Should California vote to roll back criminal justice reforms?

Conservatives often blame a 2014 California ballot initiative for rising crime across the state. Next month, voters will have the opportunity to undo some of its provisions. Should they?

California’s Proposition 47 was approved in 2014 by a vote of 60-40. The proposal would “require misdemeanors instead of felonies for non-serious, nonviolent crimes such as petty theft and drug possession, unless the defendant has previously been convicted of certain violent or serious crimes, including murder” and rape.

The measure set a monetary limit for certain crimes, including shoplifting, grand larceny, receiving stolen property and check forgery. An offender caught committing a listed offense could only be charged with a misdemeanor as long as the amount stolen was less than $950. The change could also be applied retroactively to people who have already been convicted.

Proposition 36, on the ballot in November, would repeal portions of Proposition 47. If the new measure is adopted, “an offender with two prior convictions for theft may be charged with a felony, regardless of the value of the property stolen,” and “The value of property stolen in multiple thefts may be added together so that an offender in appropriate cases can be charged with grand theft and not with petty theft.”

The original $950 limit has long been controversial among conservatives, particularly after viral social media videos showed masked assailants carrying out brazen robberies in San Francisco. “Californians have effectively decriminalized shoplifting. Not surprisingly, they have more of it,” wrote Manhattan Institute senior fellow Jason L. Riley in a 2021 article Wall Street Journal Editorial that called San Francisco “a shoplifters’ paradise.”

At a rally in Pennsylvania over the weekend, amid a major digression on crime and policing, former President Donald Trump said relaxed penalties in California were responsible for the state’s higher theft rates.

“Nine hundred and fifty dollars you may steal; anything above that will be prosecuted,” he said. “Originally you would see kids walking in with calculators, doing the math – they didn’t want to go over $950.”

Trump has been making similar claims on the campaign trail for several weeks, saying in August: “There are thieves who go into stores with calculators and calculate how much it costs, because if it’s less than $950, they can steal it and will not be charged.”

Of course, it’s not true that shoplifting under $950 is no longer illegal – it can still be punished as a misdemeanor. “Prop 47 increased the dollar amount at which theft can be prosecuted as a felony from $400 to $950 to compensate for inflation and cost of living,” Alex Bastian, co-author of the proposal, told the Associated Press in 2021. “But the Most shoplifting cases initially cost less than $400, so there is no difference before Prop 47 and after Prop 47.”

And even after raising it to $950, California’s penalty threshold is lower than in more than half of all other U.S. states: deep-red states like Montana and Kansas set their penalty at $1,500, while Texas sets it at $2,500 US dollar is set.

“Under current law, prosecutors can already count together thefts that are proven to be related, such as multiple thefts from the same store in the same week or skimming small amounts from your employer every day,” notes the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit research organization political advocacy group that supports criminal justice reform (and opposes Proposition 36).

To be fair, there is evidence that certain crimes were committed did Surge after Proposition 47. “Driven by theft, property crime skyrocketed after Prop 47 compared to the nation and peer states,” says a September 2024 report from the Public Policy Institute of California. At the same time, it was not the largest contributor: “ There is clearer evidence that retail thefts have increased due to the criminal justice system’s pandemic response, and the increases have been greater than the increases due to Prop 47.”

Likewise a study from 2018 in Criminology and public policy found “Prop 47 had no impact on murder, rape, aggravated assault, robbery, or burglary. However, theft and motor vehicle theft appear to have increased moderately,” but the rates of increase were both small and had other possible causes.

It’s also worth noting that when Proposition 47 came up for a vote, it wasn’t particularly controversial, even among conservatives. Newt Gingrich and Senator Rand Paul (R–Ky.) both wrote editorials in favor of the proposal, each co-authored with B. Wayne Hughes Jr. (Hughes, a Republican billionaire, donated over $1.25 million in support of the proposal, just above the amount provided by George Soros’ Fund for Policy Reform.)

“Of course we need prisons for people who are dangerous, and there should be harsh sentences for those convicted of violent crimes,” Gingrich’s editorial said. “But California has overused incarceration. Prisons are for people we’re afraid of, but we’ve filled them with a lot of people we’re just mad at.”

“We must change our current system – a system that wastes taxpayer dollars, destabilizes families and, worse, does not make us safer,” Pauls said. “It’s no surprise that conservatives support this measure…If something is so promising for our public safety and our public resources, why wouldn’t we do it?”

In part, the original proposal was a reaction to Brown vs Platathe Supreme Court’s 2011 decision, which found that setting caps on California’s prison population was “necessary to remedy violations of prisoners’ constitutional rights.” A district court panel had found that the state’s prison facilities were housing nearly twice as many inmates as they were designed for and ordered the state to “reduce its prison population to 137.5% of design capacity,” a reduction , which “could be as high as …”46,000 people.”

“A decade of research has shown that Prop 47 achieved its goals,” states the Vera Institute. “Studies concluded that it reduced recidivism rates, saved the state more than $800 million, and reduced both the prison population and racial disparities. Researchers have shown that it did not increase violent crime, robberies or burglaries.”