The election came and went, and we all know how that turned out. The Internet is full of Jeremiads and admonitions about the presidential outcome, and surely one more riff on the topic is not what anyone needs and wants. What I didn’t see a lot of is coverage of the criminal justice propositions on the CA ballot, so here are my two cents.
Let’s start with the obvious: I think the outcomes on both 6 and 36 are wrong and counterproductive. Prop 6 (which failed 46.7-53.3) was a no-brainer, and was going to fix a very ugly aspect of our correctional system: the abhorrent exploitation of prison labor, that we all benefit from in many imperceptible ways. People behind bars manufacture silkscreened college merch and furniture, do the boring telecommunications tasks for companies that go unappreciated (but better rewarded) on the outside, and most importantly, perhaps, save my life and yours as firefighters in fire camps. This is real labor, with real effort, sweat, skill, and expertise that goes into it, and people on the outside get paid market wages for it. There’s an exquisite irony in that this outcome emerges from the same election cycle in which San Francisco residents voted yes on Proposition H (52-48), which lowers the retirement age for the free firefighters who protect us alongside the incarcerated ones.
Prop 36 passed with an overwhelming majority (68.5-31.6) and will result in the creation of two new theft felonies (all theft offenses were downgraded to misdemeanors in 2014, through a voter initiative that also passed with an overwhelming majority) and ratcheting up consequences for some drug crimes as well. Under the Criminal Justice Realignment, people convicted of felonies–unless these are serious, violent, or sexual–serve their sentences in county jails anyway. And I don’t see that the potential for a few more months behind bars, especially if all it does is give the prosecution yet another card they can play to push more folks to plea bargain, deters anyone from offending, supports rehabilitation in a meaningful way, or even effectively incapacitates folks. Au contraire, without meaningful vocational and educational training behind bars that leads to a robust reentry continuum, all convicted folks will learn is how to be better at thefts and drugs, and will drift further into the lifestyle that got them in trouble in the first place.
It’s fair to say that I think we got it wrong this time. And yet, to be honest, I understand why this happened, I respect the people who voted differently than me, and I think that, rather than launching into the usual sloganeering, it’s worth listening to them.
Prop 6 was close. And I suspect that many Californians who voted against it would be proud to vote for it, had it been marketed differently. There are excellent, pro-social reasons, that law-abiding people can respect and understand, for why prison labor has to be compensated fairly– and they come from a classic in criminology, David Matza’s Delinquency and Drift. People who earn a decent living through their work benefit from having a stake in conformity, the pride and support of their families, and a network that waits for them. They have, perhaps, some small savings for when they get out, that could keep them out of trouble in the first few months that pose the greatest risk of recidivism. They learn the dignity that comes with earning a paycheck, and they get a little push toward a law-abiding, taxpaying life. This is something that folds our fellow Californians into the family of man the way we want, and it should be encouraged.
Instead, the Yes on 6 folks decided to wag fingers and sloganeer: we were told that Prop 6 was going to abolish slavery (which most CA voters would understandably believe was never legal in CA and ended in the South in 1863). This framing is not without merit when you look at it carefully. Plenty of research supports the link between the abolition of slavery and the exception, introduced into the constitution in the same breath as the repeal, for prison labor. Plenty of examples exist of prisons that continued to look, feel, and behave exactly like antebellum plantations. But the effort and money put into Prop 6, I want to believe, was not spent just to admonish people or to introduce them to academic analogies. These people played to win; they wanted to eliminate forced unpaid labor in prisons. And the thing is, people do not respond well when they are being admonished. After years of forced reeducation in schools and workplaces, in which decent, well-meaning people were reduced to tears being told that they were racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, etc., they’ve lost their taste for being chastised, and they draw the line at the implication that they are modern-day enslavers. I’m saddened, but not surprised, that they lashed out by voting no on this.
This, after all, is why the financial crisis of 2008 moved the needle for death penalty abolition: excellent arguments–barbarism, innocence, racial discrimination, etc.–stopped being effective at some point. And then–boom, boom, boom, abolitions, moratoria, and now more than half of US states no longer have the death penalty. Slow progress, yes, but better than no progress. The key? Decent, hardworking, law abiding people who disagree with me on the death penalty on principle realized that capital punishment is expensive, and the recession made that impossible to ignore. I wish the architects of Yes on 6 had considered something alongside the “win-win” framing instead of reverting to the righteous scolding that permeates so much of California’s public discourse. That might’ve won them the election.
