After last week winning House passage of his eight tough-on-crime referral measures to amend Oregon's Constitution yet again (HJR87-94) , Rep. Kevin Mannix gains Judiciary Committee approval of HB 2562 ( The Oregonian, 6/3/99 ). This latest bill is a resubmission of the 1998 Measure 61, calling for still longer mandatory sentences for property crimes and low-level violent convictions.
Neither Mannix nor any other of the Republicans promoting the mandatory sentencing laws has any plan to pay for the estimated 1000 additional cells this latest measure alone would require. The projections of costs for the previous eight referrals is more complicated and may not be known until they actually bust the state budget in 2000. Despite falling crime rates for the past ten years in Oregon , right wing "law'n order" enthusiasts continue to push for more spending to put more people behind bars for longer terms with no chance for parole. The drop in crime has come despite ever more laws creating ever more crimes.
Oregon voters must get a grip on the spasms of fear and rage which fuel their thirst for revenge, and recognize that we cannot afford to provide decent transportation, health care, and public education, and continue to subsidize the wish lists of the insatiable prosecutors and their victims' rights clubs. Resisting the intense lobbying of the prison/ law enforcement complex is difficult for politicians when the public is being assaulted daily by sensational media coverage of crime.
It has been suggested, with more than a little tongue-in-cheek, that during the 1980's private, para-military vigilante squads satisfied their rage in El Salvador and Guatemala, taking vengeance into their own hands without official government subsidies. Perhaps Mannix and the Republican leadership should consider applying for private grants from the prison industry and saddling up their own right-wing posse.