By the time she came to Pacific in 1960, Claire Argow already was well known for her work to abolish the death penalty and reform the penal system.
She had been active in crime prevention, psychology of prisoners, and social work in New York and Florida before coming to Oregon and spending 15 years as executive director of the Oregon Prison Association. In that role, she visited prisons, lobbied public officials, sent letters and gave speeches. She campaigned successfully for the repeal of the death penalty in Oregon in 1964, drove the state to separate youthful offenders from adults, and to establish separate prisons for women. Two wings of the Multnomah County (Ore.) Juvenile Detention Center were named the Claire Argow Center.
She was driven by the belief that people convicted of crimes still deserve to be offered opportunities and treated humanely.
Society also benefits when it treats a prisoner well, she told an interviewer in 1983. “If we do nothing for him in the prison, he’s going to come out worse and worse and worse than he was the first or the second or the third time that he went. He is more of a threat to you ... when he comes out than he ever was before he went in.”
To the editor of The Oregon Statesman newspaper, she wrote: “Confinement without treatment will only embitter, not rehabilitate.”
She paid hundreds of visits to people in prison and sometimes brought students with her. Linda Marvel ’65 of Olympia, a retired social worker for the state of Washington, recalled a visit to the Oregon State Penitentiary in which the men in the class who visited the men’s wing encountered an inmate who broke down in tears when he saw Argow.
“He was supposed to be one of her successes,” Marvel said. But he had re-offended and returned to prison. “He was so ashamed,” she said.
Marvel said Argow was an inspiration to her and others, especially women. “She was a very strong woman,” Marvel said. “She was years ahead of her time. The Oregon Prison Association was not a place you’d find a woman in the 1950s.”
