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(1) Another Scott Watch. Note: I am not a California resident.
How's about this essay and comments on ACX?
The Case Against California Proposition 36
Scott publishes a guest essay by Clara Collier who argues against California's Proposition 36. Prop 36 modifies California's Prop 47 which increased the value required in crimes such as shoplifting and theft ($950) before qualifying as a felony charge. Readers of this forum should be familiar with the basic story arc here. Prop 47 passed, 2018-2022 came, more compassionate district attorneys were elected, less thieves kept in prison, and policing was softened. Now it is common in the big CA metropolises for stores lock up items like toothpaste to deal with an increase in opportunistic and organized retail theft.
Offenders repeatedly arrested with hard drugs (now including fentanyl) will face felony charges if Prop 36 passes. It allows judges to send presumed dealers or suspects with large quantities of drugs to prison instead of county jail. It carves out some exceptions for mandated or opt-in treatment-- which Clara Collier thinks is useless, because CA doesn't have enough in-patient beds anyway. Collier also shares there's not enough room in prison and identifies Prop 47 as a response to an overcrowded prison population. The money saved from not putting people in jail is spent on various treatment and rehabilitation programs.
No real comment on the efficacy of treatment programs that California mandates through Prop 47. It sounds like they're probably not very effective.
The comment section on this article is lively for ACX. Lots of finger pointing and blame to go around.
As Collier says, California can lock people up for longer, but there's a hard limit for how many prisoners can be housed. I would think this answer would be obvious: build more prisons. Personally, I still think there's a place for work camps and chain gangs for offenders less likely to run off. Probably more personnel heavy, but less structural overhead to build a camp out and dig a well out in the wilderness. Maybe this is an impractical romanticized idea, or it is considered cruel and unusual these days.
There's an additional argument between people pointing out that an increase in prison time doesn't matter if prosecutors don't prosecute. Which became more common since 2018 in liberal cities and was supercharged in 2020. The other side, including Clara, points fingers at police for being lazy good-for-nothings (my words, not hers) that don't do their job right. For me, it is obvious that police who don't expect the criminals they arrest to be punished are less inclined to arrest people. I would expect this to be the conclusion of rationalists who are interested in incentive structures, but I guess there's enough compounding problems, and policing unpopular enough, it can be quietly asserted that cops are bad, or swept under the carpet.
I do agree that following through with prosecution and "clearing" cases matters more than whether something is a felony or misdemeanor. The value in making it a felony is that it should encourage prosecutors and police to go after cases. It is a signal from the people saying, lock these people up actually and felony convictions hold more weight in law enforcement and DA offices. "I have X felony arrests or X felony convictions" is a metric most police and prosecutors will point at as a record, unless your police and prosecutors consider more arrests/convictions as a bad thing. It can be a bad metric for performance that leads to unnecessary prosecutions and pleas, but maybe it's still better than this alternative.
If I were a California resident, and my city left me dissatisfied, I would probably vote for Prop 36 just to send a signal to officials. Deal with this problem. That's pretty much it. I wouldn't care about how ineffective prison is, or impossible it is to jail more people. I'd start with this, then ask for more. The alternative, which Collier advocates, is more of the same. Which, as a dissatisfied resident, would not appeal to me. Then, I'd probably vote for DA's that do stuff like convict criminals and a state leadership that builds more prisons when they're full instead of releasing criminals.
(2) Among the comments was posted this piece by City Journal earlier this year. I had missed this whole story, it is more interesting than the ACX post, and it probably deserves its own post. Maybe you guys already did that.
The The California Racial Justice Act of 2020 is starting to bear fruit for convicts in the California penal system.
The RJA allows convicts that can show racial disparities in sentencing and various other flavors of racial bias. Including one example in the article of a policeman who, claiming that he did not see the race of an individual driver in a car before he pulled it over, where it was argued this could be true-- but still racially biased because of "unconscious" implicit bias.
I'm open to the idea City Journal is being uncharitable and misrepresentative here, but it seems like California's legal system faces a number of crises. Which, given the statistics of crime and prosecution, is what I would call this trend. Ok, I'm out of steam.
I voted no on all propositions except 36, for which I enthusiastically voted yes. As always, the proposition titles are misleading and meant to misdirect voters. "Involuntary servitude" is of course meant to evoke images of slavery and chain gangs. If that one passes, I am reliably informed that most of the prison jobs will go away due to lack of funding, leaving prisoners without any options to make money.
I entirely agree that 36 is largely seen as an obvious measure by the majority of Californians and will pass easily. I live in a mostly blue area and people who I've spoken with from all walks tend to agree - with the caveat that they're mostly men.
The entire proposition system is fairly useless as the legislature and courts just ignore or distort the results anyway.
Why? If the prisoners wish to work, they'll keep working. If the prisoners largely don't wish to work, I don't think it makes sense to make them work so that a small minority can fulfill their preferences.
They aren't actually forced to work. They may be granted certain privileges if they do work (along with the meager stipend) but no one is forcing them to work. That's the deliberately misleading part.
Here's the full text of the prop.
Concretely, which section here do you find objectionable?
I suppose the text itself is not particularly objectionable, merely unnecessary.
Here's what the legislative analyst wrote about the prop.
Do you disagree that this is a concrete example of being disciplined for refusing a work assignment?
Zooming out a bit, how exactly are we going to think about punishment in the context of a prison?
My view is that there is obviously some minimum standard of treatment to which a prisoner is entitled: sufficient food and medical care, reasonable sanitation, guards that don't beat them up, etc....
If the consequences of declining a work detail would go below that, that seems entirely wrong. OTOH, granting extra privileges above the minimum standard in exchange for doing a work detail seems entirely good -- even proper insofar as it teaches a positive correlation between effort and reward.
They are still eligible to be paid and receive credits for early release, so it's not that they get nothing for their efforts.
I don't care much about the punishment, personally, and I'm happy to have criminals warehoused in prisons to keep them out of polite society.
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It could be interpreted that way. Alternatively one could argue that the ability to make regular phone calls is a perquisite of working, and therefore if one does not work one would not receive the benefit. They're fairly functionally equivalent.
Sure, in the sense that you won't be disciplined for not paying your taxes, It's just that not being in jail is a perquisite of paying your taxes, and therefore you're not actually forced to pay taxes.
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