Attn: Criminals (like the ones pictured above)

Portland, Oregon is the place to be if you are considering a life of crime. Due to bureaucratic madness, Multnomah County’s brand new jail, the Wapato Facility, sits empty while crime in the area skyrockets. Because the jail sits unopened, the county has instituted an early release program that in 2005 alone allowed about 5,000 criminals (some of them robbers, drunk drivers and car thieves) to skip out of their sentences. The early releases have become so institutionalized that the county has even set up a website listing the pictures and offenses of the early released (from which the pictures on this posting came from). Thomas Eric Golden (the man at the top with the nice neck tattoo) served just one day of his harassment offense and Andrew Joseph Pulver (the man with the nice hair) served just 11 days for his two offenses. Not much of a deterrent for either of these gentlemen and by the looks of them they could both use a lot of deterring. So could a lot of other people in Portland as it turns out. As any first year economics student will tell you, if you lower the costs (such as jail time) of an activity then you should expect the number of incidents of that activity to go up–and they have.

If you look at the Portland Crimestopper map for just one offense–larceny (the unlawful taking of property from the possession of another including pickpocketing, purse-snatching, shoplifting, bike theft, and theft from motor vehicle) over the past 12 mos, you will see lots of little dots. If you are an owner of property (as opposed to one that takes the things of others), this picture should depress you.

The Portland early-release program has a double negative effect. It lowers the deterrent for anyone considering committing an offense plus it puts the very people who are committing these crimes back on the street sooner to commit more crimes. No disrespect to the Code Pink people who were protesting in my area last week-end with “Schools not jails” signs, but if you look at the pictures of in the inmates being released (like the one below) I challenge you to find even one who looks like they’d go to school if they weren’t in jail. (Exhibit A Fred Gregory Hannon who served just 10 days after being convicted of four offenses). The sad fact of life is that people make choices every day, including whether or not to commit crimes, and one of the biggest “costs” we can place on criminals is to lock them up. Failure to do that for whatever reason has a very predictable result. Furthermore, in the case of Multnomah County, the jail is already built, they just need to open it making the net social benefits even more readily available.

tags: Multnomah County jail

h/t: LA Times

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 16th, 2006 at 8:28 am by Insider and is filed under Your Tax Dollars In Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.