Long Beach Post | John Donegan | Sep 15, 2024
Opposition, meanwhile, has come from California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the California Democratic Party, the League of Women Voters, and California Attorneys for Criminal Justice, as well as a coalition of social justice groups that analogized it to the 1990s era of mass incarceration.
“Prop 36 is an attack on our communities and the public safety reforms Californians have fought and voted for,” wrote Executive Director Irene Kao of Courage California in a joint letter representing 13 partner organizations. “The funders and supporters of this ballot measure have no concern for the actual safety of our communities–if they did, they would not be working to strip away the parts of Prop 47 that have diverted more than $800 million in savings from our pre-2014 days of over-incarceration to fund the critical treatment and diversion programs that our communities need!”
Under the new measure, courts could see a massive increase in workload that could cost the state up to “hundreds of millions of dollars” annually, as the state prison population could swell by around a few thousand people, up from the 90,000 currently jailed. The county population — at around 250,000 people — could rise by a few thousand people.