but for theft and fraud because Gallagher had accessed company e-mails that were used in a portion of his story.

Gannett, the largest newspaper chain in America and owner of the Cincinnati Enquirer, groveled in a craven apology. They gave Chiquita a 72-point headline, “Apology to Chiquita,” that ran front page, above the fold for three straight days and renounced Gallagher’s story.

The apology and Gallagher’s methods became the story – not Chiquita’s business practices.

For all that Daisey understands about journalists, he underestimated one of their weaknesses: They are quick to tear each other apart, including anyone who ventures onto their turf. They will even smell blood in a misquote or a misbegotten exclusive. Look at the glee that Jay Rosen recently took in drawing-and-quartering Jonathan Karl.

Journalists will gorge on a transgression like Daisey’s but immediately forgive an adjudicated liar like Al Sharpton. (How many journalists, who slavishly seek Sharpton’s comments, remind readers of Tawana Brawley?)

Yet for the rest of his life, Daisey will likely be asked about his segment on “This American Life.”

A couple of days after seeing Daisey’s performance, my May 27th New Yorker arrived. Inside was a reminder of just how small Daisey’s sin was: a story by George Packer called “Change the World” describing how Silicon Valley’s billionaires are venturing into politics — not to improve conditions in factories. They want to do things like make it easier for foreign engineers to work legally in the U.S.

Packer grew up in Silicon Valley, back when it had a middle class. He describes the insulated tech world, with its private buses to transport employees to the self-contained campus-like communities of Apple, Google and other companies where employees are busy thinking up the next new app that will make them richer.

“One question for technology boosters – maybe the crucial one – is why, during the decades of the personal computer and the Internet, the American economy has grown so slowly, average wages have stagnated, the middle class has been hallowed out, and inequality has surged. Why has a revolution that is supposed to be as historically important as the industrial revolution coincided with a period of broader economic decline?”

Packer put that question to all of the Bay Area techies he talked to. Few of them had given it much thought.

At the front of the magazine is a two-page ad for Bre Pettis, founder of the MakerBot Revolution, including the Replicator 2 printer that takes virtual 3D models downloaded on a computer and prints them “by putting down layer after layer of renewable bio-plastic to build a finished product.”

What the ad doesn’t say is that there are concerns that this technology will be used to create plastic guns that can fire real ammunition. Just what we need.

“Our mission is to unleash creativity, to empower people to make a better world,” says Pettis.

Yes, Daisey stretched the truth in his one-man monologue in hopes of effecting change. But corporations have attorneys and accountants and PR staffs to stretch their truths and they, too, want to change the world.

– Pamela Fitzsimmons

It mesmerizes everyone from the Dalai Lama to the humblest public employee.

His Holiness recently blessed the city of Portland with a visit that drew at least 10,000 to Memorial Coliseum where he offered his usual advice: Scorn wealth and materialism.

But even the Dalai Lama and his followers count the dollars:

“As the Dalai Lama finished his remarks, the treasurer of Maitripa presented the customary financial accounting of his visit,” The Oregonian reported. “Revenue from his appearances Thursday at the University of Portland and Saturday at the Coliseum totaled $850,000.  Expenses amounted to $550,000.  About a third of the proceeds will go to Maitripa College and the rest will be donated by the Office of Tibet to charitable projects.”

Charity – a nice catchall term to hide benevolent greed.

We all want more money. How many of the 10,000 who came to hear the Dalai Lama thought he was talking to them when he counseled against love of materialism? How many of them thought he was referring to _____ (fill in the blank with the rich person you despise the most).

How many of the Dalai Lama’s spiritual seekers want the government to take money from someone else and give it to them? Or to a cause they believe in?

Yes, everybody has money on the brain – even artists, who are supposed to answer to a higher aesthetic.

In Portland, you can’t have art without money – specifically a $35 a year Arts Tax. If you are over 18 and make at least $1,000, the deadline arrived this week for paying your $35. If you live in a household that is at or below the federal poverty level, you may request an exemption.

There was this stern warning on the notice sent out by the City of Portland’s Revenue Bureau: “If you moved in or out of Portland during 2012, you must still pay the entire $35 tax.”

The tax wasn’t approved until the Nov. 6, 2012 general election, and the first deadline on paying the tax – April 15th – was ignored by so many people that it was extended to May 15th. That deadline has since been extended, supposedly because of computer problems.

Meanwhile, a lawsuit filed by Lewis & Clark law professor and blogger Jack Bogdanski is pending, and Portland city officials keep changing the requirements of the Arts Tax.

The latest rewrite allows PERS retirees to ignore the tax unless they make another $1,000 separate and apart from their retirement. (At least I think that’s the latest interpretation. The Arts Tax is beginning to resemble improv.)

I haven’t paid the tax and don’t intend to. If the City of Portland wants $35 from me, they can come and get it. They may be surprised at what I give them.

The Portland Arts Tax has turned into an amusing sideshow for political watchers who like to point out that it passed with a hefty majority of 62 percent. How is it, then, that it is now so unpopular?

Probably because many of the people who voted for it thought somebody else was going to pay for it. Many of them apparently did not read beyond the ballot title: “Restore School Arts, Music Education; Fund Arts Through Limited Tax.”

Some voters likely stopped reading after “restore school arts” and thought all it involved was moving money from one column to another in the school budget. They probably didn’t read further and notice that about half of it will go to the Regional Arts and Culture Council, which will dole out grants to various arts organizations “that demonstrate artistic excellence.” Whatever that is.

