Behind the 'Schmidt Show'

Billboards can't reveal the depth of what Mike Schmidt has done to Portland

The year before  Mike Schmidt successfully ran for Multnomah County District Attorney, he basked in his own glory at the Salem Convention Center.

“I’ve been Executive Director of the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission for just over four years now. … I was touted as having the gold standard definition for recidivism,” he told a crowd of more than 1,200 people, many of them employed in various services and public agencies related to the business of criminal justice.

The occasion was the 2019 Justice Reinvestment Summit held Feb. 13-15, 2019 in Salem. This was no ordinary dog-and-pony show. It was a grand production, publicly funded, and Schmidt was in charge.

His brag about Oregon’s “gold standard” came when he introduced then-Gov. Kate Brown (D):

It was classic Schmidt. A casual listener might think he was saying that Oregon has a good recidivism rate — that offenders aren’t getting into trouble again. But Schmidt was talking about the definition of recidivism.

For decades, recidivism has been the standard by which criminologists have measured the success of any corrections programs. Low recidivism equals a successful program, and high recidivism equals a failure.

If you want to change the data on recidivism, tinker with the definition. Make some crimes count, and others not. Make it harder to track criminal histories. Let an offender off with a confidential “restorative justice” session and — poof! — the crime disappears. (For more on restorative justice, see “Portland’s Reckoning.”)

This is Schmidt’s real area of expertise. He likes to play with words and numbers.

After some middling experience as a prosecutor in Multnomah County (he never tried a murder or rape), Schmidt went to work behind the scenes at the Oregon legislature. At the Criminal Justice Commission, an agency that is supposed to improve state and local criminal justice systems by providing an impartial forum, Schmidt was anything but impartial.

When he introduced Gov. Brown at the 2019 Justice Reinvestment Summit, Schmidt lavished praise on her and noted they were often on the same page. When Brown would send him clippings or stories making reference to something she had read about criminal justice, Schmidt said “Usually I’ve already read it myself.”

He told his audience that a few years earlier, he heard that Gov. Brown was reading a book called “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” by Michelle Alexander, an attorney and civil rights activist. Her book alleges that America’s drug laws have perpetuated another racial caste system targeting blacks.

So Schmidt had his team read “The New Jim Crow.”

“It made us intellectually curious about how the war on drugs was affecting Oregon and the rates at which minorities were over-represented in our system,” he said.

One thing led to another, and the Oregon legislature passed House Bill 2355 in 2017 making drug crimes misdemeanors instead of felonies and requiring law enforcement agencies to collect racial data on officer-initiated stops.

Standing on the dais in Salem at the Justice Reinvestment Summit in 2019, Brown and Schmidt congratulated themselves for how they were making Oregon a better, safer place by creating policies to force District Attorneys to prosecute fewer crimes and send fewer felons to prison — and save the state lots of money, presumably to spend on “prevention” programs. (Nobody mentioned PERS and its ever-growing debt; perhaps that is the real backstory on why state legislators are willing to sacrifice public safety, particularly since most victims of violent crime are from lower socioeconomic classes.)

Brown boasted in 2019 that as a result of HB 2355, felony convictions dropped by 2,000 and racial disparity by 80 percent.

“That is really good news,” she said.

For whom? Not crime victims.

Portland’s homicide rate from 2019 to 2021 increased by 144 percent, with a 241 percent increase in non-fatal shootings, according to one analysis widely reported in the media.

What does Schmidt tell the families of black men who have been killed by other black men? “Sorry for your loss, but we are closing the racial gap in prisons. Would you like to see my data?”

Reforming the criminal justice system to reduce the number of black offenders in prison ultimately helps violent offenders of all skin colors, since laws are weakened across the books.

It has been a myth since last century that Oregon prisons are full of men and women serving time for drug crimes. In this state, most prison inmates are serving time for violent offenses or chronic thievery.

As for the offenders who never land in prison or spend only brief periods in jail? They continue making their living off of others — selling drugs, stealing, cruising through various publicly-funded programs that offer optimistic solutions to “community justice.”

