For years, criminal-justice reformers treated fewer arrests, prosecutions and people behind bars as measures of success. Proposition 47 embodied that philosophy. Drug possession and some theft felonies became misdemeanors. Incarceration fell. State savings were supposed to fund treatment, mental-health services and other programs.
But there was always a question hiding behind those numbers: What happened to the people the criminal-justice system stopped arresting, treating, or incarcerating? You cannot declare victory by counting the people who left the criminal-justice system without counting what happened to them after they left.
An important new study from the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California has now done some of that counting.
PPIC estimates that Proposition 47 reduced drug-treatment admissions through courts and criminal-justice agencies by about 20 percent at the same time serious drug use increased 7 to 8 percent and unsheltered homelessness increased roughly 10 percent or about 7,000 additional Californians living on the streets. A significant number would die and many of them were amongst the “de-carcerated”.
California was warned.
Drug-court officials and former LA County DA Jackie Lacey warned as far back as 2014 that reducing drug possession from a felony to a misdemeanor would eliminate much of the leverage that persuaded seriously addicted offenders to accept treatment.
Yet Stanford’s Justice Advocacy Project, which helped draft Proposition 47, saw nothing but success. A year after passage, Romano and the project highlighted roughly 13,000 fewer people incarcerated, reduced jail crowding and potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in savings.
The numbers insofar as Romano was concerned weren’t necessarily wrong, he was measuring the wrong things.
By 2020, that philosophy had moved well beyond Proposition 47. In San Francisco, District Attorney George Gascón and his successor District Attorney Chesa Boudin became two of the nation’s most visible proponents of de-carceration and de-criminalization.
Addiction, homelessness and street disorder were increasingly treated as problems best addressed outside the criminal-justice system, then came fentanyl. During Boudin’s term in office, San Francisco experienced 2,017 overdose deaths, nearly half of all San Francisco’s overdose deaths of the last 6 years.
In both San Francisco and Los Angeles, open-air drug markets flourished, property crime exploded and hundreds of deaths became thousands as their grand experiment sent bodies to the morgue. Amazingly, evidence that challenged Boudin and Romano’s theories was repeatedly reinterpreted as evidence that California simply hadn’t gone far enough.
To proponents, more disorder did not discredit de-criminalization; it demonstrated inadequate housing. More overdose deaths did not discredit street-based harm reduction; they demonstrated inadequate harm reduction. Failure to get seriously addicted people into treatment did not restore the case for mandated treatment; it demonstrated insufficient voluntary treatment.
The theory became remarkably difficult to disprove because almost every failure became an argument for more of the same.
Even after voters recalled Boudin, Maia Szalavitz argued in WIRED that what critics called the failure of harm reduction was really “the failure of criminalization.” Her conclusion was memorable: “the hippies have the data, and the cops don’t.”
Meanwhile Narcan administrations to overdosing victims challenged the hippies as rising mortality rates were merely delayed. Addicts were saved only to die another day as the reformers became so focused on what they considered the harms of the criminal-justice system that they stopped seeing the harms occurring outside it.
California eventually changed direction. Boudin was recalled in San Francisco and Gascón was defeated in Los Angeles. Prop 36 passed in every California county and in all 11 San Francisco supervisorial districts. Police and prosecutors increased enforcement against drug markets and prolific offenders. Technology improved investigations. Consequences again became part of the public-safety equation.
We cannot know how much those deaths contributed to the subsequent crime decline. Arrests, incarceration, treatment, migration, aging, and an addict or criminals own decisions also change an offender population.
If an addicted repeat offender disappears from tomorrow’s arrest statistics because he entered treatment, recovered and stopped stealing, that is success. If he disappears because fentanyl killed him, the crime statistics may eventually improve, but public policy has failed spectacularly.
Their deaths are part of the record and now California faces another test.
A new synthetic opioid, cychlorphine, has appeared on its streets. It is believed to be about 10 times more potent than fentanyl and was recently found in the overdose death of a 16-year-old San Francisco boy. This time police investigated. Four suspects were arrested and more than 20,000 counterfeit pills were seized. Mayor Daniel Lurie put the lesson plainly: “San Francisco was caught flatfooted by the fentanyl crisis. We will not let that happen again.”
The Atlantic followed Sister Salvina, a Missionaries of Charity nun who works with severely addicted and mentally ill people on San Francisco’s streets. Her experience raises the moral question the statistics cannot: At what point does respecting someone’s freedom to refuse help become abandoning him to die?
Mayor Lurie was being kind – California’s political leaders were warned and spent nearly a decade confusing less criminal-justice intervention with better criminal-justice outcomes. PPIC is now showing us what some of that experiment cost. San Francisco’s sidewalks showed us long before the researchers caught up.
The dead don’t reoffend.
As another deadly drug arrives, the question is whether California has finally learned its lesson.
Steve Smith is a senior fellow in urban studies at the Pacific Research Institute, focusing on California’s ongoing crime challenges.