If you want to see what the arts council  considers worthy, check out the $700,000 “Inversion: Plus Minus” on the east end of the Hawthorne Bridge.

The Arts Tax shared the ballot with the presidential race and a school bond to upgrade and remodel buildings. The tax probably benefited from the goodwill of voters marking “yes” on the school bond and “Obama” for president.

I like to think that I am surrounded by art. But forcing people to pay for somebody else’s concept of something so subjective? Including people who are just above the poverty line?

For another view, I called a working artist I know, stained glass artist Jane Marquis of Southern California (one of her Oregon projects is the windows at the University of Oregon Law School’s library).

Jane was immediately supportive to the idea of teaching art. She has seen the benefits as a teacher herself. She recalled an art class that she held in her studio in back of her home.

The class was for young men who had been in trouble with the law.

One guy glanced around the grounds outside her studio and house. “You’ve got a lot of gravel. It would be hard to sneak up … .”

Another young man wanted to learn how to do stained glass, specifically how to cut a circle in glass, like in a glass door, so a person could reach in.

“I started them out with a canvas board and acrylic paints in a tube, good paints. … One young black man swaggered in, smeared his hand with black paint and wiped it over the canvas – smeared it. That was his statement. … I don’t remember what I said to him, but I didn’t get excited. … Before too long, he was painting still-lifes.”

Jane remembered another guy, Anthony.

“I couldn’t do anything with him. He couldn’t read or write, he was very contemptuous of this art stuff … I got him started on something. After a while he actually did a painting, and he was so thrilled with it. He was really surprised … I got him painting, and he was terribly pleased. He started to read and write. That is a small example of what can happen with good art classes. … Art will give them discipline and pleasure at the same time. It is not memorizing things or following rules … there is a certain kind of discipline that isn’t rote.”

She had no trouble with any of these young men. She does not know what lasting impact this detour through an art class had on them. That’s not the responsibility of art.

So Jane was more circumspect about an arts tax, as if art were an obligation.

“There is too much art being produced anyway. The art world is bananas … so much junk, absolute junk being passed off as art,” she said.

“You know Damien Hirst? Years ago he took a whole cow, a real cow, and put it in formaldehyde in a huge glass tank and sold it for millions of dollars.”

Hirst has done this with lots of animals and made millions on top of millions. He also produced something called spin paintings using a machine that spins around and splashes paint. And he does spot paintings, some by himself and many by his production team, in which spots of paint are aligned in rows.

“How did a mouthy, working-class lad from Leeds, with hooligan tendencies, become the biggest – and the richest – artist on the planet?” asked the Guardian newspaper last year in a mostly laudatory profile of Hirst.

“I still believe art is more powerful than money,” he insisted in the interview.
A few of Hirst’s works have been shown at the Portland Art Museum, which will be one of the beneficiaries of the Arts Tax. What is a family, living on the cusp of poverty, supposed to make of that – especially if they have never been able to afford a museum membership?

This is not a question that seems to concern the art world. A New York- based online art forum, Hyperallergic, has praised Portland’s Arts Tax, even reminding Portlanders “of their culture-supporting duties” when the tax notices went out.

But Damien Hirst says art is more powerful than money. It’s in his spirit that I’m going to approach the Arts Tax. I will give the city something more powerful than $35. I will give them art.

Just as Hirst has his production team, I also have an assistant. She’s in her litter box right now working on her end of this project.

Can it be called art, and will it be worth more than $35?

I asked my friend Jane.

Her advice: “Put it under glass.”

– Pamela Fitzsimmons

That protest was in the Inner Southeast Portland enclave of Sellwood/Moreland, and those neighbors succeeded in shutting down the clinic.

Last week, Madison was back at a different neighborhood protest – this one fighting the new location of that same clinic, Whole Systems Counseling. It’s now open in Outer Southeast Portland in a working-class neighborhood. These residents let Madison have his say.

They also made it clear that while they don’t like inheriting Sellwood/Moreland’s problem, they also don’t want to dump it on some other neighborhood. They would like to find a solution.

Inner and Outer Southeast Portland are flip sides of the same city.

Inner Southeast Portland attracts New York Times restaurant critics. The neighborhoods found in the Inner Southeast, such as Sellwood/Moreland, merit their own walking maps. Sellwood/Moreland is  home to antique shops, galleries, pubs, restaurants, a movie theater, a farmer’s market. Reed College nestles along its border.

Outer Southeast Portland attracts snubs and ubiquitous, strip-commercial development found in any American city. The specific neighborhood where Whole Systems Counseling opened includes a trailer court, mobile home park and apartments. The clinic is in Plaza 125, which looks like the typical small-office complex where you would find a dentist, an attorney, an ob/gyn. There’s plenty of parking.

When Whole Systems Counseling was located in Sellwood/Moreland, it was in a nondescript building at 7304 SE Milwaukie Ave. Residents were concerned that the Boys and Girls Club was nearby at 7119 SE Milwaukie, and a Montessori pre-school was at 7126 SE Milwaukie.

But it’s also a lively, well-traveled stretch of Milwaukie Avenue. It brims with people – pedestrians, bicyclists, motorists – all potential witnesses who could discourage criminal activity. These are not just any people, either; they are middle-class and upper middle-class professionals. The kind of people who, if they – or their sons and daughters – were victimized in a violent crime, would receive immediate attention.

