California ballot measures, Nov. 2024: 2-6 and 32-36

This blog post series is ultimately inspired by how much of a slog the California election process is. Our initiative process, probably well-intentioned, has resulted in way too much substance being left to voters who don’t want to make these decisions, but who also wouldn’t simply relinquish this power to legislators. So for over a decade now I’ve written up descriptions and recommendations, from an opinionated, abundance-progressive, facts-first point of view. 

This election cycle, a lot of stars aligned to have not as many measures as we might have. In November 2016 there were 16, in November 2020 there were 12, but the signature threshold wound up lower this time around so it made sense to expect more. Instead, through a combination of state discipline, negotiations, lawsuits, and other factors, several were withdrawn from the ballot, giving everyone less to do. (Most withdrawn were bad, but one good one was withdrawn for lack of philanthropic funds to publicize it.)

As usual, I assess ballot measures on two dimensions: utilitarian, purely whether it’s good or bad, and anticlutter, whether the initiative, good or bad, helps the state make policy without leaving it up to uninterested voters when that can be avoided. (Most of the time, for anticlutter, I ask if the proposal could have been achieved without the ballot, but this can be a question of feasibility in addition to legality.)

Name and description	Utilitarian (main) recommendation	Anticlutter recommendation
Prop 2: $10 billion education bonds	Yes	Yes
Prop 3: Repeal Prop 8 and establish right to marry	Yes	Yes
Prop 4: $10 billion parks, climate, environment bonds	Yes	Yes
Prop 5: Allow some local bond measures to pass by 55% not 2/3	Yes	Yes
Prop 6: Constitutionally ban prison slavery	Yes	Yes
Prop 32: $18 minimum wage	Yes	No
Prop 33: Repeal restrictions on local rent control	No	Yes
Prop 34: Direct more revenues of AIDS Healthcare Foundation to patient care	No	No
Prop 35: Fix in place a tax on health plans funding Medi-Cal	Yes	No
Prop 36: Increase petty theft and drug possession penalties	No	No

Prop 2, $10 billion in bonds for education: Yes / yes

This is mostly the same story I’ve told before: we, as a state, borrow from the future to improve that same future, in this case by investing in public education. This practice is normally not only good but necessary. (Bonds like these have to be on the ballot by the constitution, so it does not violate the anticlutter criterion.) In 2020, a bond measure that would have raised $20 billion for education failed by 7 points, so this is the state coming back with something more modest.

$8.5 billion of the money would go to K-12 schools, including new construction, renovation, lead abatement, technical education, and a bit to charter schools. The other $1.5 billion is community colleges.

We invest in education, ergo we invest in this.

The only disappointing part is that it abandons a reform the failed 2020 measure included: it tried to use equity principles to give preference in funding to socioeconomically needy districts. Prop 2 has no such provision, so funds would instead be allocated the old way, approving or denying applications as they come in, first-come-first-served. This method has been shown to favor the districts that have more money and capacity to produce and submit applications quickly, e.g. the richer districts. Did someone think “we have to avoid looking too woke, even in the deepest policy details, to make sure this passes”? But at least it’s not a worsening, and the money is needed.

Prop 3, repeal Prop 8 (2008) and establish a right to marry: Yes / yes

I came to California in 2009 so I did not experience the heartbreak of the state banning gay marriage by a whisker—and in a sea of misinformation—in 2008, but I felt it by proxy later. Prop 8 was of course eventually overturned and same-sex marriages allowed once more in 2013, and nationwide in 2015. However, the ban was never firmly repealed from the Constitution. It’s still there to find in Article I, Section 7.5.

The general public has of course matured on this issue, and queer marriage is not in danger politically. But it is in danger from the lawless US Supreme Court. The reasonable fear is that, after a spree of overturning Roe and awarding dictatorial power to presidents but only if they are Republicans, the Court could very well overturn its own Obergefell v. Hodges precedent. This would make Prop 8 valid law again, and imperil existing and future queer marriages.

