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Senators criticize bills that would remove offender-leveling requirement
Summary
Republican senators warned that two bills the governor backed would remove or delay rules requiring risk-leveling of a large backlog of offenders; they promoted alternative bills to increase oversight and victim access.
Senator Bonham and Senator Hayden used floor time to sharply criticize two measures described in the record as Senate Bill 820 and Senate Bill 821, saying the proposals would remove or delay a statutory requirement for classifying a backlog of offenders.
The senators said the backlog is about 18,000 people and that previous legislative deadlines required the parole board and post-prison supervision systems to categorize those individuals by risk.
“Rather than ensuring a thorough and responsible review, Governor Kotek’s bill would automatically label most of them as no as low risk,” Senator Bonham said on the floor. He called the change “about cutting corners at the expense of victims and communities.”
Senator Hayden said the bills would remove the requirement that those boards complete the leveling by a specific date — a requirement the legislature had extended previously — and that one of the bills would effectively place most of the backlog into the lowest category while leveling fewer than one thousand people.
Bonham outlined a set of alternative bills offered by Senate Republicans, naming Senate Bills 1008, 1009, 1068, 1082 and 1083. He described those measures as focusing on more frequent assessments, expanded victim involvement, improved public transparency, and lifetime post-prison supervision for specified dangerous offenders.
The remarks were made during the remonstrance portion of the Senate session and did not include a formal vote on the governor’s bills in this transcript. No committee action or final passage of SB 820 or SB 821 is recorded here.
The discussion left the policy status unchanged in the record: senators expressed positions and proposed alternatives but did not take a binding floor vote on the governor’s bills during this sitting.