By comparison, the new location of Whole Systems Counseling in Outer Southeast Portland looks like the kind of neighborhood where someone might get the idea that they could get away with a crime.

That was the concern of the 50 or so residents who gathered last week in the board room at David Douglas High School, not far from the clinic.

“Is there anyone here who thinks it is OK for a sex offender clinic to be located by kids?” asked Chris Piekarski who led the meeting.

Madison raised his hand. Many of the men and women in the room had the weary appearance that comes after putting in a day’s work. Madison looked crisp and chipper, like a man going into a job interview. He was one of the few men in the room wearing a tie.

He stood before the residents and told them that he wanted to put out all the facts about sex offenders.

Madison didn’t volunteer that he was a registered sex offender until he was later asked. Instead he delved into studies and statistics.

“Ninety-four percent of brand new sex crimes are committed by people not on the sex offender registry … not the few over here at Whole Systems…,” he said. “More than 90 percent of sex crimes are committed by people in the family.”

Madison eventually led up to this declaration: “It is all of us that commit sex offenses.”

That’s when Piekarski asked him if he was a registered sex offender.

“Yes, I am a registered sex offender,” he said.

There was a brief gasp from the audience, and a woman cried out that she was a victim. Another woman reached out to comfort her, and the audience quickly calmed down. They let Madison continue.

It was only when he veered off into what he really came to talk about – he belongs to a group that wants to do away with sex registration entirely –  that the audience turned on him.

“We’ve heard enough of this,” one man shouted, and Madison sat down.

State Rep. Jessica Vega Pederson spoke briefly about a bill (HB 3509) she has sponsored that would allow counties to govern where sex offender clinics can be located.

It seems like a gesture that probably won’t have much impact if it passes. These clinics are going to be located somewhere.

Members of the audience struggled with what to do. Piekarski pointed out that one of the local TV news shows had portrayed them negatively. The show had focused on the fears of the clinic’s owner, Johneen Manno, who said windows had been shot with a BB gun.

Nobody at the meeting took credit for the vandalism, and Piekarski reminded them not to support that kind of activity.

“It just makes us look like kooks. …. ‘Those people in east Portland are so immature … they are criminals and hooligans.’ … Violence is not acceptable …,” he said.

Finally, one woman rose. It would be great, she said, if they could step up as a group and find a solution for the clinic. She wondered if the clinic had deliberately chosen their neighborhood because there is a large number of residents who don’t speak English.

“I hate to say this, but it’s a needed service. … Don’t be a NIMBY…,” she said. “It’s not appropriate for anybody’s back yard.”

She is right, but if it has to be in somebody’s backyard make it a prosperous one.

For too long, violent crime has been borne primarily by the poor and working class. The good people of communities like Sellwood/Moreland seem like the kind of folks who gladly embrace politicians who promote rehabilitation over incarceration. It’s an easy concept to support when felons settle in poor neighborhoods. But wouldn’t they stand a better chance at rehabilitation in a nice neighborhood?

If it takes a village to raise a child, maybe it takes a village of well-educated, broad-minded liberals to watch over and rehabilitate a sex offender.

In which case, the people of Sellwood/Moreland and the Inner Southeast should come to the aid of their less fortunate brothers and sisters in the Outer Southeast.

Perhaps the sex offender clinic could relocate near Reed College, considered one of the most intellectual colleges in the U.S. It could be a merger of academic theory, philosophy and hard-core reality. The life of the mind meeting the temptations of the flesh.

As a bonus, the school’s president is John Kroger, former Oregon attorney general and a fan of Jeremy Bentham, the 19th Century philosopher who influenced prison and law reform.

Among other ideas, Bentham believed that public humiliation could be useful in deterring deviant behavior. He might have found sex offender registries and clinics practical crime prevention tools.

It would be something for Reed’s intellectuals and Whole Systems’ clients to explore.

– Pamela Fitzsimmons

Al Neuharth, USA Today founder, and former chairman and CEO of Gannett Co. Inc. – the largest newspaper chain in the U.S. – shoved off at the age of 89 at his home in Cocoa Beach, Fla.

It was a very different ending from his impoverished beginnings in a small town in South Dakota.

Upside: He never forgot where he came from and was generous to students at the University of South Dakota.

Downside: He ripped off millions of dollars from Gannett newspapers, hurting thousands of employees, which in turn affected the quality of those employees’ newspapers and, consequently, their communities.

More downsides: While he flourished in flamboyance, his newspaper chain demanded the corporatization of newsrooms, leaving them with the personality of any other cubicle culture. And, he created a national newspaper that came to represent the dumbing-down of media.

“Newspapers have forgotten that their readers are readers and love to read writing,” Garrison Keillor said of America’s post-USA Today world. That, too, was part of Neuharth’s legacy.

I worked for Gannett newspapers for about 16 years, during a portion of Neuharth’s tenure. “Uncle Al” some called him. Or “Big Al.” He loved fame, wealth and power. Who wouldn’t?

Well, fortunately for Al, quite a few us found other things to love in journalism.

Some of us liked living in one community for a while and learning how it worked, acquiring knowledge and historic context on a particular beat, enjoying the challenge of trying to inform the public about what was going on in their city, even when they would’ve preferred to remain blissfully ignorant.

Without thousands of anonymous employees – Gannettoids we were sometimes derisively called – Neuharth would have never been able to build Gannett into the largest newspaper chain.

