Frank Stoltze covers criminal justice for the LAist newsroom.
This measure rolls back some of the reforms contained in Proposition 47, the historic 2014 voter-approved measure that reduced penalties for most drug possession crimes and petty theft.
The sentence would be up to three years in county jail or state prison as opposed to the one year in county jail for a misdemeanor right now.Prop. 36 also allows felony sentences for theft or damage of property to be lengthened by up to three years if three or more people committed the crime together.People found guilty of possession of certain drugs and who have two or more past convictions for drug crimes, including possession, would face the choice of going into rehabilitation or prison.
Lewis also said the measure amounts to a return to over incarceration for minor crimes. “We did mass incarceration,” he said. “We saw that it didn’t work and that’s why we moved away from it.”Prop. 36 would increase state criminal justice costs, “likely ranging from several tens of millions of dollars to the low hundreds of millions of dollars each year,” according to the state Legislative Analyst’s Office.
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