Vote No on Prop 36 — Our communities deserve better
By Kenthy Porter, Inside Fellow with the Ella Baker Center
The consequence of incarceration is the absence of my freedom, but also the illusion that in such an absence you then are somehow safer. The root of such illusions rests in the false idea that Proposition 36 will make our communities safer.
Set against a backdrop of inaccurate reporting, false narratives of rising crime, and the need to incarcerate tens of thousands more Californians, Prop 36 will inevitably return California to an era of mass incarceration and the criminalization of social inequities — homelessness, substance use disorder, and mental illness.
Soon, Californians will have settled the question on the ballot this year: how do we, as a state, best address the occurrence of harm in our communities — with care or with cages? Supporters of Prop 36, in response to what they claim to be the emergence of a new crime wave in California, believe that the criminalization of addiction and homelessness and a return to mass incarceration is what California needs. They inaccurately connect retail and property crime to criminal justice reforms, in particular Prop 47 (2014) which Prop 36 seeks to roll back.
But, the tools and resources California needs to effectively address theft-related crimes already exist. To roll back those resources rather than further funding them would only limit California’s ability to redress harm in our communities.
As an incarcerated person, my opinion that Prop 36 will prove disastrous for California and effectively begin the erasure of over a decade's worth of progressive reforms might be dismissed as uninformed and self-serving. Admittedly, if they were, they should be. The truth, however, is that Prop 36 is not the solution it purports to be.
While claiming that any recent rise in smash-and-grabs is the consequence of progressive reforms, it proffers the simplistic solution of simply rolling back those reforms with a few extra draconian sentencing enhancements sprinkled on top. For either insistence to be true, there needs to be an actual rise in crime and some distinguishable association between this increase and previous reforms.
Not surprisingly, there is no relationship between any rise in property crimes and Prop 47. Moreover, there has been no significant rise in overall theft, which we have been made to believe threatens the sovereignty of our state.
California has been at the forefront of progressive criminal justice reform for over 13 years and has most recently enjoyed a historically low property crime rate. With a 13% decline in property crimes between 2009 through 2023, Prop 47’s effect on these rates is most evident through 2019.
The COVID-19 pandemic saw an effective closure of our state for over a year and with it a dramatic reduction in crime, with an exception for homicide and assault. This artificial suppression of theft-related occurrences was the environment out of which the return of such occurrences in 2022 — when California began lifting COVID-era restrictions — was counted by some as evidence of failed policies and an emerging crime epidemic.
Put yet another way, the idea that California is in the grips of a surging property crime wave brought upon by progressive policy decisions is not only factually incorrect given the data, it’s illogical.
Prop 47 helped reduce the prison population and the recidivism rate by reclassifying six theft and drug-related felonies to misdemeanors and redirecting state funding to community services to address homelessness, addiction, mental health, and provide victims' services. Prop 47 saved California more than $816 million.
If passed, Prop 36 would undo each of these reforms and result in the incarceration of an estimated additional 65,000 people, with 50,000 of them for newly minted penalties for drug-related offenses. This could cost you, the taxpayer, more than $4 billion every year.
As Californians, we deserve better. We deserve better from the policies that stand to shape and define our state and we deserve better from those who propose them.
Prop 36, in addition to being harmful to California generally, will have a particularly negative impact on Black and Latinx Californians. The Vera Institute analyzed over 40,000 jail bookings from across California between 2020 and 2023 and found that Black and Latinx Californians will be disproportionately affected by policies that seek to increase penalties for retail theft. Equally impacted are young African Americans, ages 14 through 24, who made up over 80% of all retail theft bookings examined despite only comprising 7% of the state population.
Support for Prop 36, however, remains high amongst likely California voters. A poll in August 2024 showed that 56% of likely California voters at that time supported the passage of Prop 36. What this polling did not capture is many Californians have accepted the supposed motivation and cause for recent theft-related crimes. With less than accurate reporting on why people commit theft to begin with, the architects of Prop 36 have led us to believe that the policies that demonstrably kept Californians safer and have saved the state millions in taxpayer dollars are the root of the problem.
If we truly care about public safety and solutions to the challenges our state faces, then shouldn’t we underground the root causes or source of a problem before attempting to diagnose and treat it? As Californians, we have worked too hard to secure a model of public safety that relies less on incarceration and cages and instead invests in people and the resources they need.
