Prison
Since Prop. 47 passed in California this past November, Californian prisons have released 2,700 inmates. These are inmates whose "felony" convictions were turned into
misdemeanors as a result of the measure.
The measure requires misdemeanor sentencing instead of felony for the following crimes:
- Shoplifting, where the value of property stolen does not exceed $950
- Grand theft, where the value of the stolen property does not exceed $950
- Receiving stolen property, where the value of the property does not exceed $950
- Forgery, where the value of forged check, bond or bill does not exceed $950
- Fraud, where the value of the fraudulent check, draft or order does not exceed $950
- Writing a bad check, where the value of the check does not exceed $950
- Personal use of most illegal drugs
The good news is that a couple thousand people are not doing "hard time" for misdemeanor crimes. California's overcrowded prisons are
getting much-needed relief.
The mass inmate release over the past four months under Proposition 47 has resolved one of the state’s most ingrained problems: prison overcrowding, state prisons chief Jeffrey Beard told a Senate committee at a legislative hearing Thursday. Prop. 47 has allowed the state to comply with a court-ordered inmate reduction mandate a year ahead of schedule, Beard said.
The bad news is that law enforcement is already using Prop 47 as the excuse for surging property crimes in San Francisco.
“The good news is we’ve addressed our jail overcrowding situation in California, which wasn’t acceptable to anybody,” said San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr in a phone interview. “The thing we are grappling with is the tremendous rise in property crime.” [...]
In San Francisco, Suhr said burglaries are up 20 percent, larceny and theft up 40 percent, auto theft is up more than 55 percent, between 2010 and 2014. Suhr said those crimes shot up largely due to prison realignment, Gov. Jerry Brown’s program that changed sentencing, sending thousands of convicted felons to county jail or probation instead of state prison. Suhr said auto burglaries are up quite a bit this year, and he believes it’s because of the Prop. 47 release.
Maybe he's right. Maybe all of these criminals released into the streets over the past couple of months has lead to the rise in property crimes since 2010. It could also be that San Francisco's income gap is up at
developing nations' levels.
Brookings Institute found in February that San Francisco’s income inequality is growing at a higher clip than that of any other city, and that “skyrocketing housing costs may increasingly preclude low-income residents from living in the city altogether.” Only Atlanta currently has more income inequality than San Francisco. For reference, New York comes in at six on the institute’s list, with Chicago (8), Los Angeles (9), and Baltimore (10) closing out the top 10.
As a recent United Nations study on
drugs, economics and crime points out:
Violent property crime types such as robbery appeared most affected during times of crisis, with up to two-fold increases in some contexts during a period of economic stress. However, in some contexts, increases in homicide and motor vehicle theft were also observed. In no case where it was difficult to discern an increase in crime in response to crime was any decrease in crime observed. The available data do not therefore support a hypothesis that economic crisis can lead to crime downturns.
To be sure, there are a more complex set of reasons for upticks in crime—not simply immediate economic realities like unemployment and impossibly high standards of living. The idea that increases in property crimes over four years is the result of four months' activity is even more ludicrous. It's time to look for real solutions to the roots of crime and inequality, and not some lazy "bad apples" theory being pushed forth by people whose economic viability is tied to incarcerating people for dubious reasons.