The California campaign to put Proposition 36 on the ballot is funded by a coalition of retail corporations, including Walmart and Target, claiming that theft has increased when in fact it has been trending downward since the pandemic. Key ally of this corporate-funded initiative is a standard-bearer for law enforcement, the statewide District Attorney’s Association. Significantly, it is also backed by the state’s influential union of prison guards, which recently received a pay and benefits package from the state legislature of almost $1 billion dollars.
The proposition elevates non-violent offenses like petty theft to felonies and imposes harsh prison sentences on low level drug offenses. It is a return to California’s ruinous “three strikes,” as well as other punitive laws, and an attempt to rebrand the failed war on drugs, which from the beginning was a war on class and race.
The fight against Prop 36 is gathering. Recently, grass-roots 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.
“With California 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 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’s a big cash cow and power grab by certain special interests in the state of California,” said, Lex Steppling of Los Angeles Community Action Network.
Using fear and misinformation to manipulate California voters, the entire Yes on 36 campaign is based on lies: backers claim that crime is increasing when it is actually going down; they claim that 36 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; they claim that it addresses homelessness when it actually reduces funding for drug disorder treatment, provides zero dollars for housing and hundreds of millions for prisons and jails.
The specific target of Prop 36 is the repeal of the 2014 initiative, Prop 47, which reduced certain non-violent drug and property crimes to misdemeanors, limiting penalties and keeping offenders away from state prison. 47 has saved over $800 million in the costs of incarceration, and redirected those funds to behavioral health treatment and other critical services.
Prop 36 is designed and intended to roll back the gains of the movement against police violence and criminalization – powerfully expressed in the George Floyd rebellion 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 is not an isolated California proposition, but is an integral part of the on-going fascist campaign to take over the government which is laid out in Project 2025, the playbook of the Trump candidacy.
In addition to the hundreds of millions per year that Prop 36 will funnel into prison-industrial profits, with the added benefit of activating the police to make petty theft arrests at no cost to the retail industry, corporations are promoting Prop 36 to consolidate its grip on the state and the electorate by preying on fears about crime. It also wants to reinforce the lie that homelessness is caused by drug addiction, not by destitution.
The bottom line is that our rapidly automating system can no longer provide living wage work. It can no longer distribute the wealth of the society, which is increasingly concentrated in billionaire dynasties.
“Prison is not just a response to a ‘free floating thing called crime’ – it’s a response to ‘surplus populations,’ said Ruth William Gilmore. “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 a 2019 interview 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 going to 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, but the goals are clear. The first step is to Defeat California’s Proposition 36!
