Maria Paladino
Audio Story by Cody Newton

With the ballot deadline just around the corner, people are speaking up about the issues closest to them. Measure 73 – the minimum sentencing increase for certain repeat sex crimes and DUIIs – has drawn a wide range of opinions. Executive director for the Sexual Assault Support Services of Lane County (SASS) Maria Paladino sat down with Ethos to share her views on the effectiveness of longer minimum sentencing.
My name is Maria Paladino, and I’m the executive director at Sexual Assault Support Services. I’ve been working here at SASS for over ten years.
Overall, in general, I think that it’s really been demonstrated that it’s the most expensive and probably least effective way of dealing with violent crime. In a way, these sorts of measures can be like political grandstanding, kind of like “we’re tough – we’re the tough on crime people”, you know, and with really very little connection to the reality of what’s gonna work. In the work that I do  I talk to survivors of sexual assault every day and we do prevention work every day.
This measure oddly is going to cost millions of dollars increasing every year at a time when Oregon’s in this huge budget crisis. We have dozens of organizations all over the state who are working to do prevention work that is largely not funded so the organizations like SASS in every county are doing prevention work that’s been shown to be effective. The Department of Justice did a survey of all the programs – what the demand was and what their funding was – a couple of years ago and found that across the board these programs in the state of Oregon are functioning with less than half the funding that they would need to meet the need in their communities. We know how to do effective prevention work. It’s possible and we’re not funding that. Here at SASS we have a prevention education coordinator position and it’s ten hours a week – for the whole county. That’s the case in other counties as well that this really important issue is not funded. Preventing sexual violence is not being funded.
I think that sort of the public opinion on this is coming from the expectation that sex offenders are incarcerated, and the majority are not. What you have is a situation where statistically they say maybe ten to twenty percent of sex offenses are reported. The vast majority throughout Lane County and the state of Oregon are never prosecuted, and so you have a situation where maybe one or two out of a hundred sex offenders is actually prosecuted and incarcerated. That to me seems very dangerous. The assumption that by taking the one person and locking them away for twenty-five years while the other ninety-nine are in our community – they receive no consequences whatsoever. They are our neighbors, they’re in our schools, they’re in our living rooms. If there was money to just spend, which obviously there’s not but if there was, measures that work on effective prevention and on, you know, why are these other ninety-nine not being prosecuted like can we do something about that?
I think it is unfair to people to give them the expectation that if I report this then this person is going to go away for a really long time and then what actually happens is their case goes nowhere. Survivors that I talk with a lot of times they do want the person to go away for a really long time and sometimes that’s not what they want, but I can guarantee you that what they don’t want is to tell their story to the police and to doctors and people over and over again hoping that the person will be prosecuted and then have nothing happen.
People have asked me if victims don’t want that or … what survivors think of that and mostly I’m coming from the perspective that I don’t feel safe knowing that the majority of offenders are not being prosecuted. You know, I don’t think I really don’t think we’d need to spend so much money on the prison industrial system if we made sure, and we could make sure with that amount of money I think we could make sure that every child had a home, a safe home, and that every child had food and every child had a classroom with a decent classroom size and a good teacher and every person with a drug addiction had a place they could get treatment. We could do those things with that amount of money.
It’s been shown that there are really effective ways to change social norms around violence and around violence against women. It takes a broad spectrum effort, you know, not just looking at talking to children or youth about it, or any specific group. It takes really looking at our society as a whole and implementing systems change and doing community education, and there’s a ton of stuff that we can do. It’s possible to teach ourselves as a community to be a safer community.