Given the current state of newspapers, that may seem like a dubious accomplishment, but in the 20th Century it put Neuharth on a first-name basis with presidents and let him use the mainstream media as if it were his own personal Monopoly game.

In his memoir, “Confessions of an S.O.B.,” he recalled his first attraction to journalism when he discovered, as editor of the Alpena High School paper, that he could be a big shot on campus by deciding whose name got in the paper and what was said about them.

“I was a media mini-mogul in the making,” he wrote. (Throughout his memoir, Neuharth is like a felon who gleefully announces his guilt and thinks that by doing so, he merits a pass on punishment.)

Before he was out of college, Neuharth decided, “I was not interested in a nine-to-five newspaper job that I would stay in for the rest of my life. … I wanted to leapfrog the normal, dull career ladder.”

A nine-to-five newspaper job? As a reporter and city editor, I never worked one of those. I don’t know any reporters or city editors who did. While climbing a career ladder might be dull, journalism wasn’t.

Americans love underdogs, so parts of Neuharth’s life made me want to cheer for him. He got tired of the big boys like Ben Bradlee at the Washington Post looking down their noses at Gannett’s mostly small- and mid-sized newspapers. By creating a national newspaper, Neuharth forced his way into the big leagues and crashed the media elite.

But USA Today was a questionable success. When I was a bureau chief at a then-Gannett-owned daily in San Bernardino, Calif., I was sent to USA Today for four months to work on the rewrite desk. While I was there, I lived in a Gannett-provided apartment in Washington, D.C.’s historic Foggy Bottom neighborhood and was given a stipend. I continued to receive paychecks from The Sun in San Bernardino. Other Gannett papers were required to share their employees with USA Today under the same arrangement.

Working at USA Today was fun and in many ways easier than my regular job in San Bernardino. The stories were so short, in some cases nothing more than a few graphs.

“Write like you’re writing for TV news,” one of the editors advised me. Keep it tight and bright.

My parents in Oregon would occasionally buy a USA Today to see my stories – something they couldn’t do with the San Bernardino paper.

My mother didn’t understand USA Today’s approach to news coverage. How come you didn’t ask this, she would say, or why didn’t you ask that?

But she was also from a tiny town in South Dakota – Virgil – and wanted to support Neuharth. (Her alma mater used to play his Alpena Wildcats. “If you see him,” my mother said. “Tell him Virgil’s got the ball.”) My Aunt Grace thought Neuharth was cute. My Uncle Norm in Mitchell S.D., kept an eye out for my byline.

I didn’t want him to read anything I wrote. Most of the stories were barely appetizers. Readers who wanted a full meal had to go elsewhere.

In “The Making of McPaper,” Peter Prichard illustrated USA Today’s style by noting that in its first edition, it led with news of Princess Grace’s death, reducing the assassination of Lebanon’s new president to a brief.

But the nation’s newspaper caught on – as Neuharth predicted it would (or, as detractors claimed, because “McPaper” was virtually a give-away at all hotels). When I worked at USA Today, I had no trouble getting anyone to return my phone calls. Everybody had heard of USA Today. In those early years, some of the permanent news staff would practically pinch themselves: We really have hit the big-time!

After four months, I returned to the gritty world of San Bernardino where the news was rarely tight and bright. As Gannett’s flagship, USA Today set the standard for many of the papers in the chain. For a time, my paper experimented with a shorter-is-better policy. When Orange County filed bankruptcy, my editor asked all city hall reporters to review their municipal budgets in each community for any potential disasters. Keep it to eight inches, though.

Tucked into my copy of “The Making of McPaper” are old clippings from the letters page of the San Bernardino Sun: “I’m dismayed by the bite-sized articles now featured in The Sun,” wrote reader Carolyn J. Gill. “The Sun, sadly, is no longer a quality paper,” wrote another reader, Mark E. Rogers.

Before readers abandoned newspapers, newspapers abandoned readers.

Today the Internet has helped rectify this with its unlimited space. Now there’s a shortage of reporters because the ad revenue has disappeared.

Neuharth went on to retire with Gannett stock worth $5.1 million and an annual income of $300,000 for life. He was also chairman of the Gannett Foundation, coordinating charitable and educational grants.

This wasn’t enough for him. Two years into retirement, he decided to sell all of the foundation’s stock – 10 percent of Gannett’s shares – to the highest bidder, thereby inviting corporate raiders. Gannett ended up buying the foundation’s stock for $670 million. Neuharth renamed the foundation, Freedom Forum, and spoke grandiosely of his plans to be a leader in global philanthropy and impact the world.

Time Magazine described him as creating “a truly baronial fiefdom at a swank building across the street from the headquarters of Gannett and USA Today. Renovations for the building (carved stone staircases, suede-covered file cabinets) cost $15 million.”

He now seems irrelevant to journalism. When I was metro editor at a Washington state daily, I made a reference to Neuharth to a young reporter. She had no idea who he was.

What a pity that Neuharth didn’t use his drive and charisma to create something that could’ve really transformed America: a new corporate model.

Why do American corporations, even those run by poor kids from South Dakota, have to become playgrounds for a new 1 percent?

In his S.O.B. memoir, Neuharth invited his two ex-wives, his son and daughter to contribute chapters – report cards on him in their own words.

He didn’t extend a similar invitation to a Gannettoid. No chapter from any of the thousands of anonymous employees who helped make his dreams come true.

