Proposition 47 was sold to voters as the “Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act,” but it did nothing to make our neighborhoods and schools safer. Instead, it made us less safe.
The governor and the Legislature’s focus is not on our neighborhoods or our schools.
Their priority is mass decarceration – and making sure no one is held accountable for their actions. As a result, we are seeing rising crime and more drug-related deaths across California.
The last ten years have seen a significant decline in public safety. According to the Pacific Research Institute’s study Paradise Lost: Crime in the Golden State 2011-2021, “more Californians are dead, have been sexually assaulted, and are the victims of traumatic injury,” than if legislative and public policy efforts including Proposition 47, as well as Assembly Bill 109 (realignment that released serious offenders into our local communities) and Proposition 57 (early release of prison inmates) had not occurred.
Instead of boosting prison capacity and increasing rehabilitation prospects, California opted to release prisoners who were unsafe to release, essentially decriminalized drugs and theft, and handcuffed prosecutors from charging enhancements for gangs and guns. Inmates are being released back into our communities as a result of these dangerous legislative efforts – and they are reoffending.
Tens of thousands of convicted criminals are being let out of prisons earlier and earlier because state prison officials have been granted unilateral ability to change credit regulations without any checks and balances from voters. Increasing conduct credits is just a back door way of reducing the length of sentences. The end result is the same: offenders are being released earlier and earlier. This includes violent felons serving less than half of their court-ordered sentences.
California does not have a prison overcrowding problem.
California has a Legislature and a governor problem – and each is working hand in hand to create a false narrative by methodically closing state prisons and then claiming there is nowhere to house convicted felons – which then, in their minds, necessitate shorter prison sentences.
Gov. Gavin Newsom is making good on his promise to close three prisons. The California Correctional Center in Lassen County was shut down earlier this year. The Deuel Vocational Institution in Tracy was shuttered in 2021. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), which runs the state’s prison system, has announced March 2025 as the anticipated closure date of Chuckawalla Valley State Prison in Blythe. Cutbacks at six more prisons are also in the works and San Quentin, the state’s oldest prison and the exclusive home of California executions since 1938 when the state’s gas chamber was built, has been rebranded to be a rehabilitation center instead of a final destination for the state’s most heinous of criminals.
The focus on San Quentin will now be rehabilitation, the governor explained at a St. Patrick’s Day press conference from the floor of the prison. But no mention was made of the victims who were assured the people who slaughtered their loved ones would die on Death Row.
Last legislative session, liberal legislators pledged in a public safety trailer bill that they would close five more prisons by 2027 and bragged that 20,000 prison beds would be empty in the next four years, a number laid out by the Legislative Analyst’s Office. The savings, state bureaucrats argued, would top $1.5 billion. The final language of the trailer bill left out a specific number of prisons out of the remaining 33 adult prisons to be closed – which leaves wide discretion, a frightening thought given CDCR has used its discretion to increase early release credits at unimaginable levels.
In his May budget revision, Gov. Newsom noted that he “remains committed to meeting the needs of staff and the incarcerated populations while right-sizing California’s prison system to reflect the needs of the state as the prison population declines.”
What the governor forgot to mention is his failure to protect the residents of California and safeguard public safety – and ensure that victims of crime past, present, and future will have the justice they were promised when they had their day in court and a lawful court sentence was given.
With at least 20,000 prison beds about to be emptied, where are convicted felons who should still be serving their criminal sentences in prison going?
Right back into our communities to commit more crimes – and engage in activities that used to be serious crimes before Prop. 47 decriminalized them. It’s no secret why the state’s homeless population has exploded along with rising crime.
Violent crime in California jumped 5.7% from 2021 to 2022, and of the state’s 58 counties, 13 counties saw violent crime increase 20% or more in just that year. In Orange County – against all odds – we are still California’s safest large county.
That is not a coincidence.
Here in Orange County, law enforcement agencies and the Orange County District Attorney’s Office have had to implement workarounds and invest taxpayer resources to counteract Sacramento’s anti-public safety agenda.
The Orange County District Attorney’s AB 109 Crime Impact Task Force has taken hundreds of violent and dangerous felons have been taken off Orange County streets and dozens of guns, including assault weapons, and enough fentanyl to kill hundreds of thousands of people, have been seized as a result of investigations by the District Attorney’s AB 109 Task Force.
The task force’s arrestees include ten attempted murder suspects, an 18-year-old man who escaped from a halfway house just hours after being released from jail 15 months early for killing his mother, and five defendants charged with stealing $1.97 million in jewelry, guns, and designer items as part of an elaborate burglary ring out of Los Angeles targeting Orange County homes.
Taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay again to protect themselves when Sacramento failed to protect them the first time around.
Every dollar saved by releasing convicted felons back into our communities before they have served their full sentence comes at cost. And that cost is public safety, and that isn’t a price anyone should be willing to pay.
Todd Spitzer is the district attorney of Orange County.
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