While the prison industrial complex (PIC) is an ever-shifting goliath in California politics, we’ve seen community-oriented and abolitionist gains in the state over the last 10 years due to decades more of relentless grassroots organizing. In 2014, before the passage of Proposition 47, the California state prison population was just over 135,000 people. Today, the population sits at just above 102,000 people and is expected to continue to shrink. This has meant that there are currently 15,000 empty beds across CA’s state prisons, with that number expected to grow to 19,000 by 2028. In 2024, we saw the largest cut to CA’s corrections budget in recent memory, with $750 million to be reduced from the California Department of Corrections & Rehabilitation (CDCR) from 2024 to 2027. Since 2021, four state prisons have either been closed (warm shutdowns) or emptied out and no longer active thanks to the statewide Close CA Prisons campaign. These are all gains that CR, fellow abolitionists, and the many organizations in the anti-imprisonment and criminal justice reform movements have achieved.

However, living conditions across the state have worsened since 2020 as increased austerity measures worsening the housing crisis and the war on drugs target the most vulnerable communities across the state for imprisonment and premature death. Rather than protecting community safety and the hard-won abolitionist advances of the past 20 years or funding life-affirming programs that support criminalized communities to live in dignity, legislators, politicians, sheriff departments and big corporations have band together to directly attack successful community programs that keep many Californians out of cages by putting Proposition 36 on the November 2024 California ballot.

Proposition 36 – insidiously called the “Increase Drug and Theft Penalties and Reduce Homelessness Initiative,” or the “Drug & Theft Crime Penalties & Treatment-Mandated Felonies Initiative” – threatens to undo a significant part of past gains by expanding criminalization and funding for the PIC, taking the state into a harsher tough-on-crime direction. This bill also directly endangers our prospects for making further gains in our campaign to Close CA Prisons.

What does Proposition 36 do?

Prop 36 is a bill that would significantly bolster criminalization by expanding and extending convictions and sentences for a variety of different charges. It is essentially legislation that would undo the positive reforms of Prop 47. There are two main areas that Pop 36 focuses on: Drugs and Theft.

The mechanisms by which Prop 36 increases criminalization are also two-fold: Judge and Prosecutor discretion, and Sentence Enhancements.

Here’s what Prop 36 will do (adapted from Vera’s analysis):

Allows judges to sentence someone to a felony instead of a misdemeanor for possessing any amount of drugs if the person has previously been convicted of two or more drug-related offenses, including misdemeanor possession. This would mean sentencing people up to three years in state prison and a host of other consequences including limitations on future employment, voting rights, and other civil rights.

Adds fentanyl to the list of drugs for which it is a felony to possess any amount of drugs while also possessing a loaded firearm, even if the firearm is possessed lawfully and the person has a license to possess the firearm.

Requires the court to warn anyone convicted of possessing for sale, transporting, or distributing any amount of so-called “hard drugs” that they could be charged with murder if they sell or distribute drugs in the future and the recipient dies. This will make it easier to convict people of murder if they provided drugs to someone who died as a result.

Allows judges to punish someone who commits any of a wide range of misdemeanor and felony theft offenses with a felony instead of a misdemeanor if they have two or more prior convictions for a theft-related offense.

Allows prosecutors to add together multiple unrelated misdemeanor level (under $950) thefts to arrive at a dollar amount of over $950 in order to charge them as a felony instead of different misdemeanors.

Brings back a previously expired mandatory sentencing enhancement if someone “takes, damages, or destroys any property” during any felony offense, and the damage exceeds $50,000 of value – even if the damage was unintended.

Adds a mandatory sentencing enhancement of up to three years when two or more people “take, attempt to take, damage, or destroy any property” during a felony, regardless of the value or whether it was intentional.

Adds fentanyl to an existing mandatory sentencing enhancement for drug sale or possession that adds between three and 25 years (depending on the amount of drugs) to a person’s sentence.

In addition to the devastating human toll of this bill, and the undoubted increase we will see in both state prison and local jail populations, Prop 36 also has an enormous economic price tag. On the one hand, funding will be cut from the state that currently supports local drug and mental health programs. On the other hand, the certain increases in the jail and prison populations that will result from Prop 36 would mean tens of millions of dollars of increased costs on city and county levels, and hundreds of millions of dollars of increased costs for state corrections spending.

An array of corporate and political tough-on-crime interests are lining up behind Prop 36. So far, big financial backers of this bill include the CCPOA ($300,000), as well as corporate retailers that want to see harsher punishments for theft including Walmart ($2.5 million), Home Depot ($1 million), Target ($1 million), In-N-Out Burger ($500,000), and Macy’s ($215,000). Endorsers of the bill include CA Republican Party, CA District Attorneys Association, CA State Sheriff’s Association, and grossly and unsurprisingly, SF Mayor London Breed.

Our communities need life-affirming infrastructure and support, NOT punishment and social control. Californians need affordable housing, quality healthcare, humanizing and empowering community-based mental health and healing support, and consistent, meaningful employment with living wages, NOT more cages, policing & criminalization.

Learn more about the devastating impacts of Prop 36 and spread the word: stopprisonscam.org