Oregon's mental health system fails all of us

Resistance to coercion as a tool for maintaining public order brings predictable results

In a previous column, I examined the failures in the police response to the Jonathan Grall case and the Portland Police Bureau’s neglect to meaningfully address those mistakes. Even more alarming, however, are the failures of Oregon’s mental health system—and the uncomfortable reality that, despite glowing headlines, state policy choices are making future tragedies more likely, not less.

In her reporting on the Grall case, reporter Maxine Bernsteinn of The Oregonian shared a parent’s praise for the loosening civil commitment standards from legislation signed by Gov. Tina Kotek last year. Even more recently, the paper praised the state’s “slow but steady progress” in expanding treatment capacity while warning that federal policies and economic circumstances could put that progress at risk. https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2026/01/oregons-slow-but-steady-progress-adding-substance-use-treatment-beds-is-at-risk.html

That optimism is misplaced.

While policies of the Trump Administration are poor, Oregon’s most serious failures are self-inflicted and homegrown. The changes being celebrated amount to fool’s gold for two fundamental reasons.

First, Oregon refuses to expand the number of secure, in-custody mental health beds—beds where people can be detained and required to undergo treatment when they pose a danger to themselves or others. Those beds are chronically full. Expanding civil commitment standards without expanding secure in-custody capacity is not reform; it is performative politics.

That shortage is not accidental. When Oregon built its current state hospital more than a decade ago, policymakers deliberately limited the number of secure in-custody beds. That decision has never been meaningfully reported or revisited. This remains true despite an Oregon Health Authority study—ordered by Kotek herself and released two years ago—concluding that Oregon needs nearly 3,000 additional behavioral health beds, including a substantial number of additional secure, in-custody beds. https://www.oregon.gov/oha/HSD/AMH/DataReports/Behavioral-Health-Residential-Facility-Study-June-2024.pdf

At the time it was released, legislators and mental health officials praised the study. Since then, the state has added some residential and treatment beds. The report made clear, however, that the state needed many more secure in-custody treatment beds. That omission is not a technical oversight; it is a policy choice. And it renders claims of “progress” deeply misleading.

Second, the same legislation that expanded civil commitment standards also imposed new restrictions on detaining mentally ill individuals who commit crimes. Sections 43 through 53 of House Bill 2005 (2025) https://olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2025R1/Downloads/MeasureDocument/HB2005/C-Engrossed place strict time limits on how long defendants who are unable to aid and assist in their defense may be held in criminal justice facilities—even where those facilities can provide appropriate mental health treatment.

The real-world consequence of all this is obvious and predictable: More mentally ill individuals who have committed crimes, including violent crimes, will be released back into the community. The civil commitment system will not be able to absorb them because the Oregon State Hospital will remain full. Police will be left cycling the same people through repeated encounters until, as in the Grall case, someone is killed.

This raises a blunt question: Why are state leaders not taking the needed action?

The answer lies in a political reality that is rarely acknowledged publicly. Oregon’s governing class is hostile to coercion as a tool for maintaining public order—even when the alternative is preventable violence. And much of the state’s media doesn’t seem to recognize it.

The pattern is unmistakable:

• Repealing mandatory sentences for violent juvenile offenders;

• Cutting in-custody sentences under a repeat property offender measure passed by Oregon voters;

• Sharply constraining police responses to violent riots;

• Enacting statutes that codified now-discarded federal court limits on criminal enforcement of public camping.

These are not isolated decisions. I could go on. They reflect a coherent ideological preference—and one with consequences.

Much of the governing class does recognize that the days when it could pardon violent criminals at will, cut funding for the police openly, advocate for the non-prosecution of certain crimes and so forth are over. However, as with some governing classes that are overthrown, it has adopted insurgency tactics even though it is still in power: Public defenders are permitted to determine their own caseloads, and certain crimes can’t be prosecuted as a result, re-criminalized drug crimes are “deflected” to facilities with no consequences for the failure to participate. And so it is with the mental health system.

In a democracy, elected leaders are entitled to make these choices. What they are not entitled to do is obscure their true goals or evade responsibility when these choices produce predictable harm. And they are not entitled to hide their motives and intentions.

There will be more Jonathan Grall cases as a direct result of these policies and more deaths like Jonathan Bennett, the innocent pedestrian whom Grall stabbed to death under the delusion that he was a threat. Police will again be blamed for outcomes in which they should not have to be the last line of defense. This is the future unless Oregonians demand otherwise.