– Pamela Fitzsimmons

In 21st Century America any disaffected male minority can lay claim to ancestral suffering to explain bad behavior.

Here in Oregon, the state Senate recently passed a bill requiring that any new legislation include a statement describing its effects on the racial and ethnic composition of prison inmates.

In other words, would the proposed legislation increase the number of racial and ethnic minorities in prison?

Each of us is a minority of one, but it’s group minorities that politicians and the media play to. It’s hard to keep track of the pecking order.

Early in the coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing, a CNN reporter described an alleged suspect as a “dark-skinned male.” Al Sharpton denounced this as “offensive, coded language” and claimed the reporter had turned every minority in Boston into a terror suspect. In Sharpton’s world, minorities only have dark skin. (For his purposes, however, he probably doesn’t consider Italian-Americans minorities.)

When the FBI released photos of the suspects, NPR’s Robert Siegel quickly noted that they were “not dark-skinned.”

And when the suspects were identified by name and ethnicity, NPR’s John Hockenberry hypothesized about whether “they were isolated as Muslims in America.”

Islam is one of the world’s major religions. Is it now equated with minority racial and ethnic status?

Such a fuss about race and ethnicity. Yes, it matters. No it doesn’t. Yes it does. No it doesn’t.

Had there been no bombing in Boston, the media’s race debate the past week might have settled on “The Central Park Five.”

Ken Burns’ documentary about the four black teenagers and one Hispanic convicted of raping a white Central Park jogger aired on PBS the day after the Boston Marathon.

The Central Park Five were convicted of rape, assault and attempted murder in 1989 after confessing and implicating one another. The victim, who was beaten into a coma, eventually recovered but remembered nothing of the attack.

Important to the story is the context of the times. Crime was so high, even the black community seemed happy to convict the teenagers. One of the saddest comments in the film is from a black man who says, “Many of us were frightened by our own children.”

These teenagers served years in the youth authority and in prison. Their convictions were overturned when a serial rapist and killer named Matias Reyes approached one of them in prison and volunteered that he raped the Central Park jogger.

Although the youths didn’t rape the jogger, they were elsewhere in Central Park that night, a scene of general mayhem.

As New York Times reporter James Dwyer says in the film, they were beating up other people when the jogger was being raped, but their attorneys declined to use that as a defense.

That might be why there has been no public outcry to settle the multimillion-dollar lawsuit the youths, now men in their mid-30’s, filed about 10 years ago. Burns hopes his documentary will help lead to a settlement.

“Race has been a central part of the America narrative whether people want to deal with it or not …,” Burns has said.

Americans most certainly deal with race – more than any other nation. (And we’re certainly not the only country with a history of slavery).

That’s why we end up with legislation like Oregon’s Senate Bill 463-A, which reflects none of the wisdom we should have acquired since the Central Park jogger case.

The bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Chip Shields (D-Portland), is white. In a press release from his office, he quotes statistics from the Oregon Department of Corrections that blacks make up about 2 percent of the state’s population but constitute 10 percent of prison inmates.

He recites other tired observations without digging any deeper: Blacks in Oregon are six times more likely to be in prison than whites, and nationally black men are more likely to be imprisoned than hold four-year college degrees.

Shields does not explore why blacks commit a disproportionate number of crimes. He doesn’t want to know. He’s practicing a form of paternalism that has helped infantilize young black men. Shields would never call a young black man “boy,” but that’s how he treats them when he suggests new laws must cater to their special needs. They can’t be expected to obey laws like other people.

The bill was co-sponsored by state Sen. Jackie Winters (R-Salem), the only black in the Oregon State Senate and the wife of an ex-felon who later worked for Gov. Tom McCall.

Winters frequently invokes her late husband, Ted Winters. His story, though, is his story. His accomplishment would not be so extraordinary if it could be duplicated simply by tweaking the laws.

In proposing SB 463-A, Shields relies on similar laws passed in Iowa and Indiana. He quotes from the Sentencing Project in citing a familiar example of racism in criminal statutes: Federal laws that call for longer sentences involving crack cocaine (associated with black users) and shorter sentences involving powder cocaine (more popular with white users).

That worn-out example has a couple of problems. First, in the 1990’s, when I was a reporter in Southern California. I lost track of how many gang-related shootings I covered involving crack cocaine. Black crack dealers did more to destroy working-class black neighborhoods than white police officers. That might have something to do with why a disproportionate number of blacks ended up in prison on drug charges.

The second problem with that old example is that crack cocaine isn’t the issue it used to be – perhaps because of that federal statute? I don’t know, but white politicians should have learned something from the history of the Anti-Drug Act that led to the disparities between crack vs. powder cocaine.

The law was passed in 1988 in response to the death of college basketball star Len Bias. He was on his way to a glorious career when he overdosed on cocaine. The public demanded that something be done. It was as if politicians had to show they were not going to let another promising young black man overdose on cocaine.

Looking back on the law, critics scoff at the drug hysteria that accompanied Bias’ death, but they ignore why so many white Democratic politicians pushed for this law: They thought they were fighting racism and helping blacks.

Today. politicians like Shields and Winters seem to sympathize with drug dealers. What about the black parents and grandparents who tried to raise children when there was a black crack dealer on every corner trying to hook black kids on a cheap, dangerous thrill?

The black victims are invisible.

In his press release, Shields included a Web address for the Sentencing Project’s report. Read it, and you won’t even find the word “victim.”

