Portland Shooting Not Forgotten

While much of the nation grieves for the tragic loss of 26 people in a Newtown, Conn., shooting, a community on the West Coast is still trying to come to grips with its own loss after a gunman opened fire in a Portland-area shopping mall.

The Clackamas Town Center was reported to have had 10,000 holiday shoppers in and out of its stores on the day Jacob Tyler Roberts arrived and began randomly firing a semiautomatic weapon in the shopping center’s food court, killing two and seriously wounding another before turning the gun on himself.

No motive has been determined, and family and friends of the shooter say he was a mild-mannered man who never showed any signs of mental disturbance or violent tendencies. He was employed and had plans for the future that he spoke of often; all things that seem to set him apart from many shooters, including Adam Lanza, although details about the Connecticut gunman are still murky.

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W.Va. inmate crowding study homes in on drug abuse

West Virginia can likely reduce prison crowding by assessing more quickly the risks posed by offenders and providing substance abuse treatment to those on probation, parole and other community-level supervision, researchers told state officials Monday.

The recommendations are among several findings emerging from a study of the state's criminal justice and corrections systems by the Justice Reinvestment Initiative. The project of the Justice Center at the nonpartisan Council of State Governments began scrutinizing West Virginia's situation earlier this year. With plans to present more formal proposals in January, its staff on Monday updated a panel that includes corrections and court officials, legislators, county prosecutors, defense lawyers and community leaders.

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Treating them as victims, not criminals

Two years ago, Los Angeles County probation officer Michelle Guymon was asked to help child abuse experts study human trafficking. She imagined a globe-trotting break from 23 years in the trenches managing law-breaking teens. "I figured I'd be traveling the world," she said. But Guymon never left home. The human trafficking victims she studied were local girls forced into sex — not much different from the hundreds she'd encountered in juvenile hall, locked up and punished for working the streets.

"That was an 'aha' moment for me," she recalled.

Guymon had spent years in the county's probation camps "working with young girls who had come into the system as a result of a prostitution-related offense. But I never really saw those girls as being sexually exploited."

"I had more of a judgment thing: 'You need to quit that. This is not a good thing to be doing.' I thought I was a good therapist, but I missed it," she said.

"I didn't make the correlation with the girls I had been working with: These are the girls being sexually exploited. This is not just some bad choice they made."

That was then. Now Guymon is serving on a county task force charged with translating that insight into policy. Its goal? Finding ways to keep young girls out of prostitution, and young prostitutes out of the criminal justice system. Treating them, finally, not as criminals but victims.

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