Thomas Hawk / flickr

Nearly a year after California voters overwhelmingly agreed to lessen sentences and release inmates convicted of minor crimes, statistical and anecdotal evidence has cast doubt on the wisdom of Proposition 47.

A souring trend

Change has been swift, but results have been mixed, with little to suggest the dynamic is soon to shift. “In the 11 months since the passage of Prop. 47,” the Washington Post reported, “more than 4,300 state prisoners have been resentenced and then released. Drug arrests in Los Angeles County have dropped by a third. Jail bookings are down by a quarter. Hundreds of thousands of ex-felons have applied to get their previous drug convictions revised or erased. But along with the successes have come other consequences, which police departments and prosecutors refer to as the ‘unintended effects.'”

“It’s too early to know how much crime can be attributed to Prop. 47, police chiefs caution, but what they do know is that instead of arresting criminals and removing them from the streets, their officers have been dealing with the same offenders again and again.”

As early as August, the numbers painted an unflattering picture of change. “In San Francisco, theft from cars is up 47 percent this year over the same period in 2014,” noted Debra Saunders at the San Francisco Chronicle. “Auto theft is up by 17 percent. Robberies are up 23 percent. And aggravated assaults are up 2 percent, according to San Francisco police spokesman Carlos Manfredi. Burglaries are down 5 percent.”

Los Angeles, Saunders added, “saw a 12.7 percent increase in overall crime this year, according to the Los Angeles Times; violent offenses rose 20.6 percent, while property crime rose by 11 percent. Mayor Eric Garcetti says Prop. 47 may explain Los Angeles’ change in course from crime reduction to crime increases.”

Now, cities and municipalities have begun facing up to the problems. In Santa Barbara County, for instance, the Board of Supervisors heard that, in the wake of Prop. 47, “the average daily population of the county jail has since crept back closer to normal levels, and the burdensome court workload is holding steady,” according to Noozhawk.com.

“The law — crafted outside the state Legislature — is meant to save the state $100 million to $200 million by eventually reducing the criminal-justice workload and freeing up jail beds and probation resources. But that money isn’t coming until August 2016 at the earliest,” the site noted.

Holding out hope

Defenders of the measure insist that the wait is worth it. Writing in The Desert Sun, Indio public defender Roger Tansey called it “far too soon to declare Proposition 47 dead,” since “the second part of the proposition — the estimated $250 million in savings to be spent on rehabilitative services — has yet to be channeled to the counties.” Until that money rolls in, Tansey said, it’s too hard to tell whether repeat offenders are coaxed out of crime through rehab programs.

Other supporters shifted the grounds of the debate to Prop. 47’s impact on the next generation. “Children suffer most when we cavalierly incarcerate their parents,” cautioned San Diego Unified School District board member Richard Barrera in an editorial for U-T San Diego. “According to the Department of Health and Human Services, children of incarcerated parents are seven times more likely to be locked up one day. And according to the Women’s Prison & Home Association, one in 10 will have been incarcerated before reaching adulthood. Prop. 47 savings mean more money for schools. It means more money to invest in our communities’ health and safety. It means more students with stable homes, and more support for those looking to get their lives back on track.”

Momentum stalled

The initial wave of enthusiasm for Prop. 47 extended well beyond California, with the measure fitting the pattern of Golden State policies framed up as models for nationwide use. But in an editorial urging caution around the so-called Justice Reinvestment Act, Massachusetts’ answer to Prop. 47, the Boston Globe warned that many fewer addicts are agreeing to participate in drug court “while the homeless population has risen. Massachusetts lawmakers should examine California’s experience and find ways to avoid such unintended consequences.”

Solano prison, Vacaville

The good news is that the California Department of Corrections offers program to help inmates become opticians.

The bad news is that there are four different state statutes that allow the state to refuse to license an ex-offender as an optician, established in explicit language in the law.

It’s the riddle of reform, as California’s prison inmate population dropped 17 percent between 2005 and 2014 while the number of individuals on parole dipped 61 percent.

