Is Proposition 47 responsible for crime increases in California? - OCRegister

Editor’s note: Breaking views are thoughts from individual members of the editorial board on today’s headlines.

In 2014, voters approved Proposition 47, which reduced a handful of drug and property crimes from felonies to misdemeanors. Those crimes include possession of certain drugs as well as petty theft, receiving stolen property and forging/writing bad checks when the amount involved is $950 or less.

With California no longer packing state prisons with people convicted of such low level crimes, California has been able to free up $103 million in savings from reduced incarceration for investments into crime prevention and recidivism reduction programs.

But Prop 47 has its detractors, who argue the measure has contributed to crime increases in the state.

To their point, if one compares violent and property crime rates from 2014 to subsequent years, you’d find that, yes, there have been increases in the statewide crime rate.

From 2014 to 2016, violent crime rates per 100,000 people rose from 393.3 to 443.9. For the purposes of this discussion, “violent crime” consists of homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assault.

Over that same period, property crime rates per 100,000 people rose from 2,459 to 2,544.4. For the purposes of this discussion, “property crime” refers to burglary, motor vehicle theft and larceny-theft (regardless of value).

Stopping there, declaring that we’re in the grips of an unprecedented crime wave and attributing the crime increases to Prop 47 would be a grave error.

There are three important facts that have to be pointed out:

There has been no evidence to date that Prop 47 is actually the driver of any of these increases. Beyond anecdotes and people confusing correlation with causation, there is no evidence that Prop 47 is responsible.
The year Prop 47 was passed, 2014, happened to be the year in which the property crime rate hit the lowest ever recorded by the state. Consequently, the increase from 2014 to 2016 turned out to be a case in which California’s property crime rate rose from the lowest on record to the second-lowest on record. The sky isn’t falling.
As I pointed out in a January response to Michele Hanisee, “between 2006 and 2016, as the prison population fell from 163,000 to 115,000, statewide violent crime rates per 100,000 fell by 17 percent and property crime rates fell by 20 percent. ” This suggests that California long passed the point of diminishing returns with respect to crime in packing so many people in state prisons.

As one can see from the chart below (from the Public Policy Institute of California), any discussion of crime and crime increases in California is within the context of historically low crime rates. To say otherwise, or to fail to acknowledge that reality, is simply dishonest.

With all of this in mind, we now have some rigorous research on the particular question of to what extent Prop 47 has influenced increases in violent and property crimes in California.

On Wednesday, researchers from the University of California, Irvine released the findings of their research into the impact of Prop 47 on violent and property crimes. The researchers compared California’s crime trends since 2014 to the trends of a “synthetic California” comprised of states – New York, Nevada, Michigan and New Jersey – which have had similar crime trends to California from 1970-2015.

Their findings?

“Our findings suggest Proposition 47 is not responsible for increases in homicide, rape, aggravated assault or robbery,” the researchers note in a fact sheet summarizing their research. “While our findings appear to show that larceny and motor vehicle thefts increased following Proposition 47’s enactment (see Figure 2), these findings don’t hold up to additional testing.”

This research adds to a growing body of evidence that, contrary to the hysterical claims of those most opposed to criminal justice reforms like Prop 47, the reforms undertaken by California in recent years do not make us less safe.

“What the measure did do was cause less harm and suffering to those charged with crime,” said Charis Kubrin, a professor at UCI who conducted the research along with doctoral student Bradley Bartos. “Of course, we want to keep our streets safe, but we also want to be as humane as possible along the way.”

Fortunately, it appears that Prop 47 has not only meant less suffering to those charged with crimes, but Prop 47 has been able to do that without driving crime increases across the state.

Instead of condemning people to being warehoused in prisons and jails for excessive periods of time, reforms like Prop 47 have moved us in the right direction, without compromising safety.

Sal Rodriguez is an editorial writer and columnist for the Southern California News Group. He may be reached at salrodriguez@scng.com

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