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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 work with a few former prosecutors, and this topic has come up a number of times. It's easy to look at the number of dismissals and non-prosecutions of shoplifting and conclude that the prosecutors are being wishy-washy, but the realities of the situation often leave them with no real alternative. Consider the following case: A store clerk observes a thief stealing an item and calls the police. The suspect is arrested, and a body search uncovers the item. There is video of the suspect stealing the item. This is the perfect case, a slam-dunk to convict right?
In theory, yes; the evidence is incontrovertible. But think about what's actually required for a conviction:
The only witness who has a reasonable chance of actually testifying at trial is the cop, but unless he also happened to be there when the item was stolen, his testimony is useless on its own. A clerk making ten bucks an hour is unlikely to spend her day off testifying in court, and her employer is unlikely to pay her to not work. And unless the clerk is also the manager or has some familiarity with the CCTV system, they're going to need a manager to testify if they want to use the video, and good luck with a manager taking the day off to testify. With small convenience stores, there may be one guy running the whole place who would have to close for the day if he were required to be in court. The prosecutor's best bet in these cases is to confront the defendant with the evidence, offer a deal, and if they take it they take it and if they don't, drop the charges. Of course, defense attorneys know this as well, and they know why prosecutors do this, so they can be fairly confident that even if the charges aren't dropped that their client won't be convicted anyway, and the prosecutors aren't stupid so they can just skip the first step and dismiss the case before they waste any time on it, unless the victim is adamant about prosecution. Some are, but when a store proprietor finds out how much it's going to cost him to prosecute over a few hundred dollars in merchandise he usually decides it isn't worth it. Keep in mind that in most of these cases the merchandise is actually recovered, so there isn't even much of a tangible loss. Paying two employees a day's wages to testify is an expensive way of proving an abstract point.
Now combine this with the fact that DA's offices are chronically short-staffed and have high turnover rates. Some people love it, but most people burn out pretty quickly. You make less money for more work. They don't exactly have the manpower to take on every single theft case that gets reported. It's similar to the solution you give of building more prisons — it's easy to say "hire more DAs", it's quite another to actually be willing to pay for it. We're dealing with this situation right now in Allegheny County. County Executive Sara Innamorato is the exact kind of single, progressive, tattooed, DSA-supporting lefty that J.D. Vance hates. The county is currently facing a budget crisis, and she wants to increase property taxes to cover the deficit and give a small bump to the DA's office budget. County Council has describes her plan (which would increase property taxes by $182 for the average homeowner) as dead on arrival, and she's basically thrown down the gauntlet and told them that if they had any better ideas she'd consider them.
If tax increases are a nonstarter in a place that elected Innamorato as executive, they aren't going to play much better elsewhere. Demanding increased funding for police and prosecutors sounds good, but the people making these arguments out of one side of their mouth are bitching about taxes being to high out of the other side. It's basically like the school board meeting from The Simpsons. Where is this money supposed to come from, exactly? take it out of the highway budget? EMS? The board of elections? Parks and recreation? It's easy to blame bullshit on your political opponents, but it's hard to offer any realistic alternatives.
This is exactly the argument for just hanging them- crime is committed by the same few people, but rarely prosecuted, so anyone who actually gets convicted is a serious repeat offender.
Yeah, we could do that. But when your 13-year-old gets caught stealing a dirty magazine from a convenience store, don't come crying to the court.
"If you want law enforcement, don't complain when you get anarcho-tyranny instead". Yes, this strategy keeps "working", but it doesn't actually solve the problem better enforcement would.
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The sorts of stores that will still stock physical porn when my children are teenagers are the sort which won’t even let them in the front door without an ID. This isn’t the eighties.
Okay then, replace it with a six pack of beer from Sheetz, or a candy bar, or whatever the hell else you think kids steal these days.