Prop 36 is a more difficult case. I have no doubt that the proposition is not the solution to the fentanyl crisis, the moribund vibe around the downtown area, and all kinds of other horrors. But at least it is a solution, proposed by people who accept the fact that there really is a problem. Along the lines of scolding, moralizing, and admonishing voters comes the unbearable hubris of telling people that what they see is not what they see, that what they experience is not what they experience, that the things that blight their daily life are not problems, that feeling scared and inconvenienced is really down to being racist/classist/bigoted/cruel, and that it is not okay to be bothered by any display of public disorder or lack of safety that falls short of a multiple homicide. It is true that, by objective measures, serious/violent crime is down, and that crime levels overall are low. But people do not experience crime by objective measures. They care about how their everyday life is affected.
The point where I started being really sore about this was way back in 2018, when Heather Knight wrote a piece for the Chron about how a homeless encampment affected life in a San Francisco neighborhood. The neighbors–good, decent people, who truly felt for their unhoused neighbors–got to their breaking point when rats, needles, and a suitcase full of poop became part of their getting-ready-for-school routine. Knight wrote:
The people who have homes on Isis aren’t get-off-my-lawn types. The neighbors I met seemed very progressive and genuinely heartsick that other people were living in these filthy conditions on sidewalks.
“I really strongly believe San Francisco is for everybody, not just us, but the community should be livable for everybody,” said Schoen-Rene’s wife, Jill, an attorney and children’s book author. “The suitcase is a symbol. Nobody should have to poop in a suitcase, and nobody should have to find a suitcase full of poop.”
To read the comments on the article, you’d think these people were unfeeling monsters. A whole parade of check-your-privilege scolding ensued. Knight was roasted for “privileging” these people’s feelings about how they live and work, for “giving them a voice,” rather than interviewing the folks who owned the only, apparently, valid perspective on the situation: the unhoused people themselves.
Yes, like anyone who lived in NYC in the 1980s knows, life is scary and dangerous when there are drive-by shootings and muggings on the subway. But life can also be plenty unsettling and unpleasant when, like me, you sit on BART next to a person who seems to have died hours ago and no one noticed. Or when a fellow passenger lights up multiple joints, or even a crack pipe, in a closed train car, under the San Francisco Bay, when you can’t escape to another car. Or when a passenger hopped up on something terrible breaks the fire extinguisher glass compartment, shakes it violently, and hammers it on the car train floor as it drives, to try and spray the foam on you and your stuff. Life is plenty unpleasant when you walk around the city with your kid and folks defecate right in front of him, or come close to you and scream profanities in your face. Or when your kid and his school friends play in a city park as part of recess, and a person who is clearly suffering a serious mental health crisis physically attacks two of their beloved teachers. All of the above happened to me personally in the last few months. Variations on the same theme have happened to every resident of a major urban area in California in the last few years, especially if they walk/bike to work or take transit. Yes, it is possible, and it is a human imperative, to feel empathy for the poor folks who are out in the street, unloved, uncared for, cold and hungry and maybe in drug withdrawal or mentally afflicted. Their suffering is immense. And at the same time, the people who have to bear the brunt of this suffering are also human beings, who want to work and study and raise their families in peace. And they are right that it’s not them-against-their-unhoused-neighbors. It’s them against a local government that does not offer solid solutions for this problem. So who are they going to vote for: the people who say, “I see you, I know the streets have become unsettling and upsetting, here’s how to solve it”–even if the solution is misguided–or the people who say, “you’re a middle-class douchebag and there’s no problem here?”
During COVID-19, Chad and I and many folks on the front lines of the San Quentin coalition were disheartened that no one cared about how the virus ravaged the prison, that no one stood up to cry against the mismanagement and the indifference and the neglect. But I think the big problem was–as is the case with so much of public policy–that people saw COVID as a zero-sum game. If prisons are cushy club Feds, it’s a bite out of our tax bill. If vaccines are distributed to prisons first, my grandma has to wait in line. The government did everything to avoid telling the truth: that the fight against COVID had to be fought on behalf of all human beings. That if people behind bars get sick, people on the outside–me and you and our loved ones–get sick also. That’s why we wrote FESTER, and I wish more social problems were addressed like this, instead of pitting people against each other.
I don’t think it’s time to roll over and stop working. If anything, we need to advocate harder. The more misery and suffering is wrought on the bottom rung of the socio-economic ladder in this state, the more we have to think hard and work hard to fix this. But alienating people and gaslighting them and pretending that they don’t know their own interests is not working. It hasn’t worked in the past, and with people feeling so fed up with being on the receiving end of so much schoolmarmish lecturing, it’s not going to work in the future. So what’s it going to be in the next election cycle? Do we want to feel like good people or do we want to actually accomplish some good? Can you expand your circle of compassion beyond the poor folks who are cold and sick and have to sleep rough on this cold winter to the folks who have to absorb their misery, even if they have the good fortune to be housed and employed? Can you see that it’s about our government finding a solution that works for all of us? That if our government takes us seriously, rather than telling us to suck it up, we all benefit?
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