Housebound

Washington state offers an alternative to sending parents to prison. Is Oregon willing to try it?

Michelle Newell busted up her family in 2010 with a repeat conviction for writing bad checks to cover a drug habit. The state sent her to Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville, Oregon’s prison for women. Her children were taken away from her Southeast Portland home. One went into foster care. Two others were sent to Prineville and Roseburg to live with their fathers, men who had drug habits of their own.

"One day I was their only parent," Newell, 39, says today. "And the next day I was not there at all."

She got out of prison in 2012, and it took nearly two years of custody fights and emotional trauma before she could put her family back together.

It's a pattern repeated in the lives of scores of women sent to Coffee Creek every year—and something lawmakers hope to curb.

A bill in Salem modeled after a 5-year-old program in Washington would give nonviolent offenders like Newell a chance to stay with their kids while getting their acts together.

House Bill 3503, introduced by Rep. Jennifer Williamson (D-Portland) and Rep. Andy Olson (R-Albany), would test-drive alternative sentences for moms and dads who have custody of their minor children when they commit crimes.

Instead of going to prison, parents could stay home with their kids under what's known as community supervision—intensive monitoring coupled with supports such as drug treatment, vocational training and parenting classes. Offenders who slip up in a big way would be sent to prison to serve a full sentence.

"This is about keeping families together and doing what's best for kids," Williamson says.

But it's also about slowing the growth of the state's population of female inmates.

Coffee Creek was designed to hold 1,253 women, but it currently has 1,275, according to the Oregon Department of Corrections. State officials say increases in female inmates could force the state to open a new women's prison at a cost of $16 million, plus $13 million a biennium to operate.

Doug Harcleroad, executive director of the Oregon District Attorneys Association, thinks his DAs will be either neutral or support the bill. The DAs had opposed an earlier provision that would have given inmates with children early release.

Clatsop County DA Josh Marquis questions if the program goes too far in keeping some criminals out of prison. "We are not one of those states that are systemically placing low-risk offenders who committed low-level offenses in prison," he says.

The Corrections Department recently ended an effective but expensive program that helped a small number of Coffee Creek inmates stay connected to their kids while in prison. The program brought inmates and their children together and offered the women classes on parenting and other skills they could use once they got out of prison ("Hard Time Gets Harder," WW, Dec. 10, 2014).

Williamson fought the cutting of that program. The bill she introduced with Olson is intended to save money while accomplishing the same goals.

Newell, for example, rarely heard from or saw her children while she was in prison. Her two boys' fathers never brought them to visit. 

Newell occasionally got to talk to one of the boys when he visited Newell's mother in Portland and she arranged phone calls. But her mother died part way through Newell's sentence, and the phone calls stopped. The Department of Human Services helped Newell's daughter in foster care make three visits in the course of nearly two years.

"It was tough," Newell says. "We're still in family therapy."

That trauma is what Washington officials are trying to avoid with their alternative sentencing program for parents, which it launched in 2010. 

Parents with custody of minor children may be considered for 12 months of "community custody" instead of prison, if they're not guilty of sex crimes or other violent offenses, and if they don't face deportation.

A judge approves the alternative sentencing. "You have to be able to show there's motivation to change behavior," says Susan Leavell, who runs the Washington program.

Leavell says 120 offenders—mostly women—have completed community custody while 50 have gone back to prison. Among those who finished the program, recidivism is about 6 percent, compared with 29 percent statewide.

It also saves money. Leavell says it costs about $90 a day to house a mom or dad in prison versus $32 to supervise him or her in the community.

Nova Sweet, 42, got out of Coffee Creek in February after serving part of a 56-month sentence on burglary and drug charges. She has two children and took part in the in-prison program for mothers that the Corrections Department recently shut down.

Sweet says Williamson's bill would help too few parents and do nothing for moms who are already incarcerated.

“Williamson’s bill alone is noble,” Sweet says, “but I don’t think it’s enough.” 

WWeek 2015

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