Californians rejected a tough on crime measure and embraced rehabilitation for formerly incarcerated people in statewide ballot measures Tuesday.
Former CA Gov. Jerry Brown was one of the attendees at a virtual party for the No on Prop 20 campaign, which turned into a celebration after the measure was defeated.
Framed as a tough on crime measure, it would have made it harder for people to qualify for parole and rolled back some of the criminal justice reforms that Brown helped implement.
“It’s very important for thousands and thousands of inmates and their families,” he said.
Crime survivor and community organizer Tinisch Hollins said defeating the measure was a step in the right direction.
“Considering that there are big problems in California that we’re all trying to address, things like homelessness, mental illness, substance abuse - we know that these things are at the court, right? But we can’t keep incarcerating our way out of the same problems, using the same failed tactics,” she said.
“The work continues because this criminal justice field as we all know, it’s huge,” said Brown. “Not just prisons, it’s jails, it’s probation, it’s mental health, it’s educational programs, it’s breaking down barriers like letting inmates become firefighters.”
That change in letting formerly incarcerated people get EMT licenses, which are required by most firefighting agencies, was signed into state law recently.
And by voting down Prop 20, Californians seemed to indicate they support reforms that emphasize rehabilitation and reducing the prison population.
Californians also overwhelmingly voted yes on Prop 17, which restores voting rights to people who have completed their sentences but are still on parole and will affect about 50,000 people.
“This is gonna shut the door for a while on this kind of tough on crime nonsense,” said criminal justice reform advocate Dan Seeman.
One outlier is Prop 25, which has yet to be called but opponents held a 10 percent lead as of Wednesday morning. That measure would have replaced cash bail with an algorithm that determined a defendant’s risk level.
While it had the support of Democrats including Gov. Gavin Newsom, support for the measure was complicated when reform-minded organizations including the ACLU of Southern California and the California NAACP opposed it, saying the system it would implement would be worse than the status quo.