Calif. to vote on lighter penalties to relieve prisons
By Michael B. Marois, Bloomberg
California voters are being asked to lighten criminal penalties for low-level drug possession and nonviolent thefts such as shoplifting, to help ease crowding in the state’s prisons.
Support for the ballot initiative is uniting billionaires on opposite ends of the political spectrum, from financier George Soros and Netflix Inc. Chief Executive Officer Reed Hastings to Republican donor B. Wayne Hughes Jr., son of the founder of Public Storage, the largest self-storage business.
Proposition 47, reducing certain non-violent property and drug crimes from felonies to misdemeanors, is a turnabout for the state that enacted one of the first Three Strikes laws in 1994. It’s one of six measures on the statewide ballot that also asks voters to sell bonds for water works, stash money away for a rainy day, restrict increases in health care insurance premiums, and boost malpractice civil judgments.
“This is incredibly significant,” said Nichole Porter, director of policy advocacy for the Sentencing Project in Washington. “This could set the stage for the next 20 years in terms of rethinking the nation’s approach to criminal justice policy. If the voters of California authorize this ballot measure, that will really change the conversation nationally.”
Simple drug possession, bad checks under $950, shoplifting and petty theft with the same limits would be misdemeanors, generally punishable by a fine or a term in county jail, rather than a felony, requiring a prison sentence.
Be sure and check to see if your 401k plan has any of your money invested in any “for profit” prisons before you vote. You could adversely effect your retirement by voting to free non violent drug offenders. They are the “bread and butter” of these institutions.
(Yes, tongue in cheek. Just so there is no confusion.)
There are plenty of people who actually think that way. It is an embarrassment for democracy to be in the top ten of the world in number of citizens incarcerated.
Clearly California voters do not want the cost of building more prisons and Judges have ruled that the prison system is grossly over populated. After reading Proposition 47, it seems pretty reasonable to me.
After reading Proposition 46 I am thinking Doctors should be drug tested and be required to look in a database to see if a patient is Doctor shopping for pain killers like “hillbilly heroin” aka “Oxy” or Oxycontin. How many employers require drug testing before or after they hire you in California? And Doctors are just excluded because… why?
And yes, I know it raises pain and suffering cap limit on malpractice lawsuits, but the cap was set at $250,000 in 1975.
Instead of releasing more inmates by rewriting laws, this state needs to deport the near 33% of criminal aliens who are inmates in the state. By rewriting laws and releasing thousands of new inmates there will be large costs to welfare offsetting any savings, this state continues high unemployment and high poverty rates due to open borders and very few immigration laws being enforced. Unemployed career criminals who are mostly drug addicts commit crimes to support their habits and violent crime is rising. There is a way to deal with career criminals and that is hard time. It is the only sure way to deal with the people who are unemployable “institutional” criminals who are at home in the system and out of place if free. There is no need to build new if the state would use the surplus properties they have now that are empty, like the several closed state CYA facilities that are sitting empty and could be used. There are now nearly 200,000 convicted criminal aliens in the country awaiting stalled deportations from the Bummer comedy clown show.
Justice you keep using this 33% figure. Please tell us your source because I am having trouble finding that figure in a Web search. Most sources for those figures are 3 to 5 years old.
Justice: glad you are consistent, not letting facts get in the way of your preconceived notions. As Don Quixote quipped in the musical “Man of La Mancha” “Facts are the enemy of truth. Illegal immigrants are actually underrepresented in crime statistics
http://www.immigrationpolicy.org/just-facts/anecdotes-evidence-setting-record-straight-immigrants-and-crime-0
http://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/Where_is_the_fire.pdf
Also unemployment California is 7.4%, with the large population centers (Bay Area and SoCal) doing pretty well, ranging between 4.3 (San Mateo County) to 6.1% (Alameda County); LA County being the lone exception coming in at 8.5%. The rural areas of the State, Northern California, San Joaquin Valley are still in need of jobs – the drought has certainly not helped those communities. With El Dorado (6.6%), Placer and Nevada (6.1%) recovering. http://data.bls.gov/map/MapToolServlet
Enjoy
Rick
The 2005 GAO report suggests 27% of federal prisoners in 05 were criminal aliens, with a projected 15% per year increase. The reimbursement to states in 05 was almost six billion to care for criminal illegals in the system. 33% is used commonly as a figure to reflect the projected increase and the new numbers could be much higher with the current unenforced immigration laws. I did see a figure of there are in 2014 now 900,000 criminal aliens with deportation orders that have not been enforced. These figures are increasing obviously much higher then people know.
A report from 2005?
Huh. Sounds like cherry picking to me!
Mr. Blank picture, why don’t you provide the info if you want it although it is well hidden. There is a desire, politically, to hide illegal aliens until elections and then use them for voting, just as unemployed people are hidden after their benefits expire and they drop out to produce a magical unemployment number far below below what it really is. The more you look, the more you will find hidden by this Bummer and the comic clown show. The GAO is one source generally respected as non-political until the Bummer started firing inspectors for what they were finding out including what they found out about his dear friend, the Obummer Jr, aka, the Mayor of Sacramento.
Funny Justice that folks like you belittle the Obama administration for being incompetent, than go on to infer that they are successfully involved in every conspiracy theory circulating. Couldn’t that be called an oxymoron?
And I really enjoy how you call others out for name calling, yet the gist of most of your comments consist of derogatory use of proper or avatar names and blatant name calling.