2026 Legislative Priorities
Safety, Healing, and Fiscal Responsibility
Every Oregonian deserves access to services that prevent harm, support healing, and strengthen safety. Oregon’s experience shows that community-led alternatives to incarceration reduce violence, lower recidivism, and save public dollars — while prison expansion does the opposite: separating families, deepening trauma, and wasting scarce resources.
This is the year to build on smarter investments that deliver better outcomes for survivors, families, and taxpayers:
Protect Culturally Specific, Community-Led Safety Services
Fund the Justice Reinvestment Equity Program (JREP) at $4.3 million
JREP supports 18 culturally specific organizations providing victim and survivor services, violence prevention, and reentry programs across Oregon.
In its first year alone, JREP reached 5,000+ Oregonians across most of the state’s 36 counties. Programs show measurable reductions in violence and repeat justice involvement.
Why now: Federal policy changes threaten healthcare and social services that communities rely on. Without JREP, increased service gaps and disparities will further harm the communities and organizations already impacted by federal and state assistance.
JREP needs a $4.3 million investment to sustain culturally specific, trauma-informed services that strengthen community safety and promote long-term healing.
No New Prison before Strategic Planning and Stakeholder Engagement
Reprioritizing DOC Feasibility Funding for Long-Term Planning
Oregonians deserve strategic, long-term planning and meaningful stakeholder engagement before building a new prison. We urge the legislature to evaluate:
- Existing capacity and population trends
- Staffing shortages and facility conditions
- Long-term fiscal sustainability and public safety outcomes
- Prioritize the voices of crime victims, incarcerated and formerly incarcerated, and the families of both.
Oregon should prioritize solutions that improve public and community safety outcomes for people in custody, DOC staff and victims alike.
Keep Families Together
Protect the Family Sentencing Alternative Program (FSAP)
FSAP provides court supervision alongside treatment, housing, and parenting support—preventing unnecessary incarceration and foster care placements.
Beyond these direct savings, FSAP achieves better outcomes for children, families, and public safety.
Last session, FSAP was expanded and made permanent. Despite its strong outcomes, the program is currently facing potential budget cuts. We need to sustain its funding to ensure that more families can benefit from the program.
Our Partners’ Legislative Priorities that We Strongly Support
Advance Immigrant Rights
Families deserve to feel safe and united, but ICE raids deepen fear of government violence, inflict trauma and instability for those impacted and our communities as a whole.
Our work is rooted in transforming the harm caused by the criminal legal system, and that’s why we support the 2026 Oregon Immigrant Justice Package.
These measures strengthen our public safety system by expanding access to legal services, medical care, food assistance, and housing support, as well as protections against ICE raids, racial discrimination and profiling, data breaches, and masked law enforcement agents.
Protect M110-Funded Behavioral Health Services
Cuts to Measure 110-funded services threaten the state’s mental and behavioral health infrastructure.
These investments have expanded low-barrier addiction treatment, overdose prevention, housing, recovery and peer support, and employment services, which are proven strategies that deliver better outcomes than the cost of incarceration.
Community-based care reduces recidivism, prevents deeper system involvement, and breaks the cycles of homelessness, addiction, and incarceration.
We’re urging lawmakers to protect these services by supporting Behavioral Health Resource Networks (BHRNs) and advancing the recommendations of the Oregon Alcohol and Drug Policy Commission (ADPC).
ADPC’s strategic plan provides a statewide, evidence-based roadmap for expanding access to substance use prevention, treatment, harm reduction, and recovery — prioritizing outcomes, equity, and long-term public safety over costly and ineffective incarceration.
This session is a critical moment for PSJ to protect and advance proven, community-based safety and behavioral health solutions.