Shields’ bill at least makes a passing reference to victims (buried in Line 22) – but only because he had to. His earlier versions dating back to 2009 did not.

If he and Winters really want to help black Oregonians, they should take the advice that U.A. Attorney General Eric Holder offered to the National Association of Black Journalists at its 2011 conference:

“When conversations center on the fact that African Americans are disproportionately jailed, you can ask why we aren’t also discussing the fact that black people are also disproportionately victimized by violent crime.”

– Pamela Fitzsimmons

Related:

Good morning, Heartache

Consider the spectacle they created in a hearing room at the Oregon State Capitol, where a legislative committee took testimony on a proposed law to drop mandatory-minimum sentences for first-degree sexual abuse, second-degree robbery and second-degree assault.

Here they came over two days of hearings, women representing groups with names like “Oregon Alliance to End Violence Against Women,” “Human Services Coalition of Oregon,” “Mid-Valley Women’s Crisis Service,” “Citizens United for Rehabilitation of Errants” (how quaint: calling a violent felon an “errant”).

They all urged passage of House Bill 3194, which would reduce – in some cases eliminate – time behind bars for men (it’s usually men) who sexually abuse, rob or assault. It’s a 54-page bill and includes other features favorable to offenders, such as increasing earned time to have 30 percent knocked off prison sentences.

Why would women be in favor of this?

Money.

With guidance from the Pew Center on the States, domestic violence groups lobbied for HB 3194 because they believe that the money saved by not incarcerating offenders – or giving them shorter sentences –  will go to women’s groups.

Lindsey Nelson, a domestic violence survivor who now works as an advocate, told the committee there were about “22,000 cries for help that went unmet in 2010.”

She described what happens to these women: “You go back into a home that has now become exponentially more dangerous and imprisoning due to the attempt made. To truly address the safety of the public, we must reinvest in victim services.”

By Nelson’s reasoning, if the Legislature passes HB 3194 fewer violent men will get locked up, and then the state can take the savings and give it to the victims.

One woman after another joined this craven sisterhood.

Amanda Green, who spoke in a little girl voice, said she was an advocate for victims’ rights: “I want to improve Oregon and …  reinvest public safety dollars.”

When she was 16, she said she was drugged and assaulted by her boyfriend, who “threatened and emotionally manipulated” her into silence.

“I never sought justice for the crime,” Green said.

Instead, she sought “services” and implied that this was a better alternative than seeking justice, because “nothing can take away violence that has already occurred.”

Suzie Elmer, who works with survivors of domestic violence in Josephine County, said she often finds survivors camped outside her office.

“It is very dark at night … there is no help for them. … They are staying with friends that are sometimes only marginally better than their abuser. …They get angry with us.”

Elmer asked the committee to “please increase safety” by passing HB 3194.

How will making it easier for violent men to remain free increase safety?

These women were badly used by Pew, which wants to score another prisoner’s rights victory for their organization. (Visit Pew’s Website and see what they consider good news. Example: Easing the three-strikes law in California; among the felonies no longer considered serious is gun possession by an ex-felon.)

There was a time – and it wasn’t that long ago – when women’s groups were urging legislators to take domestic violence seriously. One way society demonstrates the seriousness of a crime is by the punishment attached to that crime.

It has taken a long time to persuade police, prosecutors and the courts to treat domestic violence seriously. When I was a young newspaper reporter I did my share of stories trying to educate readers about domestic violence. I found that many police officers did not like domestic abuse calls; the odds were that the victims eventually would turn against the police.

What some abused women want is for the authorities to magically change their husbands or boyfriends. To take the bad boys they were attracted to – and had babies with – and change them into loving, devoted providers.

If a woman is dependent on her abuser to pay the rent, she may get angry to discover there are no “services” to step in and play breadwinner.

I understand how helping a woman become financially independent can help free her from abuse, but many of the women who testified talked about offenders as if they, too, were victims. These are men who simply need a better education or a better job.

None of these women seemed to consider that there might be something skewed about rewarding criminal behavior. How do you explain this to law-abiding taxpayers who might also like a better education or a better job?

What these women ignored while they were selling out is that they are endangering other women – who will end up on the receiving end of a fist, a knife or a gun should HB 3194 pass and become law.

This was the story brought by a few other women. Although they were outnumbered by the abuse professionals, when these women spoke they didn’t sound like they were reading from Pew’s Website.

Emily Wood, now 25, was routinely abused by her grandfather from the age of 5 until she was 13.

“This is the kind of sex abuse in the first-degree we see every day …,” said Clackamas County Deputy District Attorney Michael Regan. “We didn’t bring Emily here because of some gratuitous case.”

Teresa McCart, Emily’s mother, urged the committee to keep the minimum-mandatory sentence.

“I don’t regret having my father in prison,” she said.

Marion County Deputy District Attorney Katie Suver told of a man who sexually abused his 9-year-old granddaughter, touching her vaginal area while he masturbated until, as the little girl put it – “he peed on my pants.”

The men and women on the legislative committee listened silently, several of them looked down.

“I want that to be uncomfortable for you to hear,” Suver said.

Under the change in law they are contemplating, the grandfather would have gotten probation. As it is, he had gotten away with crimes before. It turned out his granddaughter was not the first.

“What we are talking about is child molesters,” Suver said. “If we are not willing to step up and protect children … then we shouldn’t be in this business.”