Prop 3 is a shield against this horror-outcome. It strikes Prop 8’s “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California” from the Constitution and replaces it with “The right to marry is a fundamental right,” with a couple of reinforcements of which other rights it furthers (life, liberty, safety, happiness, privacy, due process, and equal protection).

Fortunately, it’s polling at around 70% yes. We’ve come a long way.

Prop 4, $10 billion in bonds for parks, climate, and environment: Yes / yes

Prop 4 has been glossed as the “climate change bond”. A great deal of its spending is indeed fixing things worsened by climate change, but we should have been working on them anyway. Its spending breaks down to:

• $3.8 billion for water-related protections & improvements: water storage, cleaning, dam repair, water capture, river/lake restoration, etc.
• $1.5b for forest health and wildfire prevention, including thinning overgrown forests & hardening homes in fire zones
• $1.2b for sea-level rise protection & mitigation, and coastal restoration, including restoring ecosystems like wetlands that serve as buffers, but also protecting developed shoreline areas
• $1.2b for land conservation & habitat restoration
• $850 million for renewable energy, half of that to offshore wind, the rest for electric transmission and battery storage
• $700m for improvements to state parks
• $450m for extreme heat mitigation, like planting trees, building cooling centers, and other local aid
• $300m for farm sustainability

All this is a good investment that in my opinion will pay off in our ability to live in and adapt to climate change. Not a panacea, but what is?

My main concern was remembering that in 2018 we saw a water bond going to some of the same causes on the surface, but which also would have made giveaways, such as repairing a specific canal that had been damaged by agricultural overuse, that should have been paid for by the same agricultural interests that would use the water. However, on examination, this bond is not flawed in the same way. It was put on the ballot by the Legislature (over 80% voting aye) rather than a policy entrepreneur. Its water section focuses on water for drinking over water for agriculture, does not earmark specific canals (specific watersheds, yes, but not projects within those), and even states opposition to such in its principles: 

Funds provided by this division shall not be expended to pay the costs of the design, construction, operation, mitigation, or maintenance of isolated Delta conveyance facilities. Those costs shall be the responsibility of the water agencies that benefit from the design, construction, operation, mitigation, or maintenance of those facilities.

That worse water bond was opposed by a handful of environmental orgs including the Sierra Club, the Friends of the River, and the League of Women Voters (while supported by others). By contrast, Prop 3 this year has the support of all three of those orgs and the others besides, while eliciting no opposition besides the irredeemable Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association. It succeeds on policy grounds, not just on messaging.

Prop 5, allow some local bond measures to pass by 55% not 67%: Yes / yes

In 1978, a small faction of right-wing extremists, at their helm the landlord Howard Jarvis, got Prop 13 passed, taking advantage of some semi-reasonable discontent over how taxes were being administered to put on the chopping block the entire ability of government to operate. We live in their world, and we’ve only been starting to crawl out of it in the past 15 years.

Not by the operation of Prop 13 specifically, but by one of its outgrowths*, right now if a city or county wants to borrow money to spend for the benefit of the public, it has to put that up for a public vote—and it has to win that vote by a two-thirds majority. This is a veto by the few against the many: 66% of a city can want to tax itself to improve streets, build housing, transit, whatever, but the grumpy 34%, who will let the world burn as long as their taxes are flat, are decreed to be their superiors.

Bond measures do get passed—but they often get watered down significantly to make sure they can get the necessary support. And that’s in the more left-leaning parts of California: other places, it can be hard to get them passed at all. 

Prop 5 would be a measured reform: instead of a two-thirds majority, local bonds would need to win by a 55% majority, the same threshold we have required for school bonds since 2000, and only if they are going to build affordable housing or public infrastructure—libraries, streets, parks, fire and flood protection, police, etc. Affordable housing includes new housing restricted by income (less than 150% of area median income), but also down payment assistance, first-time homebuyer aid, and housing that gets people out of homelessness.

