On Wednesday, March 6, 2024, I was homeless in Corvallis, Oregon, burning money I barely had on sleazy motel rooms and living out of my duffel bag and waxed-suede boots, protecting my feet and belongings from the constant drizzle and dirty puddles I walked across daily. I was unemployed, save for the money I could make freelancing, which was not nearly enough, and I carried a Picador pocket edition of Denis Johnson’s short story collection Jesus’ Son around for whenever I felt like I needed inspiration, which was not as often as I really did. On that date in the first week of March, I was also tethered to an ankle monitor, confining me about 70 miles south of my partner and 1,105 miles north from my family and home in New Mexico.
When you are in survival mode, it is very difficult to think of anyone, or anything, other than yourself and these slow, grinding days were taking a toll.
Despite all this, something hopeful happened to me that week, because Wednesday, March 6, 2024, was also the first day I became eligible for earned early discharge of my “community supervision” thanks to newly adopted state legislation that went into effect that January.
Oregon Senate Bill 581 provided me a home, a job, and the ability to be with my loved one thanks to advocates at the Partnership for Safety and Justice and the politicians who advanced and signed off on the bill. It was an expansion of previous earned early discharge legislation, that started in 2013 with HB 3194 that applied only to felony probation and local control sentences. In 2021 Oregon expanded on the provisions in HB 3194 significantly by removing many of the restrictions on which kinds of sentences were eligible for relief. That change, made via HB 2172, wasn’t retroactive, however, a shortcoming that Senate Bill 581 finally fixed by making all of these changes retroactive.
With these final expansions, I was able to shave my community supervision time in half through compliance with my parole conditions. On March 12, 2024, when my parole officer finally signed off on my discharge, two of my most immediate needs were met. First, that very day I was freed from my ankle monitor and I was able to return to my home in Portland. Second, I was able about a month later to find a W-2 job that allowed me to write freelance and provided me with a steady, gainful income.
A few months later, my partner and I traveled to our home state of New Mexico for a week to see our respective families for the first time in four years.
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Only a season earlier, it had seemed almost inconceivable that even my basic survival issues could be solved. It was a shock when, during a meeting in February 2024 with my parole officer, she informed me that it was possible I was eligible for earned early discharge of my probation, as soon as the next month. She handed me a sheet of paper that was a checklist of obligations I needed to fulfill to be eligible to have my community supervision discharged and shave the time I owed her office in half.
I asked as delicately as I could, with plenty of suspicion that I hoped my tone concealed, who ultimately decided whether my probation was discharged: Was there a judicial review process or did discretion solely reside in her office? My officer told me that no there was no judicial review process and that if I completed all the boxes on the checklist and remained sanction free, then it was just a matter of getting her supervisor to sign off on my freedom.
The few things remaining on my checklist were extremely manageable. I paid off my supervision fees with my credit card and jumped on a bus to Salem to complete my court-mandated mental health evaluation (Benton County did not have a single provider with even an open waitlist). I also completed my remaining work crew days in lieu of the community service I owed the county. A lot of people did work crew instead of community service because some probation officers (mine) wouldn’t sign off on any of the community service options (public safety concerns) and the work crew days were more straightforward calculations of the hours in servitude you owed the county anyways.
By February 27, I had completed all my work crew days and all the other tasks I needed to remain eligible for an earned early discharge of my post-prison supervision.
On the day of my first monthly meeting, March 12, I checked out of my motel, left my duffle bag with my last remaining possessions at my alcohol and drug counselor’s office and brought only myself and my ankle monitor charger to my parole meeting, for what I hoped was the last time.
I left that meeting finally free, thanks to Senate Bill 581.
I have struggled with alcohol my entire adult life. When I drink, I cannot stop; I’ve done terrible things while using alcohol, including sexually abusing women. I do not say that to minimize my responsibility but to provide context to the help I needed and by way of explaining why, when I started my “community supervision” in Benton County in September 2020, the court ordered me to complete sex-offender-specific therapy along with alcohol and drug treatment.
But probation and parole are nonsensical bureaucracies. The demands they place on the individual often run counter to their stated aims of public safety and successful reentry. My meetings with my parole officer were painful wastes of time and of taxpayer money. In the entire seventeen months I was on her active caseload, I never had a permanent address approved by her. She only ever approved one W-2 job and it was a temporary one, lasting for about a month.
On top of these hindrances, I was unable to complete either of the court-ordered treatment programs until 2024. There is not a single sex-offender behavioral therapist in Benton County, and it wasn’t until June 2023 that Benton County contracted out with a provider in neighboring Linn County. I wasn’t enrolled in alcohol and drug treatment until February 2023.
In Oregon, the system of probation and parole is highly decentralized, with administration largely devolved to the county level, where it is overseen by sheriff’s offices, and this leads to considerable variation in how these systems are experienced by individuals across the state. That said, these shortcomings are not directly the fault of, in my case, the Benton County Sheriff’s Office so much as they reflect the behavioral health and treatment shortcomings found across the state and country. However, the sheriff’s office certainly did not help facilitate any of the rehabilitative aspects of my sentence, and, in fact, actively denied my multiple requests to enroll in treatment with providers located outside of Benton County until June 2023.
Community supervision, in this way, would be more aptly named community surveillance and it plays an integral role in maintaining the punishment bureaucracy. It is incentivized to keep people on their watch for as long as possible. In Oregon, each county receives a certain dollar amount for everyone they have under surveillance. Even when doing so goes against best public safety initiatives.
One of the ways that Oregon lawmakers secured support for the changes was by writing the legislation such that when someone receives early discharge, there is no reduction to the Grant in Aid budget. This means that county parole and probation departments receive funding to the person’s original maximum release date but can now spread that funding on a smaller supervised population.
This could be seen as a kind of bribe to corrections officials, but it is facilitating a useful proof of concept in Oregon and allowing many people to be free to rebuild their lives absent state surveillance. The Oregon Department of Corrections reports 5,289 individuals across the state had their supervision discharged early in 2024 alone, the first year SB 581 went into effect. In 2025 4,918 individuals were discharged from supervision early. But as of October 2025, this still left 22,000 adults on active supervision in Oregon. In short, much work remains to be done to free people from this system. Still, these are encouraging first steps.
Refocusing community supervision away from surveillance and toward divesting from the punishment bureaucracy is an important correction of a public institution largely disinterested in corrections. There is still so much more work to be done to make it an honest one.
Image: Carla Quario / Unsplash