Kate Brown was the 38th Governor of Oregon, serving two terms from 2015-2023. Before being elected governor, she served Oregon in the roles of state representative, senate majority leader, and secretary of state. Brown has worked in public service for over 30 years and made history during her time in office by appointing a diverse array of judges to Oregon’s court system and commuting the sentences of all prisoners on Oregon’s death row. HPR spoke with Brown about her historic tenure in office, including her measures to fight racism, her status as the first openly LGBTQ+ governor of a U.S. state, and her take on issues facing Oregon today.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Harvard Political Review: I wanted to start out by asking, I read a bit about your background before coming to Oregon: born in Spain, moved to Minnesota as a child, and then attended the University of Colorado Boulder. So how did you get to Oregon and what made you want to stay and devote so much of your time to the state?
Gov. Kate Brown: I came to Oregon to start law school in the fall of 1982, and I looked at a number of law schools, but I wanted to study environmental law, and I wanted to be an environmental lawyer. Northwestern School of Law at Lewis and Clark College had one of the best programs in the country, and I loved the law school. I love studying environmental law, and I would have hated practicing environmental law. But I fell in love with Oregon.
I’ve never left, and I think it is in part the stark beauty of Oregon. From Portland, you can be at the coast in an hour and a half. You can be on Mount Hood, skiing, in an hour and a half. You can be in stark desert in eastern Oregon in about five hours. So I think it is both the diversity and the beauty of the state. Oregon also has a very progressive public policy ethic that I very much connected with. And the people are amazing. I think for folks growing up in the Midwest, moving to the Northwest is a really easy move, but I just loved it. I love it to this day. It’s my home, and it is where I will be forever.
HPR: So you spent time in Oregon as a state representative, senator, senate majority leader, and secretary of state before you were elected governor. What did you learn from each of those positions?
KB: I started in the state legislature relatively young. I came in as an idealist. And I think I am closing out my time in public service, at least the elected portion of public service as a pragmatist at a relatively young age in the legislature. I learned that you can get more done if you don’t burn any bridges. And so, regardless of the issue, I worked hard to not make enemies and to at least try and hear from the other side about what they were trying to accomplish and what they wanted to get done in hopes of creating a win-win situation.
When I became the caucus leader, which was in 1999, I had caucus members from very diverse parts of the state and very diverse perspectives. I saw the role as a leader as making sure they had what they needed for their districts and making sure that they could shine in the legislative process. Having to work for folks that are substantially more conservative than you shifts your perspective. And as the Democratic leader, I realized I represented all of the Democrats in the state, not just from my district. So that was really a shift in thinking.
But the other piece was in the late 90s, I started seeing my spouse, my husband. He was working for the Wallowa-Whitman, which is the National Forest in the most northeastern county in Oregon, so it’s fairly remote. It’s about five hours from Portland. It is very rural, and it is stunningly beautiful. It’s considered the Swiss Alps of Oregon. I got a taste of what it’s like to live in a rural community. You would go to the grocery store, and you’d end up meeting someone and talking for 10 minutes. I got to know the mayor of Enterprise, Susan Roberts. She is still a county commissioner to this day. And I don’t know that we became friends, but we certainly became colleagues, and she visited me in the state capitol. I had friends who were worried about cougars, and the impact of cougars on their children when they were out hiking. So it changes your perspective. It was really good to spend time in that remote rural community. And it still is really amazingly beautiful and I love to visit whenever I can.
HPR: You also made history in your state and in the U.S. as the first openly LGBTQ person elected governor of a U.S. state and the second woman elected governor of Oregon. What was the journey like to the governorship, and what do those distinctions mean to you?
KB: The journey was very interesting and very challenging. I came into office under unusual circumstances. My governor resigned due to an ethics scandal. So I had five days’ notice to be ready to be governor, which wasn’t very much time. It was quite a challenging transition. I had a lot of help from a lot of great people, including amazing staff. But throughout my tenure as governor, Oregon has faced crisis upon crisis, and my role as governor really became crisis management, from the horrific UCC shooting in 2015 to historic wildfires — the Labor Day wildfires of 2020 — and the pandemic that we all went through in the United States and, frankly, across the world. And my goal throughout that time was to make sure that Oregon would be a place where everyone, literally everyone, could thrive, and that all of our children could achieve their full potential. And I hope that I left the state in a better place and I think I did in terms of the identity issues.
