Like hundreds of survivors, Marchel Hirschfield got tied up in the criminal legal system as a result of a violent relationship. As a mother who identifies as a survivor defendant, Hirschfield was able to avoid jail and stay home with her child due to an innovative pilot program in Oregon aimed at diverting parents and legal guardians from incarceration. Through her participation in the program in 2017, she advocated for early home detention through probation and parole, managing to avoid some of the collateral consequences that physical incarceration wreaks on families.

“If I wasn’t in that relationship,” Hirschfield said, “I wouldn’t have been … in that position of needing to defend myself.”

Now the political director of Family Forward Oregon, an organization fighting for economic and reproductive justice for all caretakers across the state, Hirschfield has advocated for paid maternity leave and universal child care, among other policies. Since the program launched in 2015, Hirschfield has been one of about 300 people who have participated over a 10-year period in the pilot, largely viewed as a promising endeavor.

The Family Sentencing Alternative Pilot (FSAP) program aims to keep families together, reduce incarceration, and reduce recidivism, by allowing biological parents and legal guardians convicted of certain nonviolent crimes to stay in their homes rather than go to prison. Though the program was only available in five of Oregon’s 36 counties, it achieved all three of those goals on a limited scale, saving Oregon taxpayers money in the process through an intensive, service-oriented version of community supervision, as opposed to traditional, expensive incarceration. 

But efforts to expand the scope and availability of this successful program, which is set to expire at the end of June 2025, have been curtailed after pushback from district attorneys across Oregon. While the current version of House Bill 2555 proposes making the pilot program a permanent diversion, it no longer includes children’s “primary caretakers” as eligible participants along with legal guardians and biological parents. Advocates say that this omission and other inconsistencies within the bill significantly reduce its potential for positive impact. They say the bill, as it stands now, abandons a more inclusive and trauma-informed approach that would encompass all family structures and dynamics across the state, particularly among communities of color. 

“We are leaving behind the structure of the modern family,” Babak Zolfaghari-Azar, senior policy manager for the Partnership for Safety and Justice, which drafted the initial bill that included primary caretakers, said in an email.

In his testimony before the committee at a February public hearing , Zolfaghari-Azar cited his time working as a family case manager in Multnomah County, where he witnessed nontraditional family structures every day. One mother, for instance, “was experiencing severe mental health issues,” while the father was in jail. The primary caretaker was the uncle. The onus of the program, Zolfaghari-Azar said, was to keep families, even nontraditional ones, together to avoid these very inequities. 

“Remove the primary caretaker and the collateral consequences can last for generations,” he told Prism.

Meeting goals

FSAP participants showed about a 15% reduction in recidivism compared to incarcerated individuals and cost Oregon taxpayers an average of $27 a day, as opposed to up to $230 a day of a traditional prison bed, according to Oregon Department of Corrections Assistant Director of Community Corrections Jeremiah Stromberg. 

That drop in recidivism is significant considering that the majority of FSAP participants are convicted of drug or property crimes, Stromberg told Prism, which are tied to addiction and poverty and have some of the highest recidivism rates across all categories. 

Stromberg credited the success to the program’s more humanistic approach to community supervision.

“We have capped the caseload that a [FSAP] probation officer can carry at 30 individuals,” Stromberg told Prism, as opposed to up to 70 cases. The department also ensured that “there was more engagement and involvement with parole and probation and [the Department of Human Services],” Stromberg said. 

FSAP also covers substance abuse treatment and housing, including security deposits on permanent housing. In special cases, probation officers have used the additional resources to take FSAP participants out shopping for gifts and school supplies for their children. 

Inconsistencies remain

When the bill to make FSAP permanent and expand it to primary caretakers was introduced earlier this year, the move immediately attracted critics from within Oregon’s carceral system. Amanda Dalton, the lobbyist representing Oregon district attorneys, claimed at the February hearing that the primary caretaker language goes too far and allows too nebulous of a framework to work with. She also stated in a letter that the inclusion of primary caretaker language would result in “inconsistencies in legal outcomes.”

Dalton did not respond to multiple inquiries from Prism.

Advocates of the bill say it is these very inconsistencies that they were attempting to evade by expanding the language to include those the state may not traditionally recognize as being responsible for a child’s well-being. 

Other inherent inconsistencies include a person’s physical location, as the pilot program was only available in five counties, meaning only parents and legal guardians alleged to have committed crimes in Multnomah, Washington, Marion, Jackson, and Columbia counties were eligible for this diversion. The new bill maintains these parameters, meaning that, for example, a parent or legal guardian living in Portland, in Multnomah County, but working in neighboring Clackamas County would not have access to this program if they picked up an eligible charge in Clackamas County. 

“Any county could opt in, and the funding would have to then meet the need,” Zolfaghari-Azar said, “but the current economic climate and revenue forecast is what would create limitations if more counties were inclined to opt in.” 

Advocates say these limitations remain as a result of compromises that were made in order to get the bill through the committee, including the removal of the primary caretaker language. Hirschfield said this is troubling because her own experience showed her how inequitable the criminal legal system inherently is. “We don’t have a true justice system,” she said. “We have a justice system based on how much money you have … or how much self-help and self-advocacy you have.”  

Hirschfield was able to participate in the program in Washington County, a suburban county of the Portland metro area, through self-advocacy, pushing back with the help of an attorney after she was initially rejected. 

“Not many people have the skills of self-help and the skills of how to advocate for themselves,” Hirschfield said. 

This context could help explain the low participant numbers over a 10-year period in some of the most populous counties in the state. In Quarter 2 of 2017, the year Hirschfield was fighting her case, Washington County alone was responsible for incarcerating 2,134 individuals: 566 in the county jail and 1,568 in state and federal prisons. 

While avoiding the cost of incarceration was a primary motive behind FSAP, the district attorneys’ opposition to the initial expansion hints at a larger problem with county prosecutor incentives. 

John F. Pfaff, a professor at Fordham School of Law, explains in his book “Locked In” that prison is a cost shouldered by the state and not the county that sentences people to prison. For the prosecutor, prison is essentially a free blunt instrument, instead of an expensive sharp one that carries with it a host of collateral consequences, such as foster care, economic instability, housing insecurity, and overall public health and safety issues. 

There are no incentives in this current bill that prevent prosecutors from overly relying on this tool, nor are there safeguards in place to make sure every parent or legal guardian charged with eligible crimes is informed about FSAP as a viable alternative to incarceration. 

Hirschfield hopes to raise awareness for this version of the program so that more parents and legal guardians can be aware of how to stay united with their children. 

But she knows it isn’t a consistent system and far from perfect. While FSAP was crucial for her to avoid jail time and deal with the breaking up of her family, she said it still resulted in “a conviction which ultimately stopped me from being able to be housed, volunteering at my children’s school, and attending field trips.”

Update, July 14, 2025: Marchel Hirschfield’s last name has been updated to use the legal name associated with her case at the time of her participation in the alternative sentencing program.

Editorial Team:
Sahar Fatima, Lead Editor
Carolyn Copeland, Top Editor
Rashmee Kumar, Copy Editor