A Point of Inflection in the California Legislature?

For several years now, it has seemed like the California Legislature had written the soft-on-crime advocates a blank check. It was passing one bill after another to reduce the consequences to criminals of committing crimes across the spectrum from relatively minor ones to the very worst. Legislators seemed to be competing among themselves to see who could put the most thugs back on the street.

This year, the folks who call themselves “progressive”* are lamenting that so many of their cherished bills failed to pass. Bob Egelko has this article in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Legislation to limit solitary confinement in California is on hold in Sacramento. So is a bill that would allow inmates serving life-without-parole sentences to apply for parole eligibility after 25 years in prison. Measures to allow prisoners to vote in elections and to give news media access to state prisons didn’t reach a floor vote in the 2023 session that ended last week.

Meanwhile, a bill to apply “three-strikes” punishment to cover child sex trafficking, the first expansion of the sentencing law since 2002, passed both houses unanimously and awaits Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature.

On that latter point, Egelko fails to mention that the child-trafficking-only bill was a compromise. To allow the bill through, the progressives demanded that the bill be watered down so that enslavement of adults is still not a “serious felony” in California. See this post. The mandated watering down illustrates that the pro-criminal crowd is still very much in control. They can occasionally be embarrassed into letting anti-crime legislation though, but only to the extent they have to.

Still, there have been some notable failures of bills that would have gone even further down Leniency Road, as noted in the first paragraph and later in the article.

“It concerns me that Democrats are willing to stand up to the mob in every context except the justice system,” said Natasha Minsker, policy adviser to the liberal advocacy group Smart Justice California, referring to what she described as the “right-wing social media mob.” While it has been a “mixed year” legislatively, she said, the opposition’s “message on fear is very strong.”

Mob? The only mobs I have seen are on the other side. The so-called “message on fear” is merely stating the truth about real dangers to real people.

I’ve known Bob Egelko a long time. He leans the other way, but he sometimes calls me to get a single opinion on our side into his stories.

Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the conservative Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, said he was particularly relieved that the parole-eligibility bill, SB94 by Sen. Dave Cortese, D-San Jose, stalled on the Assembly floor this month after narrowly winning Assembly passage in May. It would apply to inmates sentenced to life without parole at least 25 years ago for a murder in the course of another crime, like kidnapping or robbery, and would require a judge to consider their age and behavior in prison when deciding whether to make them eligible for release.

“I am cautiously optimistic that this is indeed the first stage of a climate change” on crime-related issues, Scheidegger said. “The public seems to be waking up to the real-world consequences to law-abiding people when we lessen or eliminate the consequences of crime for law-breaking people.”

California is still a very long way from have a Legislature that even qualifies as decent. Still, perhaps we are seeing the very early signs, like the first green buds after a long winter.

* A note on the term “progressive.” The term implies a person who wants to make progress. But how is it progress to disable the government from protecting the innocent from predators? The direction they want to go is back toward the “law of the jungle” where you have to protect yourself because no one else will, and those who can’t protect themselves are just easy pickings. Very early in history, “progress” was the formation of governments to protect people from predators. This was the beginning of civilization. Undoing civilization is not my idea of progress.