“OSP was built so long ago that it was not built for the prison population we have now,” she told Filter. “No one, back when OSP was constructed, could have envisioned that we would double our incarceration rate.”

In 1994, Oregon voters approved a dramatic expansion of mandatory minimum sentencing with Ballot Measure 11. Over the next two decades the Oregon Department of Corrections population grew from around 6,700 people to more than 14,000. Since its peak in 2013 the population has decreased to around 12,000. Kaplan said this still puts enormous strain on the entire system but especially on OSP, which is home to about one-third of the nearly 1,000 ODOC prisoners serving life sentences. Oregon is also among the 17 states that have effectively abolished parole. ODOC data show that more than 1,300 people in ODOC custody are 61 or older.

Though most of the facility’s housing units were built in the 1950s, ODOC has acknowledged that “Oregon State Penitentiary is well beyond its useful life and doesn’t support the level of care needed” for the aging population, estimating a cost of $200 million to bring the facility into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act—a figure that “will continue to grow exponentially.” A $3 million feasibility study is underway to begin designs for construction of a centralized health care facility as well as a new facility to replace OSP.

Shannon Wight, executive director of Portland based Partnership for Safety and Justice, is disappointed that the plan to build new prisons is moving forward, when those funds would have been better spent on re-entry support and culturally specific services. She was part of the movement that changed the trajectory of the ODOC population with sentencing reform legislation in 2013, when Oregon was instead preparing to open another prison. In 2017, advocates again held off plans to open a new prisons, this time for the women’s system. Between 2000 and 2007 ODOC opened four new facilities, but has not opened any since then. 

Wight was struck by how ODOC framed the feasibility study not as a matter of public safety or the best use of taxpayer dollars, but simply as a study to find the best plot of land for new construction.

“It felt so much like the cart before the horse,” she told Filter. 

In an Oregon Secretary of State audit released in late July, the proposed centralized health care facility is referred to explicitly as a “centralized geriatric medical facility.” That audit revealed an ODOC maintenance backlog of nearly $861 million, noting that OSP in particular “continues to pose serious safety, health, and accessibility risks to adults in custody” due to “regular emergency failures, including sewer line breaks, boiler outages, and inaccessible critical services.” It recommended that the department “develop and implement a plan” for emptying “unsafe facilities, such as the Oregon State Penitentiary.” The audit references the feasibility study, though without explicitly linking it to the recommendations.

“We’re dealing with the infrastructure issue,” ODOC Communication Manager & Legislative Director Harvey Mathews told Filter.

He said that the department doesn’t want to “expand the carceral footprint or expand on the number of beds,” but is under-resourced. ODOC originally requested $5 million for the feasibility study, which Mathews considers a modest ask. 

“They should have about $70-$80 million [in] this first phase of stakeholder outreach and architectural designs and site studies,” he said, explaining that that would be about 10 percent of the estimated cost to replace just OSP, not including the separate health care facility. “But we’re doing this on a shoestring budget for now.”

Wanda Bertram of Prison Policy Initiative has studied the various ways states across the nation pitch new prison construction. She said that even when it’s not a mega-prison that’s explicitly intended to increase bedspace, opening any new facility without examining the sentencing laws that created this strain seems like a very costly, short-sighted and irresponsible approach. 

“The criminal-legal system has shown it is completely capable of filling all of the prison space that’s available,” Bertram told Filter. “The very circumstances that apparently caused [ODOC] to want to build a new prison—the aging prison population—still exist.” 

Kaplan is participating in an OSP workshop teaching incarcerated peer mentors how to work with prisoners who have Alzheimer’s or dementia, since that portion of the population is increasing both at OSP and across the state. She doesn’t see the slow and costly process of new construction as the right solution. She said the situation cries out for at least an exploration of reforms that would release people with advanced medical needs, rather than spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a geriatric-focused facility. Between that facility and the OSP replacement, the total cost would likely be more than $1 billion.

“There’s people now who can’t walk, who can’t see, who have dementia,” she said. “It seems to me that there might be a better approach.”  

Despite the common misconception that prisons are meant to inflict punishment, being in prison is in fact the punishment in and of itself. But Kaplan said this isn’t meant to leave people with Alzheimer’s and dementia “suffering into their old age”; that goes beyond the pale of state-sanctioned punishment.

For her, this is what the feasibility study and plans for new construction don’t address.

“We have an aging prison population that needs attention right now.”

Top image (cropped) via Oregon Department of Corrections. Inset images (cropped) via Oregon Secretary of State.

The post Oregon Will Close Its Oldest Prison by Building Two, One for “Geriatric” Care appeared first on Filter.

On May 6, councilmembers approved a proposal to update the city code that governs “chronic nuisance property”—buildings cited in repeat complaints related to criminalized activity like drug use and sex work. The proposal, from District 3 Councilor Steve Novick, is clear about what businesses it’s targeting: 82nd Avenue motels.

