The law and the public programs designed to implement the intent of the law should serve as a model for the way in which needs are met in our society. With this view in mind, a study of the Public Guardian and Conservator program has been undertaken. This study is the first written description of a young program designed to offer unique services to legally incapacitated persons. Public guardianship and conservatorship evolved from an early notion that a guarantee of rights is a public as well as a private responsibility. The question of the extent of public responsibility required as well as implementation will be examined.

Criminal justice administrators in the United States have been challenged by a highly visible accusation of racial discrimination. This perception has weakened the confidence in, and support of, our judicial process. This study attempted to clarify this perception by examining the effect of race on certain judicial decisions related to the death penalty. The variables chosen for analysis focused on the persons involved in the homicide, the circumstances of the crime, and decisions made during the processing of capital cases.

From 1868 to 1911, the Multnomah County Poor Farm off Canyon Road in the Tualatin Hills housed indigent and sick residents of Portland and surrounding areas. In 1911, county officials relocated the Poor Farm from the West Hills flanking Portland to the far eastern portion of the county. Subsequently, the site hosted a municipal golf course and is currently home to the Oregon Zoo and Hoyt Arboretum. With no physical presence left, the original Poor Farm was quickly forgotten, and the reasons for its relocation have been obscured by the passage of time. Occasional references to the farm in newspapers and blogs retell the same story, that county authorities relocated the farm after a 1910 visit by charity organizations revealed atrocious living conditions. In reality, the county had begun scouting land for the new farm two years prior to the charity visit and ensuing newspaper exposé. Conditions at the farm in 1910 may have been bad, but the relocation was not a product of altruism alone. More important was Portland's striving for greatness in the opening of the twentieth century. The early 1900s were heady times for West Coast cities, and as the century opened, Portland was still the largest city in the Northwest and the regional hub for shipping and commerce. A massive development boom, coupled with Progressive-Era reforms around parks and public health, worked to reshape the face of Portland's physical landscape. As the city grew and local boosters sought to promote its image as a prosperous and beautiful metropolis, some leading Portlanders began to see the Poor Farm as a blight on their city. With land becoming more expensive and less available, Portlanders contested who had the right to which parcels and for which purposes. Real estate, public health, and general development fervor combined to make the Poor Farm land seem undeserving of its location. As Portland looked towards its future, Portlanders' desire to create a great city resulted in the displacement of the Poor Farm and its inhabitants to the county's physical and psychological fringes.

A significant and challenging topic for contemporary geography is an understanding of how the social construction of space both reflects social forces and at the same time structures those forces. This thesis is a case study of how political and social attitudes, measured as an outcome of votes for different issues, reflect the social organization of space in Multnomah County, Oregon. It employs an arealstructural (ecological) approach. Using eleven different issues voted upon in the general elections of November, 1990, it analyzes relationships between ballot items and socioeconomic characteristics of the electorate for small geographic areas in the county. The 1990 election was selected to permit a minimum possible temporal gap in the comparative analysis data with returns from the 1990 census of population. Using a technique from the field of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), "block group" census divisions were "overlayed" with voting precinct boundaries. This permitted identification of clusters or proportions of block groups falling within each precinct. Factor analysis, correlation analysis, and cluster analysis were used to identify relationships among the measures themselves, to establish associations between the measures and socioeconomic data from the census, and to characterize spatial patterns of voting. The following conclusions emerge: (1) Factor analysis confirms that voting patterns for the eleven issues can be aggregated into two basic trends: "westside vs. eastside" and "inner city vs. periphery". (2) Cluster analysis shows that neighboring precincts have common voting patterns that create distinctive geographic regions. A new GIS method was developed to permit quantification of the geographic component of cluster analysis. (3) Correlation analysis of census and electoral data at the precinct level indicates high correlations of voting patterns with two socioeconomic dimensions: status (education, income, occupation) and position in the life cycle (age, marital status, family size). Such analysis was permitted by new GIS capabilities that allow the use of less aggregated block group data. ( 4) Cluster analysis of residuals shows a significant geographic patterning that suggests the existence of a "neighborhood effect" in Multnomah County, although confirmation requires further analysis.

