In my role as a public defense attorney, I feel qualified to offer my perspective on our unhoused neighbors and how our system consistently fails to meet their needs. By far, the largest “shelter” in Multnomah County is the downtown detention center, where we incarcerate people after police arrest them – often for minor, petty charges like stealing food from a grocery store.After a night in jail, people are routinely released, miss their next court date and can remain at large on a warrant for years.

I recently handled a case from 2019 involving the theft of food. The case ended in a plea, with the sentence amounting to credit for time served and bench probation. My time on that case alone cost several thousand dollars. The prosecutor’s time since 2019 was certainly in the tens of thousan

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