I’m glad that she was willing to risk discomfort. For me, it was sickening to sit in a hearing room and listen to women make excuses for why violent men should be given a break – just so the women might be able to divvy-up some savings for themselves.

Instead of bargaining with the public’s safety, these women should look to Health and Human Services – which consumes half of the state’s general fund budget – to help support domestic violence shelters.

These women’s groups should also consider the possibility that even if HB 3194 passes, they won’t get much. Think about it.

How much clout do these women’s groups have, especially now?

– Pamela Fitzsimmons

Our parents were addicted to nicotine, a habit my brother and I were forced to endure. I learned something early on from my parents’ addiction: If you never start a bad habit, you won’t have to try and quit.

I’ve never had a drug problem. However, I am surrounded by people who do.

One of my cousins lost his 16-year-old daughter to drugs. Another cousin’s son is all over the mug shot Websites for various crimes related to his meth addiction. In some mug shots, he grins insanely; in others, he looks haunted. One of my nieces tested positive for drugs when her baby was born.

Drug abuse is as common as cancer. Just as everybody knows somebody who has had cancer, we all know someone who has a drug problem. The difference is that while some cancers are lifestyle-related, almost all drug addictions are self-inflicted.

Not surprisingly, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, one of the most recession-proof businesses is the substance-abuse industry.

What would former Gov. Tom McCall think if he had known that his son, Sam, would represent the future as much as his famed environmental movement.

In Oregon, the media recently finished a month-long celebration of McCall, who would’ve turned 100 in March. McCall was ahead of his time in the 1960’s and 70’s when he advocated for such things as the Bottle Bill, the Willamette River cleanup and slow-growth planning.

Lost amid all those victories was a defeat that now seems more of a bellwether: McCall’s son was a drug addict.

“He took every kind of drug he could find, favoring stolen prescription drugs sold on the street,” writes Brent Walth in “Fire at Eden’s Gate,” a biography of McCall.

Walth’s description of Sam’s addiction and his parents’ reaction will sound familiar to many families now. McCall couldn’t understand why Sam fell into drug use and couldn’t shake the habit. The governor and his wife, Audrey, fought to protect Sam – even after he committed a series of crimes. Audrey thought the world was ganging up on her son. McCall blamed the doctors who gave Sam a prescription for pain killers when he was 14.

Walth’s chapter, “Mother and Son” is especially revealing. When you read it, you almost want to yell at the parents, “Don’t do that! You’re making it worse!”

As Walth notes, “Though police often arrested Sam for various petty crimes, he was never booked and reports were never written.”

Back then it was because Sam was the governor’s son.

These days it’s not uncommon for petty, drug-addicted criminals to be sent on their way. Bookings can be almost meaningless. They merely record the inconsequential slaps on the wrist should the offender finally work his way up to something more serious.

In Walth’s book, Sam comes across as a narcissist who wanted more attention from his father and resented the success of his brother. Eventually, thousands of dollars were spent sending Sam to the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. He talked his way out of that. Later, there were stays at Dammasch State Hospital in Oregon, where he escaped several times. Finally, Sam entered a methadone program.

Several years after McCall left office, Walth describes how 17 years of coddling Sam left Tom and Audrey with a 34-year-old son dependent on them. By then, McCall was working as a commentator at a television station. One day his co-workers noticed that he was especially distressed. He explained that he had awakened in the night and found his son unconscious from an overdose.

In a stunning passage, Walth describes how McCall told his co-workers that he regretted waking up. If he hadn’t, his son might have died, “and all of this might be over now.”

What would McCall do with the drug mess we now have in 2013? He might be bold and practical.

In 1970, while his son was fighting addiction, McCall endorsed the Vortex festival to draw Vietnam War protesters away from Portland and out to a state park where drugs and rock music would be plentiful – and law enforcement officers would be ordered to look the other way.

With Vortex McCall saw how drugs could be useful, and with his son he saw how they could be abused.

In the right context, would McCall see some wisdom in allowing illegal drugs that have known benefits – even cocaine and heroin – to be medically prescribed (like marijuana is now)?

As a trade-off, criminals who steal, rob and assault would no longer be allowed to lean on their drug addiction as an excuse for their crimes. Burglars, car thieves, muggers would be treated like burglars, car thieves and muggers. Whatever drugs they test positive for would be irrelevant.

Oregon’s current governor, John Kitzhaber, doesn’t want to learn from McCall’s experience. Kitzhaber believes that spending more on drug counseling services is a better crime-fighting tool than prison. Not surprisingly, the substance-abuse industrial complex likes the idea.

Our culture loves drugs, and no amount of tax revenue is going to change that. Drug use is gladly tolerated – even celebrated – in the entertainment world.

Public attitudes about drugs will continue to evolve and change – just as they did with cigarette smoking. It was only a few decades ago that cigarette-smoking was allowed in most American work places and restaurants and bars.

Eventually drug use will be seen as something you do in certain personal spaces, but you don’t bring the abuse into public. Eventually, the same people who condemn the “prison-industrial complex” will notice the money being made by the “substance-abuse industrial complex.”

Perhaps because of what’s called “Oregon politeness” (actually an aversion to unpleasantness), the recent Tom McCall retrospectives skirted the fate of Sam McCall. Here’s what happened to the governor’s son after more than 20 years of “help” with his drug problem:

On Easter Sunday morning in 1990, Audrey McCall found her now 40-year-old son passed out in a hallway of the family home. She left for several hours.