You're talking as if "kids" as a general category are broadly guilty of shoplifting something. IME, most kids didn't, and don't, shoplift; and those who do tend to be greatly concentrated in terms of class, culture, family background, etc.; and much as with crime in general, it's dominated by a small number of repeat offenders.
It includes more people than you think it does. I can recall the following instances from high school where I was either aware of or partially complicit in theft:
One friend of mine would steal practically anything he could out of museum gift shops whenever we were on field trips. I don't even know that he necessarily wanted the stuff he was stealing. He was a good kid who got good grades and came from a good family. He's currently some kind of engineer for General Electric.
A group of us decided to whitewash the local graffiti tunnel just after all the seniors in our graduating class painted their names on it. A friend who worked at Wal Mart put several hundred dollars worth of white paint on the loading dock for us to steal. We kept joking about it being a heist. I wasn't there for the actual heist, but I participated in the whitewashing.
Two friends of mine were convicted in juvie court for stealing plants from a local nursery that they intended to give as Mother's Day gifts.
On the band trip junior year my roommates and a few other friends did a grab and run of beer cans out of the cooler in the hotel bar. My role was to create a distraction by trying to get served underage and getting into an argument with the bartender.
I was at a Halloween party and a bunch of us piled into a Dodge Neon and drove to a farm field nearby where we proceeded to grab pumpkins and throw them in the back of this one kid's El Camino. This fat, black cop who was the local fuzz showed up and started chasing us while running with a flashlight. I remember I had to jump a fence at the edge of the field and I actually stopped to let him catch up because I wanted to see how he negotiated it; he was trying to wriggle his fat ass underneath it and I started laughing before continuing running. We all had to walk back to the party, and when the officer showed up and saw all the pumpkins my friend's parents said that they told everyone to bring a pumpkin to the party.
I'm not aware of any of the people involved in the above incidents having any contact with the law whatsoever as adults. I also spent 4 years working for the Boy Scouts and dealing with kids all the time who, while I don't have any specific knowledge of criminal activities, they were the kind of jackwagons who I wouldn't be surprised if they stole something. The entitled rich kid brats who are bound and determined to see how close to the line they can get before I have a talk with their scoutmaster about my ending their participation in my program.
When people say shit like this I always get an image of the naive mom who says "well certainly my David would never do anything like that!" Kids are idiots, and if you think that the impact of harsh punishments for petty crime among teenagers would be limited to minorities and poor people, well, I have some swampland in Jersey for sale.
Sounds to me like you just hung out with a particularly bad crowd. Nobody I knew growing up was anything like this (and I come from a rather poor background, probably much lower class than yours).
Plural of anecdote is not data, personal experience not necessarily representative, etc.
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It sounds like you and your friends were idiots. My friends and I didn’t get up to anything this bad. Of course we did stupid shit, but none of it involved theft. My parents would have been mortified to learn I was involved in stealing anything.
Also, I don’t know what gives you the impression that I support draconian punishments for first-time teenage offenders. In any of the anecdotal scenarios you referenced, I’d be happy to see the kids involved forced to do some sort of community service. The people for whom I have zero sympathy, and for whom I prescribe maximally harsh penalties, are habitual offenders.
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Sure, kids steal stuff and do other bad things. But it is certainly possible, in principle, to have a system of law and enforcement that comes down hard on shoplifting gangs and habitual criminals while applying consequences to the girl swiping some earrings at Claire's which, while unpleasant, are not ACTUALLY life-ruining.
That when people ask for that, they're offered tyranny -- "OK, but if your kid does anything wrong we're going to have him thrown into the general population with the father-stabbers and mother-rapers" -- or anarcho-tyranny -- "We'll start by throwing middle-class kids in jail if they step out of line and if that doesn't work, maybe we'll consider moving on to the gangs" tends to make them stop asking for enforcement. But that's because the responders are acting in bad faith and don't actually want to stop the problem.
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Are you a time traveler from 1975? Do you think teenagers still need to steal “dirty magazines from convenience stores” to be able to see boobs?
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