Law enforcement course correction underway in California

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Nov 8, 2024 / 16:10 pm

On Election Day, voters in California overwhelmingly approved a “tough-on-crime” ballot initiative to roll back a state law that had reclassified a number of felonies as misdemeanors.

The initiative’s success represents the electorate’s opposition to the excesses of an “unjust” progressive criminal justice reform movement, according to Catholic scholars interviewed by CNA.

Proposition 36 passed by a landslide margin of 40 percentage points in the state of California as of Nov. 7. Unofficial election results showed Proposition 36 projected to have passed with 70.2% of the vote as of Friday.

The amendment makes the theft of items worth $950 or less a felony rather than a misdemeanor in cases in which a “person has two or more past convictions for certain theft crimes (such as shoplifting, burglary, or carjacking).” 

The proposition also raises drug possession from a misdemeanor to a “treatment-mandated felony,” which requires those convicted on drug-related charges — specifically fentanyl, heroin, cocaine, or methamphetamine — to complete treatment and have charges dropped or face incarceration. 

According to a local SFGATE report, Proposition 36 supporters raised approximately $16.8 million to pass the measure, while opponents raised about $7.7 million. Retail stores such as Walmart, Home Depot, and Target were the largest financial supporters of the amendment, according to the LA Times. 

The latest measure reverses Proposition 47, a ballot initiative passed in 2014 that reduced the sentencing of theft and drug-related crimes in an attempt to stave off overcrowding in the state’s prison system.

According to the Public Policy Institute of California, after the 2014 proposition went into effect, shoplifting crimes accelerated to their highest rates since 2000. A recent study from the Manhattan Institute also found a 10.5% increase in chronic drug offenders since Proposition 47. 

Correcting a ‘deformity’

“Proposition 47 was a deformity,” Charles Nemeth, professor and director of Franciscan University of Steubenville’s criminal justice department, told CNA, explaining that the “so-called reforms” enacted through Proposition 47 had “generated chaos and really essentially undermined the criminal justice system.”

Reform initiatives such as Proposition 47, he explained, are “inconsistent with our notions of what justice is in both the Catholic context as well as even an Aristotelian context.” Nemeth, who is also director of the university’s Center for Criminal Justice, Law, and Ethics, emphasized that true criminal justice reform must “always keep in light the principle of proportionality.” 

“For every act, there has to be a consequence. And many of the so-called reforms that have taken place in criminal justice have thrown the concept of proportionality under the bus and replaced it with individual demands and individual rights that are rooted in disproportionality,” he told CNA. 

“One of the things I teach here at Franciscan constantly to our students about criminal justice policies, it has to uphold the common good,” he said. “It isn’t a question of individual rights all the time. It’s also the social and common good of any society or nation-state.”

The imperative of accountability

Nemeth said Californians passed the ballot initiative so readily because they recognize the notion that “when we don’t hold people accountable and they have no personal responsibility, you wreak havoc on societies and cultures.” 

In the year leading up to the election, California Gov. Gavin Newsom advocated strongly against the ballot initiative, according to local reports, stating that “Proposition 36 takes us back to the 1980s, mass incarceration; it promotes a promise that can’t be delivered.”

The governor also argued that Proposition 47 had saved taxpayer dollars by reducing incarceration for theft and that many counties across the state would be unable to provide mandated treatment. 

Public safety is “a very small expenditure” in the state of California’s “finite” budget, according to Lance Christensen, vice president of California Policy Center, who told CNA that the state has historically spent less than 10% of its budget on jails and prisons statewide, and closer to 5% to 7% in recent years. 

“If cost is an issue, then let’s have a conversation about the budget — but that’s not the issue,” Christensen said. “The issue is the government does not want to put people in prison for being criminals.” 

“There’s one essential function of a state government, and that’s to protect the people,” he continued. “If you can’t effectively protect the people, what exactly are you doing and spending money on? The idea that they’re trying to save money on public safety in prisons, it’s just garbage.”

Nemeth described the California governor’s prioritization of progressive social justice-centered reform as “tone deaf to what the general population wants and experiences.” 

“[Newsom] doesn’t understand the ravages of crime in the communities where these initiatives play out,” he observed. “It’s not just a commercial question or a business question — it’s also the safety and integrity of people in neighborhood by neighborhood.”

Nemeth also pointed to the results of the state’s local elections, which saw the mayor of San Francisco and the Los Angeles district attorney unseated. People are starting to “rise up” against “insanity,” the criminal justice expert said.

“All of these things are so-called reform initiatives that destroy the common good and the collective tranquility of the citizens. Eventually, the citizens do rise up against it because it produces unjust systems,” he said.

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Nemeth told CNA he hopes that in the future other states that have enacted similar criminal justice reform measures will eventually “come to their senses” and reject decriminalization. He said states such as New York, which had also made theft of $950 and below a misdemeanor, have made a “total error” in enacting policies “completely inconsistent with the Catholic doctrine of personal responsibility and culpability.”