Where do they go, though?

Ineligible for employment

Both stats are relatively sunny reflections on Gov. Brown and the state Assembly’s effort to reduce both crime and criminals.

Among other things, the state hiked credits toward early release for non-violent and minimum custody offenders and established a new parole system for non-violent second time criminals.

But if you’re looking for a job and have been convicted of a crime involving a controlled substance – and this includes marijuana – forget about getting work on an ambulance crew, a litter van, or a wheelchair van. You could become a real estate broker, a midwife or a speech pathologist, but you’d have to make a case for it.

Any misdemeanor will keep you from working at as a smog check station attendant, a locksmith, a repo man or board member of a humane society.

The information comes from a database assembled by the American Bar Association. Users can search dictates in each state for how a conviction of a variety of crimes can affect a person’s ability to get a job, a business license, a judicial position, housing, education and 10 other endeavors.

The findings can be comforting – someone with a felony conviction can’t serve on a grand jury – and amusing, as a felon is also ineligible to participate in the cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gas emissions.

Contradictions in law

The database also exposes the contradictions in the law regarding employment restrictions on inmates. In California, “not much work has been done on fixing the employment and licensure issues,” said W. David Ball, an associate professor at Santa Clara University School of Law.

“These laws are generally written broadly, and there are laws that are easy to understand, like you would not want someone who was involved with financial fraud to be a CPA,” Ball said. “But it makes no sense that someone convicted of drunk driving can’t be a cosmetologist.”

The ABA database is part of a broad effort to loosen restrictions on ex-offenders. There is a national move to create a bill in all states forcing them to examine their laws regarding ex-offenders and employment. Advocates claim passage would bring recidivism rates down.

In California, 61 percent of felons returned to prison within three years, according to a 2014 annual state report on recidivism.

The study found that “inmates committed to prison for property crimes consistently recidivate at a higher rate than those committed for other types of crimes, including crimes against persons, drug crimes, and ‘other’ crimes.”

The move to a national retooling of restrictions on ex-offenders is not welcomed by all parts of the legal community.

Too soft on criminals?

“This was like a liberal do-gooder thing,” James Bopp, a Terre Haute, Ind., lawyer told the Wall Street Journal earlier this month. “The law is constructed in a way to grossly favor the criminal who is seeking relief from these collateral effects of their conviction.”

The passage in November of Proposition 47 pruned the ranks of the incarcerated even more, as the law softened criminal classifications for some crimes including drug possession and shoplifting. It also made the theft and reception of stolen goods under $950 a misdemeanor.

Under Prop. 47, part of the projected $400 million to $700 million projected to be saved statewide by cutting down on the state’s incarceration bill is to be spent on mental health and substance abuse services.

Such services, while they can help treat an ex-offender, also exclude the ex-offender community: A misdemeanor conviction excludes a person from becoming a vocational nurse, treating an adolescent in a drug treatment program or obtaining a psychiatric technician license.

Additional legislation

Lawmakers are still making adjustments to the effects of the bill, plugging holes and shaping the mandate. Some are concerned that a provision in the measure would allow the theft of a gun to be lumped in with stealing a bag of Twizzlers in the under $950 category.

A measure authored by state Sen. Cathleen Galgiani is winding its way through the statehouse, seeking to fix that, making the theft of any firearm a crime not subject to the parameters of Prop. 47.

Another bill, SB205, looks to fund a university study of the effects of Prop. 47.

Still another bill, SB527, seeks to allocate money from the expected corrections savings for truancy and dropout prevention, funding over four jobs for that task alone.

Collateral consequences are also often unintended consequences, said Ball, the associate professor at the Santa Clara law school.

“I’d like to raise the bar higher so you have to make a case for ‘why not?’ rather than reasons to impose,” Ball said. “These collateral consequences really do prevent people from starting over.”

Steve Miller can be reached at 517-775-9952 and avalanche50@hotmail.com. His website is www.Avalanche50.com

According to the nonpartisan MapLight research organization, Prop. 47 has raised a total of $5,177,162. Of that sum, reports MapLight, $4,716,891 has come from just 10 donors — some of whom were predictable donors — but some were not predictable.

Among the predictable donors was George Soros, the left-wing hedge fund manager with a long history of bankrolling drug- and prison-reform efforts. Through his Open Society Policy Center, Soros supplied Prop. 47 with nearly $1.5 million. Moreover, as the Los Angeles Times recounted, Soros funneled resources into Vote Safe, an organization created in 2013 to help get Prop. 47 off the ground. Soros, the Times reported, arranged to keep a “representative” in place on the organization’s three-person advisory board.

Some of the proposition’s big backers, however, came as more of a surprise. The No. 2 donor, with $1,255,000 in funds, was Public Storage; the sixth, even more remarkably, was Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix. Although Public Storage supplied about $1 million more than Hastings, the CEO’s intervention into the controversial measure signaled that Silicon Valley’s tech titans have become increasingly comfortable with political spending.

A surge of tech dollars

In fact, this isn’t the first of Hastings’ expenditures. The San Jose Mercury-News reported:

“Hasting’s stance could represent an evolution when it comes to issue advocacy from Santa Cruz’ best-known business leader. A benefactor of Santa Cruz’ Pacific Collegiate School, Hastings has long backed charter schools, giving nearly half a million dollars last year to groups backing them, after nearly $1.2 million the prior year, according to state campaign finance records. But in 2012, he also donated $1 million to Prop. 30, the Brown-backed tax measure, and $250,000 to another criminal justice initiative, a failed effort to end California’s death penalty.”

And Ars Technica reported on other tech titans’ giving: Napster co-founder Sean Parker, for instance, has dumped a million dollars into Gov. Jerry Brown’s favored Propositions 1 and 2, which authorize a massive water bond and structure Sacramento’s debt repayment, respectively. With liberal leanings, Parker has recently put money toward legalizing marijuana and re-electing both Brown and Attorney General Kamala Harris.

Tipping the national scales

A big picture has begun to emerge from the political spending habits of Silicon Valley influentials like Hastings and Parker. Where measures on the California ballot have the likelihood of making a big impact on national policy, it has seemed more likely that confident tech players will intervene on the side of change. High-profile outcomes like the abolition of the death penalty or the legalization of marijuana would fuel powerful media narratives about the nationwide momentum — and perceived inevitability — of such laws.

Prop. 47 has fit into the same basic pattern. According to a Sunday poll released by UCLA and the Times, almost half of respondents supported the measure’s lighter sentencing rules, while only a bit more than a quarter of respondents opposed them. Although the organized opposition to Prop. 47 has been well outspent by Soros, Hastings and company, Californians’ widespread interest in criminal justice reform has reinforced the idea that money in politics has not always proven as important as once believed.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s divisive decision in the Citizens United case, critics warned that so-called “dark” money, flowing in from undisclosed corporate and individual donors, would damage the democratic process. Instead, not much changed. Organizations and individuals taking advantage of the Citizens United ruling could chalk up few, if any, major victories to the spending opportunities protected by the court.

In some ways, that has shaped up to make Prop. 47’s opponents ironically uncomfortable. California’s big law-enforcement associations, representing sheriffs, police chiefs, highway patrolmen and narcotics officers, have spent thousands against the measure — in some cases, tens of thousands. Yet the largest “outside” donor, at $10,000, is Artichoke Joe’s Casino, a card-gaming club in the Bay Area city of San Bruno.

While Citizens United was broadly interpreted as favoring right-of-center candidates and policies, in California as elsewhere, those presumably outsized benefits have not materialized.

Since spending against Prop. 47 has been so low, even relatively modest investments by the likes of Hastings could go a comparatively long way in shifting public opinion at the margins. More importantly, however, Prop. 47’s supporters have managed to associate themselves with a risky but popular approach to a major new policy that could become a template for national changes.