On a key question involving criminal justice, states across the nation have made a basic mistake: They reject 100-plus years of evidence from developed nations across the world that crime is mostly a young man’s game. So they lock up tens of thousands of aging prisoners, at extreme expense, for no logical reason.
In California, criminal justice reformers have made a basic mistake in the opposition direction. Proposition 47, approved by voters in 2014, reclassified many nonviolent property and drug crimes as misdemeanors. But by putting it into law that retail thefts of up to $950 could only be prosecuted as misdemeanors, the measure incentivized theft. Thanks to a signature-gathering campaign organized by district attorneys across the state, in November, voters will be able sharply reduce this incentive. The $950 threshold would be eliminated for a third offense, allowing serial thieves to be charged with felonies.
This is a reasonable fix to a well-intentioned but flawed law. But as the Los Angeles Times’ George Skelton reported June 17, Gov. Gavin Newsom and some Democratic leaders want to hurt the measure’s prospects. They may insert “poison pills” into a bipartisanly popular package of legal reform bills that would give prosecutors more tools to take on retail crime. If the bills become laws, the “poison pills” would invalidate them should the DAs’ measure .
Since the bills and the ballot measure have the same goal, Skelton poked around to determine what were the motives for this ploy. One was legit — the fear that the measure went too far and would revive the era of mass incarceration. But one was deeply cynical: the fear that the ballot measure would prove so popular it would help tough-on-crime Republican candidates in six contested races for House seats in the Golden State.
Now, of course Democrats want to retake control of the House after losing their majority in 2022. But polls show 43 percent of state moderates have negative views of both parties, convinced that neither can be trusted to act in the public’s interest. California isn’t as deep blue as some may assume. If the governor pursues his cynical crime maneuvering, this distrust will, and should, keep growing.
The hope that the ploy would get the DAs to pull their measure before a June 27 deadline didn’t work. Voters will get a chance to fix Proposition 47. But they should be able to do so without shabby threats that their will backfire by invalidating needed laws.