“Shutting down a venue doesn’t make [sex work] go away,” Koyama told Filter. “It displaces people to other areas, and it becomes more dangerous.”

Koyama testified against the ordinance in March. Though the city council argued that the changes were necessary to keep pace with “human trafficking,” Koyama does not believe that the motels on 82nd Avenue are facilitating or complicit in such activity.

“What you see is people engaging in underground economies,” she said, “and underground economies happen whenever there’s poverty.” 

The ordinance had initially proposed to change the definition of a chronic nuisance property to one cited for two or more “nuisance activities” in any 90-day period, when previously it was three or more in a 30-day period.

“Something that happens twice within a 90-day period is hardly a chronic thing,” Phillip Chachka of the nonprofit Portland Copwatch told Filter.

After significant pushback, the final version was amended to three or more nuisance activities in a 90-day period.

There are 25 designated nuisance activities, which in the original proposed version of the ordinance included “prostitution or related offenses” and “loitering to solicit prostitution.” Following pushback, these were replaced with “Human Trafficking or related offenses.”

“There’s become very little [legal] distinction between trafficking and voluntary sex work.”

Grant Hartley, Multnomah County director of Metropolitan Public Defenders, agreed that the ordinance is criminalizing poverty, and punishing businesses “for the failures of our society.” He also told Filter that he’s suspicious of the claims that this protects trafficking survivors. This sort of surveillance, he explained, has often been to find evidence of “promoting prostitution,” which could be interpreted as applying to almost anything—friends giving gas money to someone in the sex trade, for example. Such activities could be associated with human trafficking in the same way.

“There’s become very little [legal] distinction between trafficking and voluntary sex work, and that’s just dangerous for sex workers,” he said. “Sex workers are pulled over, and their phone is seized … you don’t seize the telephone of someone who is a victim.”

Lorren Snowwolf, deputy director at the community closet and food bank Mainspring Portland, told Filter he’s concerned this will “become a witch hunt.” Mainspring Portland is on 82nd Avenue and serves anyone in need, including sex workers.

Multnomah County Senior Deputy District Attorney Glen (JR) Ujifusa said that the ordinance is part of a “multi-faceted approach” to reduce trafficking, which also includes educating motel owners and employees on ways to make their properties safer. He said that the goal isn’t to shut down any businesses.

“What it’s trying to do is clean up and make business-owners responsible for the type of things they attract around them,” he told Filter. “We all know that the criminal justice system is slow and expensive, and so is law enforcement sometimes, so this [ordinance] is another way to maybe get at some of the same issues and deter it in a different way.” 

“It just seems like a power grab.”

Koyami would prefer if local law enforcement focused on improving basic safety for people on the margins, rather than punitive interventions. In addition to founding Coalition for Rights & Safety, she’s the co-founder of Aileen’s, a peer-led hospitality space for women in the sex trade. Aileen’s, founded in 2019, serves the notorious stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway in Washington state where in the 1980s and 1990s Gary Ridgeway killed at least 49 women, many of them sex workers.

“Having small organic communities being built up are something that we need to support and not destroy,” Koyami said.

Chachka echoed the sentiment, pointing out that business owners might prefer dealing with civilian city workers rather than armed law enforcement officers. He also finds law enforcement to be “a little disingenuous about their priorities” in this instance.

In 2025, Portland had directed its police bureau to put overtime dollars toward combatting human trafficking, among other issues like domestic and sexual violence. Only 4 percent of the requested funds actually went toward those issues, with the bureau instead putting some toward crowd control at anti-ICE protests.

“It just seems like a power grab on their part,” Chachka said of the new ordinance. “It kind of cuts way back on the due process for property owners and businesses to be able to handle things without city intervention.”

Image via City of Portland

The post Portland Changes “Nuisance Property” Code, a Crackdown on Motel Sex Work appeared first on Filter.

HB 4002 allocated funding for counties to create jail-deflection programs, and encouraged law enforcement to make referrals to such programs as an alternative to arrest. They currently operate in 27 of the state’s 36 counties.

In Multnomah County, Oregon’s most populous, being referred to a jail-deflection program means being transported by an armed police officer through Portland’s bustling Central Eastside to Coordinated Care Pathway Center, operated by Baltimore-based Tuerk House. But only if the quantity of drugs falls under a certain threshold, there are no other charges involved, and the person has no outstanding warrants, is not deemed to be in mental health crisis and has not declined to voluntarily enter treatment within the past 30 days.

In January, District Attorney Nathan Vasquez revealed that his office would begin prosecuting deflection participants who didn’t “meaningfully engage” with the program.

This refers to, at minimum, completing the initial assessment. But it will also target participants who don’t enter treatment with any of the providers they’re referred to.