This proposition, too, was watered down to get to where it is. Its original version would have allowed a 55% vote to approve bonds or special taxes for the same list of causes. (Bonds also come with just enough taxes to pay off the loan over time; special tax ability would have brought in tax money to spend directly rather than borrow on.) This year, the part about special taxes was taken out. Then, at the last minute, to appease the realtor’s lobby and keep them from spending big on a No campaign, the backers accepted a new law preventing the use of Prop 5 bond money to buy properties with between one and four units. Which is most of our residential urban land! The realtors showed their colors by not making those properties ineligible for down payment assistance, first-time homebuyer assistance, fire, police, or EMS project. So that leaves… affordable rental properties, parks, transit. All the slightly-left-of-center causes are blocked, while allowing realtors to still make money the way they like, trading in increasingly scarce single-family homes. (A few extra-sympathetic causes are also exempted, like domestic violence shelters.)

The SF Chronicle has used this sop to realtors as an excuse to oppose Prop 5. That is very much perfect-enemy-of-good thinking. It is true the restrictions limit where new affordable housing can be placed, with NIMBY intent. But the restrictions are not forever. You are not voting them into place on the ballot—the 1-to-4 carveout was passed under Assembly Bill 2813, which implements Prop 5. As I understand, Prop 5 does decree that AB 2813’s restrictions can only be repealed with a two-thirds majority in the Legislature, locking it in place for now. But a near-future Legislature could put together that much support to undo that restriction, or blast holes in it with exemptions. After all, the original version of Prop 5, with no 1-to-4 carveout, was passed with 68% support in the Assembly, and 77% in the Senate. They wouldn’t do that in 2025, as legislative leaders will want to honor their deal; but possibly in 2027, with new members and leaders.

(Also, there’s a potential loophole: even subsidized development projects are usually put together with multiple sources of funds. If someone raises $10m from the bond and $1m from a federal grant, and needs to purchase a single-family lot to put their building on, I suspect they could dedicate the federal grant to the land purchase while keeping the bond money “clean” and compliant. That will have to be tested in court though.)

If you think we’ve underinvested in the public goods that keep us a functioning community, then vote for Prop 5, which unlocks that investment.

*A curiosity for super-wonky readers: Neither Prop 13 nor its 1980s follow-ups technically created the two-thirds requirement for bond measures—the state constitution has held that since the late 19th century. But the constitution only requires a two-thirds vote if the money to pay off the bonds does not already exist. Before 1978, localities could simply raise taxes by a vote of the city council or county board of supervisors, so it was easier to raise the money without going to the public.

Prop 6, constitutionally ban involuntary servitude as punishment: Yes / yes

The Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution banned involuntary servitude, “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” The California Constitution has text mirroring this. Prop 6 would eliminate that language: 

Slavery is prohibited. Involuntary servitude is prohibited except to punish crime and involuntary servitude are prohibited.

No exceptions. It would also prohibit the state from disciplining any prisoner for refusing a work assignment.

I don’t see much reason to belabor this point. Forced employment in prisons is immoral and should be illegal to match. 

The Legislature could make this a law, which could theoretically be a point against this measure on anticlutter grounds, but then they could easily revoke it in the future for budget reasons or if their politics change. It’s a moral principle and deserves to be enshrined as such.

Prop 6 won’t keep prisoners from being more subtly coerced to work, such as through bad conditions making it hard to live without some wages. Nor will it guarantee prisons will pay minimum wage. But it establishes a grounding principle. The rest is policy.

As a footnote, let Senator Steve Glazer be forever damned in historical memory for being the Democratic vote blocking a near-identical amendment from reaching the 2/3 threshold to be referred to voters two years earlier. (Somehow, he changed his vote this past year—my suspicion is once it was going to pass with or without him, how it would affect his legacy mysteriously snapped more into focus. What a clown.)