“When she returned, he was dead. She told police that she regularly found him passed out and could not move him without help,” wrote Mike Thoele in The Register-Guard.

Out in Sam’s car, police found a 17-year-old boy suffering from a drug overdose. The youth was said to have been Sam’s companion for the past three days. Sam had worked on staff at some of the institutions where he had been a patient over the years.

Tom McCall died seven years earlier.

He left a legacy of getting tough on environmental polluters, but he broke weak on drug pollution.

– Pamela Fitzsimmons

Related:

Good Morning, Heartache

When Marysa did not come home on Feb. 26, her parents knew she had not run away. She was a happy kid, who liked to practice her clarinet and was looking forward to playing in a school concert.

There’s a reason, though, why police often don’t take missing persons reports seriously for at least 24 hours – the missing person often shows up. The Red Bluff, Calif., police were no exception. It fell to the parents to post notices.

“I saw the dad walking up the street, hanging up fliers and the grandma walking behind him,” the mother of one of Marysa’s classmates told the Redding Searchlight newspaper. “It was awful watching him walk up and down the street.”

Two days after Marysa disappeared, her body was found. She had been strangled, and the police were now very interested.

Cops visited her home and asked to see Marysa’s room. When the parents showed them her room, one of the cops asked sarcastically, “What’d you do? Clean it?”

The parents understood that family are often legitimate suspects in criminal cases. They simply replied that no, they hadn’t cleaned it. The room was exactly how she left it. The cop didn’t believe them.

“No 14-year-old has a room this clean,” he said. (That cop would later apologize.)

Strangers empathized and wanted to help, even if it was only to have their car washed to help raise money for Marysa’s funeral. They posted sympathetic comments on news stories about the victim. Classmates and friends talked about how popular she was.

But, as in any homicide, some people looked for reassurances that they or their loved ones couldn’t end up like the victim. What happened to that girl wouldn’t happen to their daughter.

So there was this in the Red Bluff Daily News: “Asked whether he believed Nichols was ‘up to no good’ when she left the school campus, (Police Chief Paul) Nanfito fired back, ‘Absolutely not.’”

This was also the kind of homicide that doesn’t travel far.  I wouldn’t have heard about Marysa’s killing were she not my sister-in-law’s niece.

For everyone except Marysa’s family, her story will fade with the headlines – to be replaced by the next killing and the next and the next.

When California legislators were trying to decide what to do with state prison inmates, did they put a dollar sign on the heads of future victims like Marysa? No. Legislators looked at other costs: the costs of building new prisons, the costs of future lawsuits if they didn’t build new prisons, the costs of keeping inmates in prisons vs. the costs of shipping them out to the counties to be jailed or supervised.

California legislators passed a bill – AB 109, the 2011 Public Safety Realignment Act – which called for the “realignment” of prison sentences. Realignment – kind of a vague word, isn’t it? In this context, it meant “realigning” certain prison inmates by changing sentencing guidelines for certain crimes, and sending some offenders and parole violators to county jails rather than state prisons.

Among the parole violators who have been “realigned” was Quentin Ray Bealer, 39.

On the day Marysa disappeared, Bealer failed to appear in court on charges of second-degree burglary, receiving stolen property and possession of a methamphetamine-smoking device. Under AB 109, this was not serious. With realignment what mattered was Bealer’s current criminal charges – not his extensive criminal history dating back to the 1990’s and including crimes like battery with serious bodily injury and corporal injury to a spouse.

Anyway, three days after he failed to appear in court, Bealer was arrested, booked, cited and released.

At the same time, police were looking for a “person of interest” in Marysa’s death – a man seen on video surveillance footage taken outside the high school the day she disappeared. The video showed a stocky man with a red beard and a tattoo on his left leg walking into the school’s parking entrance, less than two minutes before Marysa would follow the same route.

Bealer’s friends saw news coverage of the video, asked him about it and he admitted it was him. Several hours after Bealer had been released with a citation on the failure to appear, one of his friends accompanied him to the police station to surrender.

At his arraignment on murder this week, Bealer insisted he was innocent and seemed to implicate one of the friends. The friend is a registered sex offender.

While this was being detailed on a news Web site, there was a five-paragraph story on an unrelated case: “Man arrested 11th time for skipping out on parole, court appearances.”

This brief story elicited 33 comments from readers, many of whom grasped a fact that eluded California legislators when they passed AB 109. As summed up by one reader: “This realignment program is a joke if we have people out there violating their parole like this guy, and yet we do nothing but book and release them.”

Here in Oregon, our legislators – at the urging of Gov. John Kitzhaber – are weighing changes in sentencing guidelines and moving prison inmates to county supervision. In Oregon it’s not called realignment – it’s called justice “reinvestment.”

Kitzhaber enlisted experts and lobbyists from the Pew Center on States to help sell justice reinvestment. He created a Commission on Public Safety to make the appropriate recommendations. A Joint Committee on Public Safety has been holding hearings in anticipation of a legislative vote later this year.

I’ve been to more than 20 meetings on the subject of Kitzhaber’s justice “reinvestment.” Supposedly $600 million can be saved over the next 10 years.

For the Quentin Ray Bealers (every state has them) this could be good news.

For the Marysa Nicholses (every state has them) this will be bad news.

– Pamela Fitzsimmons

Related:

Deep in the Heart of Oregon