Incidence of youth and gang violence in the Portland, Oregon metro area has increased dramatically over the past five years. This violence has recently become more spatially diffuse, shifting outwards from gentrified, inner city neighborhoods, towards the city's periphery. These incidents exist within the context of a shifting regional political economy, characterized by a process of gentrification associated displacement and growing, and distinctly racialized and spatialized, inequalities. While gang researchers have long argued a corollary between the emergence of gangs and economically and culturally polarized urban landscapes, the ongoing suburbanization of poverty in American cities suggests a new landscape of uneven power differentials playing out between disenfranchised youth and those seeking to police and prevent violence. This paper provides a critical examination of how local agencies charged with addressing youth and gang violence are responding to shifts in the landscape of violence and navigating the inequitable distribution of wealth and resources in the "progressive" city. Drawing on interviews conducted with police, policy makers and gang outreach workers, the author investigates both perceptions of gentrification's role in youth and gang violence and the spacialities of emerging enforcement and prevention efforts. My findings suggest that prevention and enforcement efforts frequently rely on techniques and models designed to replicate conditions in older, gentrified neighborhoods, while perhaps unwittingly reifying existing inequalities. Ultimately, I hope to reveal some of the links, both at macro-structural levels and those of daily practice, between a shifting political economy and emerging forms of suburban policing.

The research project herein contained was an outgrowth of concern associated with performance levels placed upon Welfare Assistance Workers (WAW’s). The Oregon State Public Welfare Division has become increasingly concerned with accuracy rates among branch offices throughout the system. It was the impression of the research group that WAW’s see this increased concern as combined pressure to reduce error rates and demand for a broader diversity of skills. The primary purpose of this study was to explore ways of clarifying individual characteristics and work habits and their relationship to error rates in the WAW’s in the East Multnomah County Branch of PWD. Our hypothesis was that a relationship exists among individual personality characteristics, work practices, and error rates. A secondary purpose of the study was to develop a conceptual framework which might suggest methods of personal management or employment screening for WAW positions.

This research practicum is an outcome study of the Specialized Out-of-Home Care project (S.O.H.C.). The project, administered by the Oregon Children's Services Division, was designed to provide alternative care resources to specifically meet the needs of Portland's juvenile target offenders, who required out-of-home care. The juvenile offenders accepted into the S.O.H.C. project were between the ages of ten to eighteen, and had been adjudicated for target ctimes. The S.O.H.C. project was federally funded for a twenty-nine month period beginning on May 1, 1974 and extends through September of 1976. This study will include only the clients referred and placed during a one-year period, from July 1, 1974 to June 31, 1975. Additional "up-date" information was collected in October of 1975. A variety of alternative care resources were utilized as placements for the client population. Clients were placed in foster families, group homes, day-care settings and residential centers. This practicum was undertaken as a cooperative effort by four M.S.W. students, of Portland State University's School of Social Work, working conjointly with the S.O.H.C.'s project staff in the over-all evaluation of the project. The purpose of this study was to assess the impact that services provided by the S.O.H.C. project have had on the target population of juvenile offenders.