I was really proud to be the first LGBTQIA governor in the country. I know that I would not have been in that particular position without the support of gay rights groups across the country, particularly the Victory Fund and the Human Rights Campaign are very supportive. But I think what’s most important about that is that young people across the country might see themselves in me. They might see someone who’s in elected leadership and realize that they can do that. And we have a saying, “You can’t be what you can’t see.” And I think it’s really important for young people to see the diversity of the LGBTQIA spectrum and elected leadership.
So I hope my presence encourages more people in the LGBTQIA community to run for office. And I think our elected leadership serves our country and our state the best when it is diverse and reflective of the communities throughout our state and our country. And in terms of gender, it was really wonderful to have the support of the first woman governor, Barbara Roberts. There’s still a lot of discrimination, both based on gender and sexual orientation. I hope that we are reducing that discrimination. And I think again, seeing more people in leadership that are reflective of our communities helps change that changes people’s hearts and changes people’s minds.
HPR: I want to switch gears a little bit to some of the things you’ve achieved during your administration, one of those being your commitment to expanding clemency. You also spoke last night at Harvard about mass incarceration. So why was clemency so important to your time in office and what do you think needs to change about the criminal justice system both in Oregon and the United States?
KB: So the criminal justice system in this country is based on the subjugation of Black and Brown people and Indigenous people. And our mass incarceration numbers reflect that. Not only does the United States incarcerate the most people of just about any country in the entire world, but our incarceration rates are disproportionately impacting our Black and Brown communities. In Oregon, our get-tough-on-crime measures have substantially impacted the Black community. Young Black men have been locked up under Ballot Measure 11 at a rate 17 times greater than their white counterparts. The number of women that have been incarcerated has tripled since both Ballot Measure 11 and Ballot Measure 57 have passed.
For me, coming into public service with a very clear mission of being a voice for the voiceless and having a passion to eradicate racism and sexism and homophobia, seeing, unfortunately, one of the greatest impacts of racism is in our criminal justice system, I felt it was incumbent upon me to do everything in my power to embed fairness, justice, and equity in the system and use the tools that I had as governor to make the system fairer.
Clemency power is, I believe, one of the most powerful tools that executives have to insert justice into our criminal justice system. I think that the work that my team and I did will have a tremendous impact, I hope, not only in Oregon but across the country. That was a total of roughly 1,100 commutations: the entire death row of 17 people, 47,000 marijuana pardons, and $14 million in fines and remissions. Clemency is a unique power that executives hold, and I think it should be used more broadly to begin to eliminate the disparities that exist in the criminal justice system.
The executive has other tools as well, including appointments to the judicial branch and parole board depending upon the particular state, as well as setting directions of state agencies like the Department of Corrections, and they also have the ability to influence public policy. I used all of those and hope I did some good in the system. I know that 40% of my commutations were Black people given the disproportionality of people in Oregon’s prison system, so it feels like we’re beginning to make steps in the right direction.
HPR: Do you think that things are looking up in terms of the future?
KB: Generally speaking? Yes, I think there are a lot of challenges in terms of reforming the criminal justice system. Racism was not built overnight. It will be deconstructed as it was built: brick by brick. But it’s going to take strategic, methodical, focused work on all of our parts. I think it’s going to have to be collaborative. I think it’s going to have to be thoughtful. Right now, after this last election cycle, a lot of voters are concerned. They’re afraid right now. They don’t feel safe because of the crime rates. Advocates are going to have to figure out how we at the same time transform our criminal justice system and ensure that our constituents and our neighbors feel safe, and that is a really challenging conversation to have. It is not one we have been very successful at as advocates over the last few decades. I think we need to really rethink how we’re looking at transformation.
