
California: Prop 47's Reduced Criminal Penalties Contributed to More Thefts - mbgaxyz
https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2018/06/12/prop-47-reduced-penalties-more-thefts/
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wahern
This is ridiculous:

    
    
      The ballot measure led to the lowest arrest rate in state
      history in 2015 as experts said police frequently ignored
      crimes that brought minimal punishment.
    
      Jail bookings in 12 sample counties dropped about 8 percent,
      driven by a reduction in bookings for Proposition 47 crimes,
      while cite and releases increased, researchers found.
    
      Reduced penalties mean fewer drug addicts now seem to be
      getting treatment, then “are stealing to support their
      habit,” said San Luis Obispo County Chief Probation Officer
      Jim Salio, president of Chief Probation Officers of
      California.
    
      Morgan Hill Police Chief David Swing, president of the
      California Police Chiefs Association, said researchers’
      findings “are consistent with what police chiefs across the
      state have seen since 2014” and show the need for a proposed
      initiative intended for the November ballot that would
      partly roll back the 2014 law.
    

Misdemeanors can bring up to a year in jail. A misdemeanor with a maximum 6
month penalty doesn't require a jury trial or even indigent counsel under the
U.S. Constitution, so theoretically it should be _easier_ to prosecute and
convict these crimes. How about instead of increasing penalties so they can be
abused we simply required our cops and prosecutors to be doing their jobs!

The issue with homelessness is much the same thing. Drug users on the street
could _still_ be charged and forced to enter rehab just like before. And no
court in this country has ever even suggested that a mentally ill homeless
person who sits in his own feces all day can't be forced into treatment. The
rule that the state can only force treatment on someone who is physically
violent or imminently so isn't a court-enforced standard, it was voluntarily
adopted.

We don't need harsher penalties. We just need the existing rules to be applied
consistently and sanely. But the past 60 years of harsh sentencing, which
included turning everything into a felony, has twisted everybody's priorities.

~~~
masonic

      And no court in this country has ever even suggested that a mentally ill homeless person who sits in his own feces all day can't be forced into treatment
    

You'd have to make the case that such behavior poses _imminent threat of harm
to himself or others_ to "force him into treatment". Good luck with that.

~~~
wahern
Again, no court has ever said that imminent harm is the constitutional
standard. Imminent harm (or similar wording) is what the ACLU and other groups
lobbied for and got in most states in the 1970s and later, and is a big reason
the U.S. has so many mentally ill homeless slowly dying on the streets.

More recently a few states have changed their legislation to loosen the
standard. For example, in Oregon you can be involuntarily committed if because
of mental illness you're "unable to provide for basic personal needs like
health and safety."

Much like with the recent crime wave, mentally ill homeless is a fixable
problem, or at least we can do much better. We don't need to return to the
1950s when undesirables were housed in mental hospitals. The abuses were real.
But the reaction was too extreme.

There's plenty of room for moving back in the other direction without creating
the potential for widespread abuse. Not letting sick people rot on the streets
is hardly a slippery slope to hospitalizing and drugging non-conformists.
There's a universe of possibilities between where we're at now and where we
were when O'Connor v. Donaldson was decided in 1975.

Again, neither Donaldson[1] nor any other court opinion set the bar at
imminent harm, serious harm, or anything similar. Rather, it was simply
expedient to toss everybody out on the street while also feeling good about
ourselves for increasing everybody's "freedom".

[1] Donaldson was a functioning schizophrenic. He lived in an apartment,
alone, in Philadelphia and got by without trouble for years. Though sick he
was still able to care for himself. He visited his parents in Florida and his
father called the cops and had him involuntary committed because of his
paranoid ramblings. He was hospitalized for 15 years without any doctor so
much as suggesting he couldn't return to the stable life he had before. _That_
was a terrible injustice, but hardly justification for the extreme reforms
that came afterward.

