The Case Against California Proposition 36

Nov 12, 2024

The discussion dives into California Proposition 36, proposing stricter sentences for drug and theft crimes. It critiques the idea that harsher penalties will reduce crime, highlighting the rising overdose rates linked to inadequate treatment resources. The podcast also explores the complexities of this measure in the context of previous criminal justice reforms, emphasizing the need for targeted solutions like enhanced police interventions and better addiction treatment funding.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Transcript

Episode notes

INSIGHT

Proposition 36 Overview

Proposition 36 increases mandatory sentences for certain drug and theft crimes.
It's a referendum on California's sentencing reform efforts due to a prison overcrowding crisis.

INSIGHT

Drug Laws and Overdoses

Tougher drug laws don't correlate with lower drug use, even in California.
The rise in overdoses is linked to fentanyl, a nationwide issue, not Proposition 47.

INSIGHT

Treatment Mandates

Proposition 36 creates "treatment-mandated felonies," offering treatment instead of prison.
However, California lacks sufficient treatment beds, rendering this provision ineffective.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

[This is a guest post by Clara Collier. Clara is the editor of Asterisk Magazine.]

Proposition 36 is a California ballot measure that increases mandatory sentences for certain drug and theft crimes.

It’s also a referendum on over a decade of sentencing reform efforts stemming from California’s historical prison overcrowding crisis. Like many states, California passed increasingly tough sentencing laws through the 90s and early 2000s. This led to the state’s prisons operating massively over capacity: at its peak, a system built for 85,000 inhabitants housed 165,000. This was, among other things, a massive humanitarian crisis. The system was too overstretched to provide adequate healthcare to prisoners. Violence and suicide shot up.

In 2011, the Supreme Court ruled that California prisons were so overcrowded that their conditions violated the 8th Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. That year, the state assembly passed a package of reforms called "realignment," which shifted supervision of low-level offenders from the state to the counties. Then, in 2014, Californians voted for Proposition 47, which reduced some felony crimes to misdemeanors – theft of goods valued at under $950 and simple drug possession – and made people in prison for those crimes eligible for resentencing. Together, realignment and Prop 47 brought down California’s prison and jail population by 55,000.

The campaign for Prop 36 is based on the premise that Prop 47 failed, leading to increased drug use and retail theft (but don’t trust me – it says so in the text of the measure). 36 would repeal some parts of 47, add some additional sentencing increases, and leave some elements in place (the LA Times has a good breakdown of the changes here).

It’s easy to round this off to a simple tradeoff: are we willing to put tens of thousands of people in jail if it would decrease the crime rate? But this would be the wrong way to think about the measure: there is no tradeoff. Prop 36 will certainly imprison many people, but it won’t help fight crime.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-case-against-proposition-36