Ten years ago, California voters soured on the state’s decades’-long experiment with mass incarceration. After years in which badly thought out, financially devastating and morally corrosive laws such as Three Strikes and You’re Out made California less safe, in 2014 a majority of the electorate opted for a new approach.
In passing Proposition 47, Californians made a bet on a more effective approach to criminal justice. Instead of sending people to prison for minor crimes, more people would be sentenced to jail, and the resulting savings would be invested in proven crime prevention strategies like drug and mental health treatment programs, job training, services and support for crime victims and supportive housing.
Six years ago, the Los Angeles mayor’s office designed a program with Proposition 47 savings called Project Impact, which funds the work of various nonprofit agencies across the city working with people formerly incarcerated. For many decades, I was a prisoner. For the past three and a half years, I have been living in the community again. I was helped in my reintegration into society by the Center for Employment Opportunities, with funds from Project Impact. A year ago, I was hired by the Anti-Recividism Coalition as a life coach for youth who have been in and out of state facilities, also using Project Impact funding.
In May 2023, the RAND Corporation published research findings on Project Impact. RAND estimated that 52% of the people Project Impact programs worked with obtained employment, with more than half of these staying employed a full year later. Nearly two-thirds of those who began the program without adequate housing have moved into stable housing. And less than a quarter of our fellows were convicted of new crimes.
Those are strong indicators of success. And Project Impact is not alone. Dozens of crime and harm prevention programs up and down California have been created with the nearly $1 billion in savings Prop. 47 has realized in recent years. State data shows these programs are successfully reducing recidivism, unemployment and recidivism.
Yet, all of this is now at risk.
This November, voters will be asked whether they want to approve Proposition 36. Its proponents have marketed this as merely a series of “tweaks” to Prop. 47, baselessly arguing that right-sizing the sentences for petty theft and drug possession for personal use from prison to jail time somehow created a climate of lawlessness.
The initiative would return us to the failed era of mass incarceration, once again flood our prisons with new prisoners and gut the critical crime and harm prevention infrastructure this state has finally begun to build over the last decade thanks to Proposition 47 savings.
By expanding the prison population again, in a state where it now costs an average of $133,000 per year to house a person in prison, we’d rapidly erode the savings accrued annually under Prop. 47. Hundreds of millions of dollars that could be spent on interventions to stop people falling into homelessness, on victims’ services, including trauma recovery centers, and on programs intended to prevent teenagers falling into patterns of criminal behavior would instead be spent on locking people up.
What a waste.
Los Angeles County has received nearly $100 million so far from Proposition 47 savings. It’s used those resources to build a sophisticated system in which community health workers help formerly incarcerated men and women get the employment, housing and mental health and substance use treatment they need to regain stability and avoid being re-arrested.
The results are tangible: falling recidivism rates, declining levels of unemployment among the previously incarcerated, and increased access to drug treatment and mental health services. Fearmongering from Proposition 36’s proponents notwithstanding, California has, since 2014, seen a decline in crime rates, despite the temporary spike in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic. Of course, there’s more work to be done — there always is — but cutting these programs off at the knees wouldn’t make sense.
Prop. 36’s supporters would have voters believe it’s necessary to get a handle on retail theft and drug use. But that’s untrue: the sort of organized retail theft that has gotten so much attention in recent years is already punishable using existing felony statutes. Lower-end shoplifting is already punishable using misdemeanor statutes. And possession of illegal drugs is already a crime. Ratcheting up punishments won’t make Californians safer and it won’t make those addicted to drugs any less addicted — but it will destroy the funding streams that keep programs like Project Impact afloat.
When a young woman trying to get her college degree approaches me with a broken laptop and asks for money to fix it, I won’t be able to give her any. When a young man needs financial help buying work clothes for a job interview, I’ll have to turn him away. All of this is counterproductive. Proposition 36 must be rejected this November because eliminating the savings from Prop. 47 would be a lose-lose outcome for our clients, for crime victims, and for the broader California community. It’s the wrong way to achieve the safety we all deserve.
David Barclay resides in Los Angeles and works as a life coach for the Anti-Recidivism Coalition.
Originally Published:
