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Home » California’s Jean Valjean law

California’s Jean Valjean law

The New Neo Posted on by

I thought perhaps it might be nice to look at something besides Trump and impeachment and Ukraine today. And so as a non-refreshing palate cleanser we have this:

In 2014 California passed Proposition 47, which made theft of property valued at less than $950 a misdemeanor offense.

The previous threshold was $450…

After searching police reports and arrest records, CBS13 found that while the rate of these grab and dash crimes is on the rise, the rate of arrest is down. We turned to law enforcement and the retail industry for answers. Both blame a California law intended to make “neighborhoods safe.”

“It’s a boldness like we’re seeing never before and just a disregard for fellow human beings,” said Lieutenant Mark Donaldson, Vacaville PD.

He explained these crimes have evolved into more than just shoplifting. It’s organized retail theft and he says it’s happening across the state. Cities like Vacaville, with outlets and shopping centers located near major freeways, tend to be a target for these organized retail crime rings.

“They know the law,” Donaldson said. “One of the first things they ask us [is] ‘Can’t I just get a ticket so I can be on my way?’”

He explained many suspects know theft under $950 is now a misdemeanor, meaning most get a written citation, a court date and are released.

Unintended consequences:

[Proposition 47] was a feel-good solution to address the over-crowding in the prisons related to California’s 3-strikes law. A couple years after its passage, police in San Jose were dealing with a surge in violent crime…

The Police Chiefs Association are hoping to get a new ballot measure approved: “Reducing Crime and Keeping California Safe Act of 2020.” It would restore the penalties for serial thieves and theft gangs.

These negative consequences may have been unintended, but surely they should not have been unforeseen. The intended consequences were freeing up room in prisons for more serious offenders as well as getting funds for more rehab treatment for drug addicts. But it’s not hard to see in advance that the lack of a felony charge for repeat offenders would encourage career criminals to go on sequential sprees, each totaling under the cutoff point. That’s elementary.

There is another problem that has emerged that might have been foreseen with a little thought, although it’s not quite as obvious. It was written about in National Review over a year and a half ago:

In addition, DNA samples aren’t collected from misdemeanor offenders. Thus the DNA database has shrunk, making it more difficult for law-enforcement agencies to solve cold cases, including those involving rape and murder.

Another thing I’m curious about is why this was decided in a referendum. It was a popular proposal at the time, and the California legislature is so overly Democratic that I can’t see that it would have had any problem passing. So why the resort to direct democracy rather than representative government?

Comments

California’s Jean Valjean law — 30 Comments

  1. A different version of this has led to the explosion of homeless in many west coast cities. The number of people on the streets with dozens or hundreds of arrests is breathtaking. In fact it’s probably even worse than that because cops have realized it’s a waste of time to arrest people when they’ll walk right out anyway so they just look the other way.

  2. I think the legislature didn’t want to carry the blame for what might go wrong on this. Whole lot of information on the proposition here. Interesting that Dianne Feinstein was against it, while Newt Gingrich supported it.

  4. Car break-ins in San Francisco were bad when I left in 2016. It was a regular thing to see broken window glass on the pavement. In 2018 there 31,122 break-ins and only 550 arrests.

    https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2018/sf-car-breakins/

    Some ascribed the increase to Prop 47 (2014) which reduced six felonies to misdemeanors, but that was state-wide and only SF shows the big increases in break-ins.

  5. “Another thing I’m curious about is why this was decided in a referendum. It was a popular proposal at the time, and the California legislature is so overly Democratic that I can’t see that it would have had any problem passing. So why the resort to direct democracy rather than representative government?” — Neo

    Ann is probably right — I know nothing about the back story — but it was interesting to see the counterintuitive positions of Feinstein and Gingritch: I’m sure both foresaw the consequences, and maybe Newt just wanted to undermine California, along the lines of Dr. Bastiat’s reductio ad absurdum on impeachment. He could be rather Menckenesque sometimes: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

    An additional motive for the politicians might have been demonstrating how open they were to democratic involvement of the little people in the great affairs of state, since they were sure that the people agreed with them on this one.

    Isn’t odd that they are Mencken’s followers too, although they would not phrase it his way.

  6. Also from the NR post, a parallel to the attempt by schools to reduce disciplinary responses to students’ bad actions by simply ignoring them:

    Residents who are experiencing an uptick in so-called low-level crimes in their neighborhoods are baffled by studies indicating otherwise. For example, a December 2017 Center on Criminal and Juvenile Justice report shows property crimes down by an average of 18.1 percent across the state. Those numbers are false, says Michael Rushford, president of the Sacramento-based Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a nonprofit public-interest law organization: “More, not fewer, of these crimes are being committed, but people aren’t reporting them. In most cases they have to do it online, and they end up not doing it. They don’t believe anything will happen, so don’t see the point. And they’re right.”

    Well, after all, it is the Age of Aquarius in California; they just wouldn’t be convinced that you can’t get harmony and understanding from universal unbridled self-indulgence.

  7. What matters is not whether it’s unforeseen or unexpected. What matters is that it’s unavoidable.

    You can’t have half of the population behind bars. No society can survive like that. However, any society can survive with some level of crime. Of course, the country becomes what Trump called ‘a shithole’, but at least, a viable shithole.

    That’s why South-American countries are so bloody unsafe. Is it because of police there being just a bunch of useless idiots?. I don’t think so. There’s some corrupt ones, but many others do their job. If it was possible to throw in jail thousands and thousands of people until there’s no crime outside bars… they would have done it by now, and South-American countries would be safe places nowadays.

    I doesn’t work like that. Police can fix isolated crime. It can’t fix a whole society that goes to hell.

    They just can’t do otherwise.

    California is experimenting in first person what happens when your country becomes a shithole: a bunch of laws don’t do shit. In US, debates about laws are important because the society worked, and THEN, then, the law makes a difference. When the country becomes a shithole, the law becomes less and less relevant.

  8. Entirely predictable, and predicted. Eight years ago, the then-Sheriff of Sacramento County, California, John McGuiness, retired and started a radio talk show on KFBK Radio here in Sacramento, CA. You might recall that KFBK was also the starting point for radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh.

    McGuiness lobbied against Prop 47, and said that it would cause … well, all of the problems that it HAS caused.

  9. Neo asks: “So why the resort to direct democracy rather than representative government?

    The proposition was promoted as a “fix” for California’s “3 Strikes” law that had imprisoned the son of its biggest sponsors.

  10. I live in Oakland, which means my neighbors and I live with this every day. It’s out of control. On the Next Door social network, the incessant virtue signaling is starting to be punctuated with occasional outbursts of real, honest anger. But soon enough the Tone Police step in. In one recent discussion, a serial prosecutor of wrongthink and wrongspeak took indignant exception to the very mention of Proposition 47, claiming that discussions of the measure would just put ideas in the minds of thieves and strong-arm robbers. I am moving to New Mexico next month and will do my part to turn that state red again in 2020. At least in New Mexico my vote will count.

  11. MollyG: An early welcome to New Mexico! It’s not well-run, it’s largely, though not oppressively, blue, and it’s crime rates in ABQ and Santa Fe are pretty high.

    That said, it’s much cheaper than the Bay Area, has much less traffic and is more relaxed. Not so much I’d feel free to put a Trump sticker on my Honda, but I don’t run into virtue-signaling except in the UNM area. Even there I’ve also run into folks who aren’t keen on the PC.

    However, you are out of luck if you want to go to the beach.

  14. Thank you, Huxley.

    I’ll be in the Mesilla hills, on the western outskirts of Las Cruces. Have spent a lot of time there over the last 15 years or so. Very relaxing, and politically diverse neighbors. I will miss the great ethnic diversity of Oakland (within a far-left monoculture, however). Looking forward to new adventures.

    Where are you?

  15. I’ve heard (but don’t know) that people go surfing the dunes at White Sands!

    sdferr: Don’t know about that, though 60-70 miles northwest from White Sands is the Elephant Butte Lake State Park, where the government built a huge dam on the Rio Grande in 1916. Impressive.

    Elephant Butte Lake provides an almost shocking amount of water and water sports in the middle of the New Mexico desert. Hard to believe when you drive over the hill from the south and see it. So technically there are beaches in New Mexico. Fishing too, though I’m not sure I could eat a fish from a New Mexico lake willingly.

    After I left San Francisco, I drove into New Mexico from the south after visiting my cousin in Tucson. I just had to stop in Truth or Consequences, just below Elephant Butte Lake. The town is actually named after the television show! I stayed at a hotel which offered indoors 24/7 hot springs. I thought I might melt into a puddle of bones and grease, but I didn’t.

  16. Where are you?

    MollyG: I’m in ABQ (I hate typing all the QUs in the full name) about a mile north of UNM, nestled in the southeast armpit of I-40 and I-25. I plan to get a better place but haven’t gotten around to it.

  18. I’ve spent a fair bit of time on the beaches or shorelines of NM. Been to Elephant Butte once. Farther north, are Chochiti reservoir, Abiquiu reservoir, and Heron Lake reservoir that I cruised around often.
    _____

    “What matters is that it’s unavoidable.
    You can’t have half of the population behind bars. No society can survive like that.” — Yann

    Probably Yann intended a large measure of hyperbole. But just to get real for a moment, the rough numbers are a little less than 40M people live in CA, and the prison population is about 1.5M. That’s under 4% of the whole population, and it’s neither tiny nor huge.

    I vaguely recollect that when the “3 strikes and you’re out” proposition was being debated a long time ago, the large increase in costs were discussed in some detail before it was voted into law.

  19. Huxley’s comment reminds of when I first moved to northern NM, I asked an avid hiker where the best hiking in NM was. His answer was “Southern Colorado.”

  20. sdferr on October 1, 2019 at 7:50 am said:
    What every schoolboy knows: Proposition 47.
    * * *
    I used to sing Danny Kaye’s version to my computer and math students.

  21. Gerard had the goods on Cali long time ago.

    http://americandigest.org/wp/truth-possibly-illegal-addictive-substance-van-der-leun-saturday-evening-post/

    To tell the truth about those years, you’d have to begin with the observation that truth was, like all precious commodities, in very short supply. Like LSD from Sandoz or pharmaceutical cocaine, truth was rumored to be everywhere but became scarce when you attempted to score.

    If your ambition was to make a market in Truth Futures, you were in business. No problem and plenty of willing buyers and sellers. But if you just wanted some truth of your own, to get you through the night, your head was straightened on that score in no time.

    Read the rest here
    https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/06/truth-possibly-illegal-addictive-substance/

  22. I know the history. Life-long (so far) Californian. Escaped Oakland and environs 25 years ago to take up residence 150 miles east in the California Ozarks. Now looking strongly at NV, AZ, or NM.

    The consequences were foreseen by many, but ignored. Besides the dollar value of the theft, that $950 was also applied to firearms which were felony theft under the preexisting law, regardless of face value. Also reduced in penalty was burglary: commercial and auto burglary was made a misdemeanor. In CA a burglary is committed when one enters a structure — home or business — with the intent of committing theft or any felony; this applied for businesses open for lawful business. These “grab and run” thefts of today would have been felonies in pre- prop 47 days.

    There is nothing wrong with prisons so long as the correct people are in them. Too crowded? Build more of them. It means fewer criminals on the streets and more jobs for construction workers and corrections officers. Win x 3.

    That 4% number was not part of the Prop 47 campaign, only the 1.5 mil, for obvious reasons. I wonder how 4% stacks up against other states, total population vs. inmate population?

  23. Another Mike:

    Interesting.

    At this point, California isn’t even in the top 10 states for incarceration rates. See this. But I thought perhaps that was a result of Prop 47. So I went back and looked at statistics right before Prop 47 was passed. Here’s some information and a graph. It seems that California never had one of the highest prison populations in terms of rates/percentages, and it was already dropping prior to Prop 47. Those stats are for prisons, not jails, by the way.

  24. That’s under 4% of the whole population, and it’s neither tiny nor huge.

    No, that would be huge.

    By the time you add in the people who are supporting those in prison (jailers, cooks etc) you have a massive proportion of your working age people locked up or tending after those locked up.

    Luckily your figures are wrong. The rate in the US is 655 per 100,000, so less than 1%. Nevertheless the US wastes an astounding amount on locking people up compared to comparable countries.

    I live in NZ, which is far from free from criminality — we have a sizeable criminal class and lots of drug issues — yet incarcerates at a third of the rate of the US. That is universally considered a problem here, but at least is trending down. Actually safe countries get down to 10% of the US rate.

