Four months ago, Darren exited a California prison after serving nearly 20 years for possession of 0.15 grams of drugs--less than a third the weight of a paper clip. After all these years, Darren still had time to serve on his original sentence. A judge was only authorized to release him because, last year, Californians stepped in and changed the law.
In November, California voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 47, a ballot initiative that changed six low-level crimes from felonies to misdemeanors (simple drug possession and five petty theft offenses under $950) and will invest the savings into prevention and treatment. In the first five months, Prop. 47 allowed judges to resentence and release 3,703 people like Darren from state prison, and up to 10,000 incarcerated individuals in total may have this same chance at resentencing and release.
Going forward, 40,000 people convicted of these offenses will avoid excessive incarceration terms. This is important for multiple reasons. First, California's over-reliance on prisons in years past led to record-high incarceration rates, budgets and recidivism rates. Voters recognized that this approach was unwise and unsafe.
Second, independent analysts project that Prop. 47 will save more than $100 million annually, all of which will be reallocated from California's bloated prisons budget to mental health and drug treatment, K-12 schools and crime victims.
But the promise of Proposition 47 goes beyond ending the prison warehousing of people for low-level crimes and reallocating corrections money to prevention. Much more profound is the measure's potential to clean up the legacy of over-incarceration--a legacy that has devastated communities of color in California for decades.
Under Prop. 47, for the first time, hundreds of thousands of Californians have a new opportunity to remove old, low-level felony convictions from their criminal records. Rough estimates indicate that there may be 1 million Californians with one of these old convictions on their record, making this the largest record-change opportunity in U.S. history.
And this is an opportunity California should not let pass. Felony convictions represent one of the most powerful ways in which the justice system perpetuates racial bias and disparities.
Such bias and disparities have always existed in the justice system, but the rise in felonies has greatly exacerbated the problem. For example, in just a seven-year period between the late 1980s and mid-1990s, lawmakers passed more than 1,000 tough-on-crime bills. Many of the law changes that exploded our incarceration rates did so by increasing the number of felonies in the penal code and mandating longer sentences for felony convictions and people with prior felonies.
Between 1980 and 2010, California's prison population increased 500 percent, leading to 22 new prisons. Communities of color have born the brunt of these policies, with African Americans incarcerated at seven times the rate and Latinos at twice the rate of whites.
We cannot work to reduce racial disparities in the system without reforming the complex web of mandatory sentencing schemes built off of the felony classification. Today, someone arrested for a felony will face higher bail amounts as they await trial, longer sentences if convicted, harsher sentences for future convictions as a result of being a felon, and severe restrictions after they have been released and served their time in the justice system.
People with felony convictions face major barriers to finding gainful employment and housing, or accessing student loans, support services, membership in professional associations, and much more. In fact, California has 3,000 laws creating more than 4,800 restrictions on people with a criminal record. More than half (58 percent) of these restrictions limit employment opportunities, and 73 percent are lifetime bans.
Worse still, people with felony convictions face significantly worse health outcomes over their lifetimes, and their children are more likely to end up in foster care as well as suffer health problems and life outcome challenges.
As criminal justice policies make it harder for someone with a felony conviction to stay out of the system--and essentially ensure worse health outcomes, economic hardships and instability-- persistent racial bias at every step makes the impacts of these policies on communities of color both a public safety and moral issue.
We must go beyond reducing incarceration and actually shrink the number of felonies on the books and, at the same time, eliminate the barriers to stability faced by people with felonies. Prop. 47 provides a chance to do that en masse.
By removing felonies from old records, we can lessen the severe collateral consequences communities of color have suffered from extreme incarceration. We can also begin the long process of rebuilding the justice system with fairness and equality in mind.
This blog is part six of a series from the Rosenberg Foundation on race and criminal justice.