Prop. 5 calls for expanding drug-crime rehabilitation

SACRAMENTO – Eight years ago, 61 percent of California voters passed a novel initiative requiring treatment instead of jail or prison for tens of thousands of drug offenders.

Supporters of that initiative are back with a follow-up measure that would require even greater leniency.

Billionaire investor and liberal activist George Soros is helping fund Proposition 5 on the Nov. 4 ballot. The measure would prohibit sending paroled drug offenders back to prison for parole violations unless they commit a new felony, have a violent or serious record or are considered high risk by prison officials.

The initiative would shorten parole for most drug and property crimes, while lengthening it for violent and serious felons. It also would require the state to put hundreds of millions of dollars into treatment and rehabilitation programs for nonviolent drug offenders and parolees.

To opponents, it's another step down a dangerous path that fails to make drug users accountable for their actions and lets drug dealers off the hook. Without the threat of jail or prison time, offenders won't get serious about true rehabilitation, opponents contend.

Bottom line: the Drug war is OVER

Drugs won

The only way to TRULY convince folks not to ruin their lives on drugs is through accurate education

Not by trying to ban chemicals, plants and the markets for them, prosecuting the growers, processors, transporters and distributors

Look at Mexico for example of where the drug war is evetnually going - armed terrorist gangs with more weaponry and money than the cops (and no rules OR LAWYERS to follow)

All those deaths would be avoided if pot was 10$ / OZ and Cocaine was the same, and you could get it legally

ALAS, it seems this insanity will never end, as will never end the desire for mankind to alter his state of mind

The only thing I don't like about this proposition is that it shortens parole for people who commit property crimes. That's a mistake. I know that the conventional wisdom is that drugs cause crime and therefore we must lock the drug dealers up as long as possible. The thinking is that if we lock up the drug dealers fewer people will get on drugs and there will be less property crime and other crime in which drugs are a major contributing factor.

Which would be better for a community, locking up ten thieves for ten years without parole or ten small time drug dealers? I say locking up the thieves that long would be much better because it would probably stop hundreds of thefts at least. So many people who would have been victimized won't be victimized. Locking up the small time drug dealers would stop them from engaging in a lot of transactions, but the reality is that those transactions would occur anyway even if these ten were locked up. The people they would have sold drugs to will just buy them from someone else. Odds are though that nobody else will go out and steal the stuff from these people who would have had their stuff taken had we not locked the ten thieves up for ten years without parole.

It is true that we have a limited amount of prison bed space and we cannot continue to build prisons at the rate we've built them for the last three decades or so. We're going to have to get smarter about how we use our limited resources. Letting thieves out earlier is not smart though.

I think drug dealers ought to get some time though in most cases. In my state selling any amount of a Schedule I or Schedule II drug, like meth, cocaine, morphine, heroin, Oxycontin, etc., can get you up to life in prison. The maximum penalty for felony theft is 10 years in most cases, 20 if the value of the property is high enough. The way things work in practice is that some guy who sells a half a gram of meth to confidential informant is going to spend a lot more time in a prison normally than even a burglar. Some punk who steals a checkbook and writes checks all over town will likely get probation, while the dumb kid who sells a half a Sweet N Low packet sized package of meth will spend five years in prison or so before being paroled. A burglar will probably do a few months and get out. Other thieves will get probation or very short sentences. It's screwy.

I'm a lawyer and who is in court all the time and I see all the cases coming through the court. I've handled tons of theft cases and drug cases. The vast majority of the drug delivery cases we get involve a gram or less of meth or cocaine or a few pills. Most of the time these people have sold to a “confidential informant,” or sometimes on occasion an undercover narcotics officer introduced by a confidential informant. Confidential informants can be people just working for pay, but most of the time they are druggies who got caught and who are trying to stay out of prison by making drug buys on tape. I worked as a public defender for many years and very often my clients ended up working as confidential informants. What they had to do normally was make a buy from three different people, and that would keep them out of prison. A lot of times they don't know three drug dealers, or three they feel safe setting up. They'll just call anyone they know who uses drugs and ask them to help them find something. They won't call somebody dangerous who will kill them or anything like that. They'll find meek people. And sometimes these aren't drug dealers at all. They're people who have a hard time saying no who think they are helping out a friend by helping him or her find drugs. Hot girls make the best CI’s because they can always get someone to go get them some dope. We aren't really accomplishing much by locking these people up so long and letting the thieves off easy.

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