The primary objective of this research was to assess the equity and efficiency of in-kind income transfers. The analytical framework employed incorporated key concepts of the utility interdependence paradigm from economic welfare theory. This paradigm views income transfers as social goods and suggests that social as well as private benefits may be derived from the redistribution of income. This study attempted to assess some of the empirical implications of the utility interdependence argument through the investigation of the low-income housing and Food Stamp programs in Multnomah County, Oregon for FY 1973. Data were drawn from agency files, published statistics and documents, interviews with program administrators, and a survey of the records of 498 Non-Public Assistance Food stamp households. The private and social benefits and costs of the programs were estimated. The program participation rates and the socio-economic characteristics of recipient households were ascertained. Particular attention was devoted to an evaluaLion of the efficacy of in-kind transfers in inducing substitution effects or producing social benefits through the alteration of the consumption patterns of the target population. In addition to an economic analysis of in-kind transfers, the political environment of welfare legislation was detailed. The results of this research suggest that in-kind income transfers are an inefficient and inequitable method of redistributing income. All programs investigated were characterized by high administrative costs. The administrative share of the public program budget ranged from 20% in the Food Stamp Program to over 50% in Public Housing. All programs were found to be inequitable in that households with similar socio-economic characteristics did not receive similar benefits. Housing programs discriminate among the equally needy by restricting supply. In the Food Stamp Program, a complex income determination formula, which is used to calculate program benefits, results in a considerable variation in the subsidies provided to households of equivalent size and income. The low-income housing and Food Stamp programs were also found to be ineffective in producing those social benefits which are specifically related to changes in the consumption patterns of the target population as a whole. While housing programs were found to induce substitution effects by furnishing large subsidies to a small number of households, only 5% of the eligible received benefits. Programs which leave the vast majority of the poorly housed untouched were judged unlikely to significantly diminish the external diseconomies presumed to be associated with the housing expenditure patterns of the entire population of eligible. In contrast, the Food stamp Program provides less generous subsidies to all eligible applicants. Food stamp subsidies were found to be insufficient to generate substitution effects; the food consumption patterns demanded of recipient households were not different from the food expenditure patterns of comparable households with income entirely in cash. While the distribution of benefits in the housing and Food stamp programs strongly favors the poor, large numbers of non-poor are officially eligible for assistance. It was estimated that 37% of the households in the country were eligible for low-income housing and approximately 46% were eligible for food stamps. While the tight supply of housing transfers limits the growth of program participation, an enormous expansion of participation in the open-ended Food Stamp Program is possible. The economic analysis of in-kind transfer programs emphasized their deficiencies as redistributive mechanisms. However, the political potency of in-kind programs was found to be considerable. Policy-makers appear to be responsive to pressures to perpetuate and expand established programs, rather than to empirically validate the assumptions on which they are based. In view of the political popularity of in-kind transfers and the public antipathy to transfers of cash, it is probable that transfers in-kind will command an increasing share of the welfare budget.

Reported cases of incest in Multnomah County, Oregon, as in the rest of the country, are increasing yearly. Effective networking between agencies is important in order to successfully work with the problem. The research problem of this study was to determine the effectiveness of the present network of agencies working with incest in Multnomah County. In order to evaluate network effectiveness the following objectives were established: to provide a "cultural" description of the major components of the Multnomah County network; to determine whether a common definition of incest among practitioners exists and to compare the networking system in this county with others throughout the country.

The present study identified and described the general education English as a Second Language (ESL) programs in Multnomah County, Oregon, offered by nonprofit organizations, in order to promote a more coordinated effort to meet the needs of the community. The study asked the following questions: 1) What are the non-profit organizations providing general adult ESL instruction in Multnomah County, Oregon?; 2) What are the nature and characteristics of these adult ESL education programs, including methods of recruiting, assessing, and tracking students?; 3) What are the methods of recruiting, training, and tracking volunteer teachers?; and 4) What, if any, ESL resource services made available would be perceived as most beneficial to this sector of the ESL instructional community? There were three parts to the study: 1) identifying the organizations, conducted by using an exploratory approach; 2) structured telephone interviews; and 3) classroom observations and/or teacher interviews, conducted by using ethnographic techniques with a stratified sample derived from the analysis of the data generated in the second portion of the research. Fourteen organizations qualified for the study, serving approximately 428 students. Methods of student recruitment were most commonly by word of mouth and referral or refugee assignment. Very few formal means of student evaluation and tracking of educational progress were reported. All ESL instruction was found to be performed by approximately 185 volunteers, recruited most frequently by word of mouth. Volunteers were most commonly trained by attending volunteer training seminars and/or receiving prepared handouts, or by no training at all. Tracking was done by telephone, forms, or not at all. The services perceived most valuable, listed from most to least, were: tutor training seminars, instructional material recommendations, grant and funding information, recruitment of volunteer tutors, and recommendations on methods of student evaluation. Student evaluation was the only service rated less than valuable. A mailing list was created from the information generated from the telephone interviews and forwarded to Portland Community College, and The Portland Literacy Council, whose information has been updated accordingly.