“[We] have a basic plan now,” Pat Dooris, communications director for the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office, told Filter. “When we hit early April … we will send the health department a list of names of people who have entered deflection. They will send us back information on how they have engaged with the program and we will then decide if they have successfully completed it or not.”

Dooris said that the DA’s Office will be looking for participants to begin engaging with treatment “right away,” and “will judge how often and how meaningfully” they do so.

Previously, county health officials did not communicate with the district attorney’s office about deflection program participants. While elsewhere in the state participants might face charges depending on the program’s view of their performance, according to Dooris, “there were no consequences for failing deflection in Multnomah County.”

In February, the county enacted a resolution that clarified that Vasquez may file charges “if a deflection participant leaves the Pathway Center before completing a screening or assessment,” which close to one in three participants did in 2025. Though it did not discuss the possibility of criminal charges for participants who enter the program but don’t follow up with at least one treatment provider, it did increase the window to do so from 30 days to 90 days. This mirrors the timeline set by Vasquez: For participants who began the deflection program January 5, their deadline to engage with treatment would be April 5. The State of Oregon’s Criminal Justice Commission also approved “similar” changes “to align the program with policy changes from the District Attorney’s Office.”

More than 50 years since Richard Nixon declared that “America’s public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse,” this is how one of the nation’s most liberal cities is continuing the War on Drugs.

County Commissioner Shannon Singleton, who co-sponsored the February resolution, told Filter that it is important “providers are defining engagement” because each person’s case is different, and so engagement can’t be defined by policymakers.

“I don’t think we are there yet,” she said, when asked if Multnomah County has a unified strategy on deflection models. She also pointed out that there’s a “disconnect between our behavioral health system and our homeless services system.”

In its first year, the voluntary engagement rate for people referred to the Coordinated Care Pathway Center was 65 percent. Of those who engaged, the “successful” completion rate was 29 percent. Both rates are slightly higher than the state-wide averages (62 percent and 22 percent, respectively).

“Part of the problem with any alternative to prosecution is that they are judged in a vacuum,” Grant Hartley, director of Metropolitan Public Defender, the state’s largest provider of public defense services, told Filter. Hartley believes the deflection model would look like incremental progress, if those numbers were judged against treatment engagement and completion rate through the carceral system. This is why he is against Vasquez’s plan.

“The [criminal-legal] system has failed over and over to address these issues through this type of prosecution,” he said.

He also emphasized that Portland doesn’t have the criminal-legal resources to prosecute its way out of the problem. There aren’t enough public defenders to take on these cases, and there are also not enough probation officers “to really supervise these people meaningfully” once they are presumably jailed and released on probation.

In his view, if a participant is deemed to be “failing” deflection, the situation only becomes more complex, once “the only option for the DA now is to issue an arrest warrant for that person.”

Hartley would also like to see Multnomah County’s deflection program take an approach more like King County’s Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program, calling it a “very reliable, excellent model [that’s] been proven for decades, and yet we all kind of ignored it.”

“It’s far, far more important to invest in a strong case management team that can stick with people for a long time.”

“It’s important to remember that deflection is not a solution in and of itself,” Shannon Wight, the deputy director of Portland-based nonprofit Partnership for Safety and Justice, told Filter. “It can’t address the underlying lack of affordable housing.”

Wight is a big proponent of the LEAD program in King County, Washington state’s most populous, where Seattle is located—which was born out of racial disparities in the county’s drug possession charges. King County provides intensive case management—not only for the deflection program participants, but for local businesses as well, providing field-based training and support in how to address public disturbances. Wight recently organized a small delegation, including Commissioner Singleton, to travel to Seattle to witness this model in action.

One of the other stark differences between the deflection models in Multnomah County and King County is that the latter does not have a deflection center.

“We’ve operated a deflection framework for 15 years without a deflection center,” Lisa Daugaard, primary architect of Seattle’s LEAD model, told Filter. “It’s far, far more important to invest in a strong case management team that can stick with people for a long time.”

Daugaard stressed that above all, people need stable housing.

“If you have money for capital facilities, a place for people [in recovery] to live is incredibly valuable,” she said.

For Multnomah County, it is hard to ignore this reality—81 percent of deflection program participants were experiencing homelessness when they were referred. This will be the population that bears the brunt of the criminal charges Vasquez is promising to bring after April 5.

Wight, from Partnership for Safety and Justice, emphasized that the point of deflection to the Coordinated Care Pathway Center is to reduce prosecutions.

“If prosecution becomes the default,” she said, “then the program has lost its core purpose.”

Update, March 26: This article has been updated with additional comment from the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office.

Top image via Multnomah County Communications Office. Inset graphic (cropped) via City of Portland, Oregon.

The post Portland Jail-Deflection Participants Who “Fail” Will Soon Face Prosecution appeared first on Filter.