For those who may have forgotten, Prop 36’s passage in November 2024 was historic. Despite opposition from Gov. Newsom, the majority of the state legislature, and a host of criminal rights groups, it passed in every county and won passage with over 68 percent of the vote statewide. One would have to go back to Prop 13 in the 1970s to find a ballot initiative so thoroughly opposed by California’s political leadership yet overwhelmingly supported by the electorate.
Newsom’s words for California’s mayors and county supervisors who supported Prop 36 at his press conference make this clear: “This is their opportunity to step up: fund it.”
Demanding that California’s cities, counties, not to mention crime victims, carry the burden of Sacramento’s decisions is hardly new.
For ten years, Californians have lived in a cruel fun house mirror of reality where de-criminalization replaces crime reduction and de-carceration replaces rehabilitation in the budgetary shell game that has promised crime prevention and rehabilitation but has delivered rising crime, ruined lives, and even deaths.
In this distorted reality, inmate populations are down yet the state’s prison and county jail spending are up. Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) budgets rose from $12.8 billion in 2018 to $14.8 billion in 2023, while the inmate population dropped from 125,511 to 96,033 during the same time frame. In addition, Governor Newsom has also closed 4 prisons and is planning to close a 5th in this budget.
Where have they gone?
AB 109, passed by the legislature in 2011 provides one answer. It designated many of them as “triple-nons” (non-violent, non-sexual, and non-serious) and transferred them to county jails to serve felony sentences there. Although AB 109 included funds to improve county jail capacity they aren’t large enough to safely house both the triple-non-felons and misdemeanor offenders.
Prop 47 is another answer. Passed a few years later, it reduced many theft and drug crimes to misdemeanors, which meant that misdemeanor offenders in the context of AB 109 are no longer arrested (they are cited and released if they are caught at all), prosecuted (if they show up to court), and they certainly aren’t incarcerated.
Californians have all seen the results.
Criminals are offending without consequence. Stores are closing due to thefts. Addicts, many of them homeless, are left roaming the streets in narcotic induced stupors or are dying from overdoses. A nation leading phenomenon in California that killed 10,952 in 2022 alone. To put it in perspective, in twenty years of fighting in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021, 2,459 U.S. Service members were killed. In California, opiates kill that many in 4 months.
This is because the California strategy of “street treatment” via navigation centers and harm reduction programs is a complete failure. Addicts simply do not behave like California’s progressive legislators and street treatment advocates want them to.
Opiates are just that powerful. They activate the pleasure centers of the human brain so profoundly that even “good” people will do terrible things to maintain the “high” and avoid the physical and psychological torment of detox and sobriety.
Consequently, treatment for most opiate addicts must be managed in a safe clinical setting or users’ addicted brains will force them to their next high – or death.
Tinisch Collins, President of Californians for Safety and Justice, (and Prop 47 advocate) recently criticized the US Department of Justice for its proposed $80 million dollars in cuts to government and non-profit agencies in California:
The recent Department of Justice decision to yank hundreds of millions of dollars of funding from groups around the country that work with crime victims and which do critical work preventing crime and harm before they occur is a tragedy. It will only make communities far less safe and far less resilient.
Prop 36 is intended to stop the revolving door of addicted, and often homeless, thieves by creating a “treatment mandated felony,” requiring that offenders accept treatment or find themselves incarcerated. Californians agreed.
If $80 million in federal DOJ grants are “critical” to crime prevention in California (in fact 2/3 of it goes to just Alameda and San Francisco Counties), what will be the consequences of Newson’s refusal to fund Prop 36?
Californians know the answer – at least 68 percent of them do.
Steve Smith is a senior fellow in urban studies at the Pacific Research Institute, focusing on California’s growing crime problem.
