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Why is Multnomah County still spending millions to churn non-violent behavioral offenses through the criminal justice system?

by Emily Green | 15 Apr 2016

More than a thousand quality-of-life crimes are prosecuted in Multnomah County each year.

These crimes are typically non-violent, low-level offenses believed to lower the quality of life for people who live in or frequent the area where they are committed.

They include infringements such as trespassing, disorderly conduct and offensive littering – the charge someone would face for urinating in public – and can result in arrest, being booked into jail, criminal prosecution and in some cases, lengthy jail sentences.

Police departments across the nation began to increase arrests for these types of crimes in the 1980s and 1990s after criminologists George Kelling and James Wilson suggested a new approach to policing they claimed effectively lowers crime rates. They called it “broken-windows theory” in an article they penned for The Atlantic Monthly in 1982…

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