Held to answer

God is smiling on Max Williams. Or at least the media are.

After he recently retired as head of the state Department of Corrections, The Oregonian gave Williams a big, wet kiss in a front-page story that said, “Critics of Williams are surprisingly hard to find … .”

You wouldn’t know that during Williams’ tenure, his agency’s chief food buyer was charged with taking at least $1 million in kickbacks and fled the country. Or that a few days after The Oregonian’s send-off, it turned out there was another investigation into the agency’s food service, this time into the misuse of public funds at Two Rivers Correctional Institution. A food services manager resigned, and his supervisor was demoted.

As that news settled down, here came a story about a state-owned rifle missing since last summer from Coffee Creek Correctional Facility. (If you’ve seen it, please call the Corrections Department at 877-678-4222.)

Williams has escaped being sullied by any of these events, although they happened while he was in charge.

Since leaving the corrections agency, he used one of his first speaking engagements to preach to Oregonians, urging them to give prison inmates a “true second chance.”

Except for killers, most criminal offenders in this state don’t see the inside of a prison cell unless they are repeat offenders. That means they have already been given multiple “second chances.”

That is probably why Williams qualified his idea of a second chance as a “true” second chance. Apparently the only second chance that counts is one that ends in success, and it’s society’s responsibility to make sure offenders have successful, law-abiding lives. If an offender doesn’t succeed, the rest of us didn’t give him enough of a chance.

Williams, a Mormon, brought a missionary’s purpose and compassion to his work as corrections chief. He doesn’t like locking people up. He wants to save them. He believes in repentance. However, he is going about it the wrong way.

We’re in the middle of an economic crisis, and Williams has been using it to sell the idea that prison is too expensive.

He has seized the same opportunity that the deceptively named “Partnership for Safety and Justice” gloated about more than a year ago.

When that organization failed to defeat Measure 73, which set minimum sentences for repeat drunk drivers and repeat sex offenders, the group declared victory anyway – victory over the media.

“We have now reached the point where our policies, language and analysis are being used and broadcast well beyond our reach,” wrote David Rogers, Executive Director of the Partnership for Safety and Justice. (The organization was originally named the Western Prison Project, a more honest description of whom it primarily advocates for – prisoners and criminal defendants.)

Referring to a story in The Oregonian about Kevin Mannix, who authored Measure 73, Rogers crowed: “The frame of a pre-election Oregonian article about Measure 73 suggested that Mannix is feeling lonely as a tough-on-crime advocate. Who would have thought such a spin was even possible three years ago or five years ago?”

The Partnership for Safety and Justice is another Max Williams’ fan. He could sing in their choir.

In his first appearance before the Commission on Public Safety a few months before he resigned, Williams declared that Measure 73 was “a horrible policy.”

He has said that he plans to speak out on prison reform in various public engagements, and the media will likely accommodate him, just as Willamette Week did last week when they linked his comments on “true second chances” to their cover story, “Jail Birds” about female inmates at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility.

This is a sympathetic look at female criminals who have finally ended up in prison because citizens have approved laws requiring chronic, repeat thieves and burglars to serve some time. It opens with the story of Dawn Pearson, 42, a mother of four who is serving about two years for stealing a credit card that belonged to a daughter’s middle school principal.

Pearson tries to shift the focus to her children, saying they are the ones paying the price for her being in prison. The reporter goes along: “Taxpayers are paying a high price as well,” the story says, adding that often “the state has to take care of their kids.”

Whether or not Pearson was in prison, there’s a good possibility the state would have been taking care of her kids, anyway. The story doesn’t address how Pearson made a living outside prison.  There is no consideration that perhaps she might not be the best influence on her children.

As is typical of these stories, there is no mention of a father. And, also typical, the true extent of Pearson’s criminal history – which is what really landed her in prison – is buried well into the story after readers have had a chance to buy into the contrived set-up: Non-violent women, who are loving mothers and haven’t hurt anybody, are going to expensive prisons because of all these citizens who keep voting for laws that punish criminals.

Perhaps if punishment hadn’t fallen out of favor for more than two decades, voters in Oregon and many other states would not have delivered a backlash to politicians who failed to notice that giving criminals multiple chances only led to multiple, repeat crimes.

As a result, many of us have a Dawn Pearson in our families. We’re tired of their excuses, their failure to take advantage of second, third, fourth chances.

This is something that Max Williams and his friends in the media might keep in mind. They are acting as enablers to the Dawn Pearsons in prison.

Nothing interferes with true repentance  – or true second chances – like an enabler.

– Pamela Fitzsimmons