  25. https://www.city-journal.org/html/punishment-and-personhood-12528.html
    Punishment and Personhood
    America’s legal system has forgotten that equality also means holding people equally responsible.
    The Honorable Clarence Thomas
    Autumn 1994

    …
    An effective criminal justice system—one that holds people accountable for harmful conduct—cannot be sustained when there are boundless excuses for violent behavior and no moral authority for the state to punish. If people know that they are not going to be held accountable because of a myriad of excuses, how will our society be able to influence behavior and provide incentives to follow the law? How can we teach future generations right from wrong if the idea of criminal responsibility is riddled with exceptions and our governing institutions and courts lack moral self-confidence? A society that does not hold someone accountable for harmful behavior can be viewed as condoning, even endorsing, such conduct. In the long run, a society that abandons personal responsibility will lose its moral sense, destroying, above all, the lives of the urban poor.

    This is not surprising. A system that does not hold individuals accountable treats them as less than full citizens. In such a world, people are reduced to the status of children or, even worse, treated as though they were animals without a soul.

    There may be a hard lesson here. In the face of societal injustice, it is natural and easy to demand recompense or a dispensation from conventional norms. But all too often, doing so involves the individual accepting diminished responsibility for his future. Doesn’t the acceptance of diminished responsibility shackle the human spirit from rising above the tragedies of one’s condition? When we demand something from our oppressors—more lenient standards of conduct, for example—are we merely going from a state of slavery to a more deceptive, but equally destructive, state of dependency?

    What’s more, efforts to rehabilitate criminals will never work in a system that often neglects to assign blame to individuals for their harmful acts. How can we encourage criminals not to return to crime if our justice system fosters the idea that it is the society that has perpetuated racism and poverty that is to blame for aggression and crime, not the individual who engaged in harmful conduct? Thus, it is society, not the wrongdoer, that is in greatest need of rehabilitation and reform.

    What a painful irony it is that the transformation of the criminal justice system has had and will continue to have its greatest negative impact on our urban areas. It is there that modern excuses for criminal behavior abound—poverty, substandard education, faltering families, unemployment, a lack of respect for authority because of deep feelings of oppression. Doubtless the rights revolution had a noble purpose: to stop society from treating blacks, the urban poor, and others as if they were invisible, not worthy of attention. But the revolution missed a larger point by merely changing their status from invisible to victimized. Minorities and the poor are human beings—capable of dignity as well as shame, folly as well as success. We should be treated as such.

  26. Justice Thomas wrote that 25 years ago.
    One quarter of a century.

    He was not the first, and certainly not the only, important person (that is, someone with substantial intellectual and social credentials known to the public at large) to make these points.

    Instead of building on their foundation, however, the Democrats and the Left, aided by compassionate but misled and misinformed conservatives and Republican legislators (including some, perhaps, with other goals) have worked even harder to tear down the entire structure.

    And Harry worries (so he says) that Donald Trump’s uncouthness is the root of our problems.

  27. Thanks, Neo. Part of Prop 47 was a “push down” where supposedly low risk prisoners who did not qualify for actual release were shuffled off to county jails that were already crowded, and the responsibility for paroled felons was transferred to local probation departments who were already under-staffed, with no funding provided by the state to ease that burden. The rural counties (of which there are many) were hardest hit.

    Besides for reducing what was spent on state prisons, the releases were expected to make segments of the voting population happy to have their friends and relatives out of custody. That part seems to have worked, to the detriment of others, however.

    I think Ann, back upstream, was correct as to why the legislature did not do it themselves. They also foresaw the consequences.

  28. Chester Draws, Apples and oranges.

    I site California numbers, you site US national numbers. I used a 2016 number for incarceration and got 3.75%. It’s quite a lot less than someone siting “You can’t have half of the population behind bars.” More hyperbole I suppose.
    _____

    Another Mike, That bit about firearms is really very stunning to me. A misdemeanor firearm theft, if I read you correctly? Would it reactionary of me to say that the Dems don’t give a damn about gun use crimes? Criminals first have to get a firearm before they can use it.

  29. Ach. My mistake again. California incarceration rate is a bout 0.33%. I pulled up an article on California that had a bunch of national numbers at the intro.

  30. Part of Ca’s high prison cost is unions, prison guards is a super strong union and their pay reflects it.

    What was supposed to happen was a lot of drug rehab, to get people out of the crime loop.

    Unfortunately the gop has no political power, Dems have a super majority, and voting laws and gerrymandering- so I don’t see any major changes on the horizon.

    It’s getting crazier and crazier.

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