California Needs to Repeal Prop 57

California’s crime rate has risen thanks to several political efforts to reduce the State’s prison population. Now, thanks to several sentencing reform bills, California’s property crime rate is 25.3 incidents per 1,000 people. That is 23% higher than the national rate of 20.7. The violent crime rate is 4.2 incidents per 1,000 people, which is 6% higher than the nationwide rate of 4.0. These statistics do not consider the recent trend of people just not reporting criminal acts which has been increasing.

A few years back, California had a prison overcrowding issue. In an effort to reduce the number of felons in prison, the State produced and funded several reforms to get criminals out of prison. One of the most impactful prison reforms was Proposition 57.

In 2016, California voters passed Proposition 57 allowing many prisoners to reduce their prison sentence. Proposition 57 allowed prisoners to exclude any enhancements to their criminal charges to include three-strikes law enhancements. The largest impact of Proposition 57 was re-labeling several violent crimes as non-violent in California. Proposition 57 also authorized more “good time credits” for criminals to further reduce their sentence.

A major impact of Proposition 57 was to relabel several violent crimes as “non-violent”. Examples of non-violent crimes in California now include several forms of rape, human trafficking involving sex acts with minors, hostage taking, domestic violence involving trauma, arson, attempting to explode a bomb at a hospital or school, assault with a deadly weapon, and several other crimes. The re-labeling of these vicious crimes to non-violent was important as non-violent offenders only serve a small portion of their sentence and allows some offenders to avoid prison entirely and serve their sentence on probation.

Thanks to sentencing reforms such as Propositions 57, “non-violent” offenders are being released from prison and causing more crime in the State. Criminals such as child molesters, rapists, terrorists, kidnappers, and domestic abusers (all non-violent in California) need rehabilitation. It is hard to rehabilitate these offenders when we just release them to the street. California needs to protect its citizens by repealing Proposition 57.