ROUGH JUSTICE

Long offers a colorful and informative look at the evolution of criminal justice in 19th-century Oregon.

As a longtime newspaper reporter for the Oregonian and Oregon Journal, the author covered the Oregon State Penitentiary through the tenures of three wardens, and as an instructor, he taught writing classes to inmates there. This book describes how the area’s penal system evolved over the tumultuous four decades between the Hudson’s Bay Company’s establishment of Fort Vancouver in 1824 to the cornerstone-laying for the first Oregon State Penitentiary in 1871. In the early 1800s, the region known as Oregon Country was bigger than present-day Texas, including all the land west of the Rockies “between Russian Alaska and Spanish California.” Officially shared by United States and Canada, the area was mostly occupied by the Hudson’s Bay Company before the mid-1840s. Long traces the region’s justice system from public floggings at the fort to more sophisticated ideas in the growing city of Portland, where “the penitentiary as we think of it was still a new invention.” The book’s depiction of law enforcement is a far cry from the sheriffs, posses, and gunslingers of Hollywood westerns, although it features equally colorful characters. These figures include the fort’s founder, John McLoughlin, a former surgeon and fur trader; his critic, the Rev. Herbert Beaver, whose ego was “exceeded only by a lack of common sense”; and professional kidnapper Bunko Kelly. Long’s journalism background is clear in his vivid descriptions, sharp observations, and engaging historical narratives. He discusses how social attitudes and laws changed as a region of scattered fur traders and homesteaders transformed into a place of farms, businesses, and full-fledged towns. Readers may not be surprised to learn that boondoggles and corruption developed hand in hand with political institutions; four out of five members of Portland’s first city council, for instance, “had dealings with the city that wouldn’t pass the smell test today.” The book, which also provides copious citations, a timeline, and an afterword, amply demonstrates that “prisons and prison policy deserve our attention and more than sideshow treatment in the national debate.”

An entertaining and often surprising look at real-life frontier justice.