California Democrats are continuing to resist the rollback of pro-criminal “ reforms ,” showing just how difficult it is to root out the racialized rot in the criminal justice system once it gets a foothold.
The California legislature has revived a bill that would help lessen sentences for people who have been in jail since 1990 or for at least 25 years, even if they were convicted of murder. As the logic goes, those people convicted of serious crimes that landed them sentences up to life without parole would have been given lighter sentences under the state’s new “reformed” system, so we need to start letting them out of jail as soon as possible.
That bill nearly became law in the last legislative session, meaning it is well on its way to doing so now. That is especially true as a chunk of California Democratic legislators now must appease their pro-"reform" colleagues after passing some mildly stricter criminal penalties on Monday.
Some California Democrats helped approve a package of 10 bills that would do basic things: “penalize thefts that involved someone forcibly entering a car with the intent to steal and sell,” “increase penalties for people who cause a fire in the act of committing a property theft,” “allow prosecutors to aggregate property thefts,” and “allow stores to file temporary restraining orders against certain repeat offenders,” according to the Los Angeles Times. This came over the objection of California’s more “progressive” legislators, including members of the Legislative Black Caucus.
Why? Because putting people in jail is allegedly racist. Assemblywoman Mia Bonta (the wife of Attorney General Rob Bonta [D-CA]) said as much, as did state Sen. Lola Smallwood-Cuevas, who said the bills would “deepen mass incarceration” but that Californians wanted “to decarcerate.” This comes despite the fact that Californians have been sounding the alarm on crime for three years now.
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All of this comes after Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) and his legislative allies tried to stop attempts to put harsher criminal penalties for shoplifting on the ballot in November as a statewide proposition. Newsom and his friends attempted to blackmail retailers legislatively into supporting their own half-measures at the expense of the ballot proposition, only dropping the matter because they ran out of time.
Even as Californians push for harsher criminal penalties and safer communities, California Democrats must be dragged along kicking and screaming. This is what happens when your view of the criminal justice system is that it is inherently racist to put criminals in jail and that incarceration numbers are bad rather than a neutral number that tells you nothing about the scope and severity of the criminals who are locked up. California’s slow crawl toward rolling back pro-criminal policies shows why voters shouldn’t allow pro-criminal Democrats to get into power in the first place.
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