CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2022 OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“LEGISLATURE MUST FIX VIOLENT CRIME DEFINITIONS”
Words
matter, we often hear in this contentious political era when politicians
frequently say things and then deny they meant what their words said.
Words
also matter in the California penal code, where the label “violent” is not
thrown around as much as it obviously should be. That tag currently is not applied
to many crimes most people with common sense know are violent. Some examples
include assault with a deadly weapon, soliciting murder, elder and child abuse,
arson, human trafficking, plus some forms of rape and forced sodomy.
All are
obviously violent, until it comes to sentencing someone who has committed one
of more of these crimes.
This has
mattered a lot since the 2016 passage of Proposition 57, a pet project of
then-Gov. Jerry Brown, who desperately wanted to clear thousands of convicts
out of the state’s prison system.
His
initiative, passed by a 64-36 percent margin (almost 2-1), allows inmates whose
crimes are not legally defined as violent to win early parole in exchange for
good behavior and other achievements
like earning college degrees.
No one
knew in 2016 what the exact consequences would be. But police chiefs warned at
the time that one result would be more violent crime. So part of the
Proposition 57 campaign was a commitment by state legislators to expand the
list of crimes considered violent. But like many other things promised by
politicians, that never happened.
One
result was a gang shootout that killed six and left 12 persons injured last
April in Sacramento. It eventually emerged that one of the murder suspects in that
case bearing the rather ironic nickname “Smiley” Martin, had spent a mere four
years in prison, despite a 10-year sentence for domestic violence and assault
to commit great bodily injury – both considered “nonviolent” crimes under this
state’s penal code – but not by many others.
Even
though Prop. 57 had been the project of liberals in the Legislature, the April
episode caught enough attention from leftist Attorney General Rob Bonta to get
him interested in having the Legislature at last follow up on its 2016 pledge
to expand the list of formally defined violent crimes.
Bonta, a
former Democratic Assemblyman from Alameda who supported Prop. 57, told a
reporter last fall that “Domestic violence, human trafficking, rape of an
unconscious person – all of those should be discussed and potentially changed
under whatever the appropriate means is for Prop. 57. I think if people are
asked, ‘Is this a violent crime? Or is it not a violent crime?’ I think people
will say, ‘It’s a violent crime,’ so I think those should be considered for
change.”
So should
some others, like assault with a deadly weapon, soliciting murder, and forced
sodomy, among others.
It is, in
short, high time to make California law and rules of imprisonment line up with
common sense.
For
there’s a lot more to the crime problems Prop. 57 has caused than merely the
Sacramento gunfight.
One
report presented to Orange County supervisors about one year after the
initiative passed claimed that one-fourth of the first 8,000 felons released
back into that county under prison realignment furthered by 57 was convicted of
another crime in the year after their discharge.
That rate
just about matched prior recidivism, which some took to mean that both 57 and
the reclassification of many crimes from felonies to misdemeanors under the
previous Proposition 47 did not increase crime.
And
yet…some crimes have risen sharply. In San Francisco, car burglaries and other
property crimes rose by 667 cases per 100,000 population in just the first year
of 57. There were similar increases in Long Beach and Los Angeles.
Although
the COVID-19 pandemic saw a respite in rising crime rates, they’ve recently
been going up more.
These
realities are the reason the state’s Association of Deputy District Attorneys
has called 57 a “full-fledged assault on public safety.”
The way
to begin fixing that is for legislators now coming into a new session to start
reclassifying obviously violent crimes as what they really are, and stop
allowing early releases for many of the most dangerous convicts.
-30-
Email Thomas Elias
at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most
Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It,"
is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net
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