Prop 32, increase minimum wage to $18/hr: Yes / no

Currently, the state minimum wage is $16 per hour statewide. After being ratcheted up by about a dollar a year since it was $8 in 2014, it’s now being increased annually at a slower pace, to approximate general inflation. But of course living expenses continue to increase, so the new movement is not for $15 but for $18. Prop 32 would increase the wage to $18 at the beginning of 2025, with a one-year delay for smaller businesses.

Economically, the minimum wage makes for a more competitive market that values workers and uses their skills better; without a minimum wage, they get used poorly, disrespectfully, inefficiently, and can’t withdraw their labor. Effectively, it’s the state negotiating on behalf of workers, who lack individual bargaining power against larger employers.

Research has found over and over that in practice, minimum wage increases have little to no effect on employment, despite what corporate apologists say. Some of it is paid for by decreasing profits and managerial/executive salaries; some, probably less, by increasing prices. It’s a net gain for everyone, by increasing purchasing power from the bottom up.

However, if you want to vote against bills the Legislature could have passed, this is one such. That previous increase of the minimum wage from $8 to $16 happened because it passed by the Legislature and signed into law by Jerry Brown. The Legislature just last year passed, and Gov. Newsom signed, a law giving fast food workers a $20 minimum wage, so this is still a productive way to get policy done. 

So, a split recommendation. I’ll still be voting Yes as it helps enough people that I won’t vote on that criterion personally, but if your main concern is making sure these matters get addressed more effectively by political organizing (and without proponents having to spend millions on advertising), this would be one to vote no on.

Prop 33, repeal restrictions on local-level rent control: No / yes

Prop 33 is a full repeal of the state law known as Costa-Hawkins, from 1995. This bad law ties cities’ hands, banning any form of rent control for buildings first occupied after 1995, as well as single-family homes no matter how old. Under Costa-Hawkins, the cutoff date remains 1995 as the years tick by, making the law effectively a declaration: “Rent control must die, but we’ll let it die slowly.” Like Prop 13 in 1978, it was marketed with promises that rents would immediately drop. They did not.

Rent control is a form of badly needed harm reduction to keep vulnerable people from eviction, which destroys lives. I support rent control at the local and state level wholeheartedly, limiting growth in rents to roughly inflation annually, extending it to single-family homes, and limiting evictions to being for just cause.

Rent control protects families already in place by capping rents and keeping them roughly constant. What it does not do is reduce already-high rents, or produce more housing. It does not reduce the housing crisis which is fundamentally about supply—just ameliorates it.

Mostly, these goals do not come in conflict. You can support tenant protections and support vastly more housing production simultaneously. But there is good reason to believe that if rent control is applied to new buildings, say less than 15 years old, that makes new housing a bad investment, enough to significantly reduce construction, and make the housing crisis even worse.

(Empirical evidence: Most studies of rent control in the US don’t find a clear effect from rent control on construction, because most US cities with rent control do respect that new-construction window. But internationally where that window is not standard, a significant negative effect is found.)

I support rent control with a 15-year cutoff, applying on a rolling basis only once the housing is no longer new—both locally and statewide. Investors don’t much care about rents 16 years out; they will have made their investment back by then. But applied to brand-new housing, rent control is likely to do more harm than good. New construction at scale is one of the key ways you get rents down, as opposed to keeping them flattish (again, empirically founded), so encouraging new construction protects renters further.

From that perspective, the fatal flaw of Prop 33 is that it has no such cutoff. It would not only allow any level of rent control for construction of any age, it would bar the Legislature from tinkering with the formula in any way. It writes permanently into law: The state may not limit the right of any city, county, or city and county to maintain, enact or expand residential rent control.

Nor is this an academic question. Exclusionary cities are outright saying that they would use the power under Prop 33 to pass rent control on new construction from day one, with the explicit goal of choking off new housing. The legislative text seems to welcome that.

