by Cathleen Williams, Homeward Street Journal
“With California dealing with such a serious housing crisis—actually I would say beyond a crisis, we are living through a housing disaster—the idea of re-introducing tens if not hundreds of thousands of felonies into families across California [through Prop. 36] will make that problem not only worse, but it will make it unimaginably worse. It’s not about fixing anything or making anyone safer. Instead, it’s a re-investment in the prison-industrial complex because it is a big cash cow, and power grab by certain special interests in the state of California…” Lex Steppling, LA Community Action Network.
The fight against Proposition 36 is gathering. Recently, grassroots organizations came together from across the state—from Humboldt County to San Diego—to get out the vote against Prop. 36 and let the public know of the danger.
Prop. 36 elevates nonviolent offenses like petty theft to felonies and imposes harsh prison sentences on low level drug offenses, which will be on California’s November ballot. It is a return to California’s ruinous “three strikes” rule, as well as other punitive laws, and an attempt to rebrand the failed war on drugs, which Emily Kaltenbach of the Drug Policy Alliance labels as “a war on class and race.”
The campaign to put Prop. 36 on the ballot is funded by a coalition of retail corporations, including Wal-Mart and Target, claiming that theft has increased when in fact it has been trending downward since the pandemic. A key ally of this corporate-funded initiative is a standard bearer for law enforcement, the California District Attorneys Association. Significantly, it is also backed by the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, the prison guards union that recently received an almost $1 billion pay and benefits package from the state legislature.
Using fear and misinformation to manipulate California voters, the entire Yes on 36 campaign is based on lies: In addition to the provably false claim that overall crime is increasing the campaign claims that the measure will get more people into drug treatment, when it will actually decrease funding for treatment and force people who want treatment to go to prison instead. Supporters claim that the proposition addresses homelessness when it actually reduces funding for drug disorder treatment and provides zero dollars for housing, while allocating hundreds of millions for prisons and jails.
Prop. 36 is designed to roll back the gains of the abolitionist movement against police violence and criminalization—powerfully expressed in the George Floyd uprisings of 2020, which brought together millions in multi-racial protests. This movement has won sentencing reforms and a 25% reduction of the prison population nationwide from its peak in 2009.
Prop. 36 proponents aim to repeal Prop. 47, the 2014 initiative that reduced certain nonviolent drug and property crimes to misdemeanors, limiting penalties and keeping offenders away from state prison. Prop. 47 has saved over $800 million by reducing incarceration, and redirected those funds to behavioral health treatment and other critical services.
Prop. 36 is not an isolated California proposition; it is an integral part of the ongoing nationwide fascist campaign to take over the government which is laid out in Project 2025, the playbook of the Trump candidacy.
Prop. 36 will funnel millions each tear into the prison-industrial complex. The corporate class is promoting Prop. 36 for political reasons, trying to consolidate its grip on the state and the electorate itself by preying on fears about crime. It benefits the retail industry by activating a police response to felonies at taxpayer expense rather than paying private security to handle the same offenses that are charged as misdemeanors.
It also wants to reinforce the lie that homelessness is caused by drug addiction, not by destitution.
The financial, insurance and real estate industries are treating housing as a profit-making commodity while the economy is being revolutionized by technology. This rapidly automating system can no longer provide living wage work, and resultingly can no longer distribute the wealth of the society, which is increasingly concentrated in billionaire dynasties.
The revolution in technology has created a growing mass of dispossessed people, the most vulnerable part of the working class, including the unhoused in their millions. They have been abandoned by the corporate state—and criminalized. In the words of prison abolitionist Ruthie Gilmore: “Prison is not just a response to a ‘free floating thing called crime’—it’s a response to ‘surplus populations.’ Which is to say that prisons are designed to absorb people: those people who have been abandoned by the state.”
Organizer and educator Mariame Kaba said in an April 10, 2019 interview with Chris Hayes on MSNBC, “For me, capitalism has to go. It has to be abolished. We live within a system that’s got all these other -isms, and we’re gonna have to uproot those. So, we’re doing work every single day to set the conditions for the possibility of that alternate vision of a world without prisons, policing, and surveillance.”
This will be a long fight with many battles, according to Brian Kaneda, Deputy Director and Los Angeles coordinator for Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB). He told the online activist publication Rally that investing in proactive solutions, rather than punitive measures, would reduce harm to communities. He also noted that the “tough on crime” messaging is losing its punch with voters.
“What we saw is the fear mongering isn’t landing the way we’re being told it is,” Kaneda said. “And that tells me that our ideas are resonating with people, no matter what the polls say.”
