Exposing the False Narrative of Criminal Justice Reform

Beginning in 2011, shortly after Jerry Brown began his third term as Governor, a series of bills he signed into law, and several ballot measures financed by progressive criminal justice reform advocates have changed California’s criminal justice system.  Since the late 1980s, state laws and policies, many adopted by the voters as ballot measures, reduced violent and property crime crime rates in California by 50% and homicide by more than two-thirds, by increasing sentences for repeat offenders and cracking down on quality of life crimes like drug use, vagrancy, vandalism and theft.  All of this has changed over the past nine years. Today, selling and using drugs, stealing property valued under $950, sleeping and going to the bathroom on city sidewalks and parks are no longer punishable offenses.  Repeatedly stealing cars, burglarizing businesses and beating your wife, girlfriend or children are no longer crimes that come with a prison sentence and some 30,000 criminals who were serving time for these crimes have been released back onto the streets, along with rapists and murderers that new laws have made eligible for early release.

Time and again, as these changes in the law were proposed, elected politicians and their supporters lied to the public about the risks to public safety that would accompany them.  In a piece published today, Michele Hanisee, President of the Association of Los Angeles Deputy District Attorneys (AADA), breaks down how her group worked to prevent these changes in policy, then tried and amend them after they became law, in order to protect the law-abiding public from the consequences.   She also discusses how the lies proponents and politicians told the press and public have been exposed.  “Some do not like the facts we share in our articles because they clash with the false narratives spun by advocates of `criminal justice reform,’ ” she writes.   The 150,000 drug-addicted, mentally ill homeless living on California sidewalks in parks and under freeways are here because of those lies.  The pages of newspapers and stories on the evening news reporting brazen burglaries, killing of police officers, and assaults and shootings in all corners of the state are the result of the reforms these liars promoted.  As a former LA District Attorney said as these reforms began to take effect, “the blood will be running on the streets before the public wakes up.”  We are not quite there yet.  But let’s hope were getting close.