Prop 33 is likely going to fail, as landlords drown it in negative advertising. But one must consider what it would do if successful. Only some cities would use it to that extent, but they might be the richest and most exclusive—plus, not impossibly, San Francisco, which would effectively shield them from the state oversight that is starting to overcome their NIMBYism and have huge effects on the rest of the Bay.

If Prop 33 guaranteed the 15-year cutoff, as one of its predecessors did, I would support it. But as it is, I can’t.

How about the anticlutter dimension? I think it passes this check in practice, as it’s hard to imagine the Legislature fully repealing Costa-Hawkins anytime soon without the public forcing it to. But if it’s bad policy, it’s bad policy.

There is a lot of backstory and drama around why this measure came to the ballot in this way, and why it refused to grant any new-construction window. It comes down to the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which is the subject of the next writeup.

Prop 34, direct higher percent of revenues of AIDS Healthcare Foundation to patient care: No / no

Prop 34 ties directly to the interests and personalities involved in Prop 33 on the yes and no side. There are some decent justifications for it in some ways. But in the end it’s not the way forward.

Prop 34 would require a narrow category of health providers that receive revenues from federal prescription drug discount programs to spend 98% of it on direct patient services. It is defined narrowly so that the only affected entity is, almost certainly, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF).

Why would this go on the ballot? There’s nothing wrong with AHF’s core work. As far as I know they’re a perfectly legitimate pharmacy network dispensing HIV/AIDS drugs. The problem is that for over a decade, they have been abusing the program funding them to act as major political players, following the whims of their president, Michael Weinstein. Those whims change, at one time it was obsessing about the evils of PreP, but more recently he has taken a strong anti-housing tack.*

AHF gets money for the drugs they dispense from the 340B discount program, which is the rare federal program that can let you clear more money than you spend earning it. Most providers use it to offset their losses on other health services and programs. But AHF’s services are tightly focused on what this program subsidizes, and they gross over two billion dollars a year, so just a few percent of that money redirected from patient care annually is massive, enough for a statewide ballot measure every two years and lots of other influence-peddling (like paying Kevin de Leon $100k as a consultant).

Critically, they are the sole sponsors of Prop 33 as well as previous similar rent control measures that failed by wide margins: Prop 10 in 2018 and Prop 21 in 2020. On these three campaigns, they spent $22 million on the first, $41 million on the second, and on this year’s third one one $39 million so far.

Typically nonprofits would probably face scrutiny for redirecting health funds in this way. But AHF hasn’t.

AHF has also used some of its largesse to get into the affordable housing business, buying up a lot of aging cheap housing on LA’s Skid Row and renting it out cheaply. To their credit, they were putting their money where their mouth is, creating or in this case preserving non-market housing. But they may not have been prepared to spend the even greater sums these buildings’ repairs called for, because there was then a cavalcade of horrendous safety violations, lawsuits, and whistleblowers persecuted. Ironically, Prop 34 makes use of this history by defining subject entities as being health providers that take 340B and that operate multifamily housing with 500+ major safety violations.

Prop 34 would single out entities meeting AHF’s precise description as “prescription drug price manipulators” and would require them to spend 98% of its 340B revenues on direct patient care, choking off the funding that has put so many measures on the ballot over the years.

Prop 34 is absolutely a play by the landlord lobby trying to rein in AHF from its rent control advocacy. Every time AHF puts rent control on the ballot they spend heavily against it—shooting them down reliably, but at great expense. But AHF’s abuses are very real.  Observers tend to be frustrated they have never been held to account by existing nonprofit oversight. It’s not a normal nonprofit, not a normal public advocate. The 98% restriction proposed is objectively perfectly reasonable—they should be spending this money primarily on HIV/AIDS/queer health, which they are supposedly constituted for. There were previously rumblings the Legislature might pass a similar law if they went too far on certain warpaths.

So Prop 34 may be objectively justified as policy. But it has problems from the reform-money-in-politics perspective. After all, if AHF shouldn’t be spending its money in the public sphere in this way, ideally the landlords shouldn’t either. Prop 34 would restrict the former while letting the latter continue their influence. 

