Prison Planning1

WABC
The Prison Industrial Complex

The $entencing Guideline$ Hoax
It's All About The Money, Stupid...
By Sixpack

It has been presented to the public that the necessity to build another prison in Oregon is because of rising crime rates or various "problems" like the so-called meth epidemic. But when reading documents from Governor Neil Goldschmidt, the Department of Corrections and various other special interest groups, it is much easier to see the truth---That our safety is not really a concern.

It was not a crime epidemic or a meth epidemic that spun the prison population out of control, it was, and continues to be corporate greed, coupled with the erosion of our constitutional rights and more aggressive law enforcement policies and tactics---in other words, it is the Sentencing Guidelines. These guidelines were sold to the public as a means to enhance prison sentences and make those enhancements uniform for each defendant. Unfortunately, that's not how it worked out for Oregon.

I've started with the Neil Goldschmidt era, where the murder of Michael Francke was being investigated as related to corruption within the Oregon Department of Corrections, and the sentencing guidelines were born.

(These clips were created by using Adobe reader's "copy to clip board" function, and then pasting on this page., creating a "snapshot" of the online copy of the document).

You can browse a list of all of the documents archived in the Oregon State Library online at: <<http://arcweb.sos.state.or.us/governors/goldschmidt/Goldschmidtseries.html>>

1989

I found memos between Gov. Neil Goldschmidt and Mark L. Cushing that imply that the sentencing guidelines have nothing to do with public safety, but rather with manipulating the prison population to suit the politician’s needs at the time. The sentencing guidelines are incessantly referred to in these early documents as a tool to make "adjustments" when the number of people who will go to prison needs to be raised or lowered, depending on the budget, or there is a desire to build another new prison.

In one gubernatorial memo I found in the archives on the oregon.gov website, goldschmidt_016_052.pdf, dated February 6,1989 the dialog about the "sentencing guidelines politics" is clear. Joyce Cohen made it clear that she wants to "send the guidelines back to the council to make appropriate [adjustments] immediately to bring guideline projections in sync with prison capacity". I never realized that changing the guidelines could be that easy, preventing the prison overcrowding and new prison construction that we are told is "imminent" and unavoidable, yet even the Governor wants to avoid responsibility for prison expansion;

On page 6 of this set we see that "guidelines could be adopted AFTER the construction program already has been approved with the sentencing board having the authority to make [adjustments] to guidelines as needed in the interim". Can we assume that the guidelines can change anytime their need for more funding arises? No mention of "public safety" in this discussion.

1990

In November 1990, goldschmidt_102_009.pdf dated August 1st 1990, the focus changes to parole sanctions, sex offenders and women's issues. New calculations of "effective capacity" given the new prison construction since 1988, and will consider "any necessary [adjustments] to the guidelines to maintain prison populations within this capacity". A 600 bed women's facility is proposed in the DOC 1991-93 budget request (i.e. Coffee Creek). Not surprisingly, the new facility will also house an expanded DMV call center, (doubled, from 40 to 80 workstations). DMV pays a regular wage for each woman employed, and DOC "graciously" gives each worker $35 per month as PRAS awards. This means DOC keeps the rest, about $1,100.00 or so per month per inmate, pocketing several million dollars of inmate wages. To me it looks like one state agency feeding money to the other.

"Effective prison capacity" is an interesting play of words when you're talking about slave labor, and "Strategic Corrections Plan" has more to do with planning what the "effective" number of available bodies will be.

In documents in goldschmidt_089_008.pdf, The guidelines themselves will become a means to assess the need for additional prison capacity, i.e. How many new warehouses can we build?

Think of what that could mean for two different people with similar convictions--One convicted while prisons are at "capacity", and one convicted while there are plenty of open beds. "sentences can be modified UPWARD to adjust to the newly available capacity", meaning one of those newly convicted people will get MORE TIME for the same crime, simply because there are open beds in the prison, and the other will get leniency due to the prison being full at that time.

So much for "truth in Sentencing"---The only "truth" here, is that the punishment only fits the crime when that happens to fit the prison slave orders and empty beds available for them. One of the key reasons proponents gave for the guidelines was to make sentencing even all across the board, so judges couldn't be "soft" on anyone, doling out punishments evenly. ..What a crock! What a lie!

The key phrase here is "This would be disastrous for the concept of guidelines as a resource-oriented management tool, and it would commit you to additional prison space which you might later decide is unwise." If that doesn't spell it out in plain English, I can't imagine what does.

All the hype and advertisement about how crime was out of control, and the urgent need to clean up the streets for the safety of the public---and all the guidelines were intended to do was make it easier for officials to manage prison populations! In other words, keep the prisons full to an acceptable level of slave labor, and make it easier to con the citizens into going into debt for more prisons to house the money-makers.

Then in the next paragraph;

they talk about the public, their constituents, like we are all a bunch of ignorant fools---"disguised as it may be", and it "may give the public the illusion that they are building more prisons..."

There are many documents in the archives that point directly to the legislative and law enforcement abuses of the public. These are just a few examples of how Oregonians were blatantly lied to in order to fulfill an agenda.

Who benefits from all of this deception? The State Government and a few vendors will make plenty of money.

Who is on the losing end? WE ARE, the people who actually pay our hard earned money to incarcerate ourselves!

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