Had Brown still been in office when Portland deteriorated, she would have deserved a spot on a downtown billboard overlooking “the Schmidt Show” — a city that is now more welcoming to the scrofulous.

Most Oregonians have never heard of the Justice Reinvestment Program, let alone attended one of its summits.

The Justice Reinvestment Program was created by House Bill 3194, passed by the legislature in 2013. It was dubbed the “Oregon Public Safety Package” to make it instantly palatable to constituents and media.

It was a turning-point piece of legislation and a slap at Oregon voters who passed Measure 11 in 1995, requiring minimum-mandatory sentences for certain violent crimes. Measure 11 worked because it brought truth to sentencing.

For two decades, Oregon legislators tried to overturn Measure 11. They achieved a measure of success with HB 3194. Try plowing through this piece of legislation sometime. Many of the legislators who voted for it probably didn’t know exactly what they voted for. They took the word of experts like Schmidt, who at the time was Justice Reinvestment Liaison for the Criminal Justice Commission.

HB 3194 deceptively starts off with a discussion of marijuana offenses. Buried deeper in the bill is leniency to those convicted of first-degree sexual abuse, second-degree assault and second-degree robbery — all Measure 11 crimes.

It also established the Justice Reinvestment Program, which set up a Justice Reinvestment Account to pay counties grants not to send felons to prison. The state wanted DAs to prosecute less.

When DAs did prosecute, the goal was not to punish offenders but to keep them in the community and offer “services and programs that are designed to reduce recidivism.” (Kind of like the treatment programs in the failed Measure 110 that were supposed to cure drug addiction. Human nature isn’t that easy to fix.)

Then-Lane County District Attorney Alex Gardner appeared before a legislative committee and pleaded with them not to pass HB 3194. Justice Reinvestment would reward offenders and could lead to  “a danger for us that we can’t manage,” he said.

His county already had a problem with criminal defendants blowing off their court dates. The most unrepentant, recidivist property criminals don’t want to be reformed, Gardner said.

“They hang out in Lane County and victimize people.”

Not every Democrat in the legislature was on board with Justice Reinvestment.

Then-state Sen. Betsy Johnson (D-Scappoose), who parsed the fine points, warned that HB 3194 had nothing to do with investing in public safety.

In a commentary in the May 5, 2013 Oregonian, Johnson predicted the public would pay the price when even more felons hit the street and realized what they could get away with.

“It’s ordinary citizens who would have their homes burglarized, their cars stolen, their physical well-being assaulted,” she wrote.

Johnson was right. Schmidt knows she was right. Now he’s facing a serious challenge for re-election by one of his own employees, Chief Deputy District Attorney Nathan Vasquez.

Schmidt has offered no regrets for laying the groundwork that has made life easier for criminals. He has, however, gone after Johnson for owning an antique machine gun.

His Justice Reinvestment work in Salem has been translated into simplistic tropes like this one found on the Multnomah County District Attorney’s website: “If locking people up prevented crime, the U.S. would be the safest country in the world. Smart reforms lead to fewer victims and safer communities.”

The U.S. is the freest country in the world, and some people can’t handle that much freedom. Where are the smart reforms?

Schmidt, like his mentor Kate Brown, doesn’t understand that prison is a form of quarantine — isolating those who spread social decay through criminal behavior.

His election as Multnomah County District Attorney did bring an end to his duties at the Justice Reinvestment Summits. But the policies he pushed live on.

In 2015, 2017 and 2019, the Justice Reinvestment Summits he put together included national experts who have been featured in The New York Times and other major media. Among the topics: Why prisons are better in Norway; why women require a gender specific approach and should rarely be sent to prison; why DAs should stop prosecuting misdemeanors and how police should stop arresting — period.

Typical advice: “Make arrests the strategy of last resort. … Turn it into a positive outcome for the person coming into contact with a police officer.”

One word rarely mentioned at Schmidt’s Justice Reinvestment Summits: Victim.

No advice to the people who are the guinea pigs for these social justice experiments.