Despite all that, I originally considered supporting Prop 34 because even taken strategically, AHF’s infinite money glitch has been an increasing problem for the cause of housing justice. 

Before they bankrolled Prop 33 this year, the similar Prop 10 failed by 19 points in 2018, and then Prop 21 failed by slightly more in 2020. And for whatever reason, after making Prop 21 much more reasonable, exempting construction in its first 15 years of occupancy, they completely backtracked in drafting Prop 33, bringing back the problems of their first attempt. Considering this decision together with their long-running advocacy against housing construction, it seems they not only understand but actively welcome its impact constraining new housing.

Overall, for housing justice, AHF has effectively made itself a chaos agent accountable to no one but itself, in a way not just embarrassing but arguably harmful. They keep losing and doubling down. There is so much activist energy in the state to protect tenants, and huge amounts of it are getting bled out in these quixotic attempts. After the failures in 2018 and 2020 they could have shifted to a legislative strategy, to reduce rent caps under the statewide Tenant Protection Act of 2019, but now they want to light another forty million on fire.

I will quickly mention some other objections to 34 I think are off base.

• That it is an unconstitutional act of attainder by singling out one organization. No, it does not punish them in any criminal or civil way, merely limits how they can spend federal money they receive going forward. They would certainly sue, but probably fail. 
• That it could accidentally apply to some large counties, which have health systems getting 340B revenue and also operate sometimes-dilapidated housing. This one may hold a little water, as the text applies to “entities,” not just private entities, though there are other ways they might get out of it. (I haven’t heard counties actually sounding any alarm.) But counties have so many sources of revenue that for them 340B is a drop in the bucket; it would be far easier for them to rearrange finances to direct 98% to patient care, even if it applied to them, which it may not.
• That it could have slippery-slope effects on other advocates. Other advocates overwhelmingly get their money by different means and would not be affected by a restriction along these principles. AHF very much made itself a target here by its abuse of the system.

But it still comes back to the interests of the landlords, and I can’t ignore that. They spent $72 million against AHF’s measure in 2018, $83 million in 2020, and through October 1 this year have already spent $75 million. If Prop 34 wins, they stop having to spend similar amounts in future years.

A criterion I try to always use in evaluating ballot measures is: Was this measure proposed by an industry or market actor for its own financial benefit? The answer is yes, 100%. So my vote is no. We should not reward such behavior to feed any organization’s coffers. That’s not what the statewide initiative system should be for.

Prop 34 also fails anticlutter, as the Legislature could pass something like it. And perhaps should.

*In addition to suing to stop specific towers apparently focused on protecting his office window’s view, in 2017, he sponsored an LA City measure that would have stopped virtually all development in the city for two years and locked it down thereafter.

Prop 35, make permanent a tax on managed care plans that funds Medi-Cal: Yes / no

This is one of those occasional measures you get that is essentially a peace deal between a range of powerful industry groups and the state. The tax on managed care plans already exists: it’s a way for the state to get more matching funds and increase the federal funding for Medi-Cal, which covers almost 15 million Californians’ health care. 

Simply put, you first tax a dollar out of the premium a health plan receives. Then, add it to the pot of Medi-Cal funding, getting a federal match. Now you have two dollars to add to health care premiums. It disadvantages plans that do more commercial business and less Medi-Cal business, because their commercial premiums will be taxed and only Medi-Cal premiums will increase—which most people are fine with. 

This could be done by the Legislature, and previously has been. The problem was that the Governor’s financial wizards were able to use it as a bit of a piggy bank—”adding” it to Medi-Cal funds in a way that allowed them to use less of their other funds on Medi-Cal, effectively keeping some of the benefit for the state general fund. This got the healthcare industry mad, but they only had so much influence over it.

