Senate Republicans Propose Abandoning Voters’ Drug Treatment Program in California Budget Fight

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Margaret Dooley
Drug Policy Alliance

If Senate Republicans had their way, the legislature would turn its back on the voters. After six years of evidence showing Proposition 36 is a success, Senate Republicans today called on the state to abandon the voter-enacted, landmark law that provides drug treatment instead of incarceration to 36,000 non-violent, low-level drug possession offenders each year. The group has proposed zero funding for the program in 2007-08.

Let’s put this in perspective: approved by 61% of voters in 2000, Prop. 36 is the most significant piece of sentencing reform since the end of Prohibition in 1933. In just six years, the program has saved $1.8 billion and graduated over 70,000 people—who are not adding to dangerous overcrowding in our state’s jails and prisons. Based on these results, de-funding Prop. 36 would clearly be fiscally irresponsible.

But the more important point is that Prop. 36 is not the Senate Republicans’ to abandon.

At the ballot box in 2000, in polling in 2004 and in debates in the legislature in 2006 and 2007, the public has shown consistent and overwhelming support for Prop. 36 drug treatment. De-funding this treatment alternative now, in the darkness of back-room budget negotiations, would be a serious affront to the California voters and to the entire initiative process, and set a dangerous precedent.

When voters approved Prop. 36 in 2000, they were rejecting the “tough on crime” politics that had quadrupled the number of people incarcerated in California for simple drug possession between 1988 and 2000. The number exceeded 20,000 at its peak in 2000.

Californians’ vote for change in 2000 should not be made light of. Voters chose treatment instead of incarceration at the ballot, despite vocal opposition from almost every state and local law enforcement agency, from nearly every district attorney and most elected officials. Voters weren’t unaware of the establishment’s opposition to Prop. 36; they disagreed.