Prop 35 reduces the squabbling by (a) making the tax permanent and (b) decreeing how it can be used, so that the state can only keep a constant share of it, and can’t increase it over time. By going back to a slightly older split, Prop 35 would reduce money available out of the General Fund by a billion or so, at most one percent, but increase Medi-Cal funding by much more than that—essentially forcing the state to invest more in Medi-Cal. It also sets parameters on how the money can be used within Medi-Cal.

It’s housekeeping. It’s fine. There’s a good reason it has no organized opposition.

Does it pass anticlutter? Depends how you look at it. The overt intention is to limit what the state can do year-to-year with this funding in the budget process, while maintaining state control on health policy specifics. You can’t do that without a constitutional amendment. But that is still the definition of ballot-box budgeting! Overall, I say no, this could literally be left to the Legislature.

Prop 36, increase petty theft and drug crime penalties: No / no

This is a frustrating measure because it seems likely to pass, but it represents a lurch back in the direction of the incarceration-obsessed justice system. In 2014, the state passed a significant reduction to penalties for minor crimes—including petty theft and drug possession—which worked out fine. In the last couple of years, for whatever reason, there was a brief surge in crime, which seems to be subsiding as inflation did. Now the police and business lobby is trying to use that to ratchet jail time up again.

Prop 36 would add something like a junior version of “three-strikes”: a third crime of theft, even if under the current $950 misdemeanor threshold, would become a felony again with a 3-year sentence. It would also go to felony if committed by three or more people together. This is clearly reacting to the panic over “organized” retail theft, which was to a large extent big retailers making stuff up. In California in 2023, larceny (non-violent, non-burglarizing) theft was down by 3% from 2022—and as a matter of fact, down by 5% since 2014, the year Prop 47 was passed and supposedly declared open season on petty theft.

I know I’m going to sound like a broken record here, but it is absolutely relevant that crime is still at historical lows. People victimized have a right to be outraged, but the people saying things are out of control or society is collapsing are absolutely creating a fact-free panic. Most of them are old enough that violent and non-violent crime rates were two to three times the current rate when they were younger. (Are brain lead levels declining in the younger people at risk to take up crime, while lingering in the older NextDoor users? Or, are the latter merely cynically trying to whip up backlash against what they see as wokeism? Who can say.)

The research has always said that the US style of mass incarceration (which California led the way on with three-strikes) was never effective on its own at reducing crime. That doesn’t mean don’t respond to crimes: research suggests punishments have a reducing effect on crime proportional to their swiftness and certainty, but not to their severity. And of course lengthy time in prison makes it harder for those released to do anything with their lives but more crime.

It should be noted that with the pressure of this initiative coming, the state already passed a broad swath of criminal justice amp-ups, including the felony-for-third-theft provision, and a sentencing enhancement for selling stolen goods (basically a double sentence, as very few steal for personal use). They also fixed something that may have been a real if minor issue, that it was technically hard for police to arrest suspected petty thieves for investigation if it didn’t happen in their presence, even with security footage. But on the other hand, it was already legal for stores to make citizen’s arrests and hand the suspect over to police, so there’s some learned helplessness at play too. That issue I suspect could have been fixed in 2015 if the lock-’em-up lobby had interest in anything other than repealing Prop 47 in its entirety; police and prosecutors let this issue, to the extent it was an issue, fester to be rallying cry later.

Prop 36’s most egregious provision is not for theft but for simple possession of drugs. Prop 47 made possession without sale or intent to sell a misdemeanor. Prop 36 makes it a felony again for “hard drugs” (opiates, cocaine, etc.) but conditional on receiving treatment—complete the treatment, get the charge cleared. Since treatment is not yet available at anything near the needed quantity, this is a recipe for criminalizing addiction once again. And substance use treatment is if anything less likely to be effective at the barrel of a gun; imagining it would actually help people get sober is authoritarian brain. (No one well-off thinks it would help themselves if they had a problem—just those people.)

Some backlash against criminal justice reform is happening regardless. But Prop 36 would lock it in forever. Please vote no.