Prop. 47 has reduced racial disparities in sentencing, study asserts

SAN FRANCISCO — A study commissioned by San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon shows Proposition 47 has reduced racial disparities in sentencing between minorities and white offenders, particularly when it comes to drug crimes.

The most-noted data points from the study showed African-Americans went from making up 23 percent of felony drug arrests before the implementation of Prop. 47 to 9 percent afterward.

Some of the key provisions of Prop. 47 are now in the cross hairs of an initiative campaign backed by law enforcement groups.

The research was released on Thursday, the same day Gov. Jerry Brown used his final State of the State speech in part to offer a spirited defense of the criminal justice changes he championed.

“I urge that instead of enacting new laws because of horrible crimes and lurid headlines, you consider the overall system and what it might need and what truly protects public safety,” Brown said.

Republicans took immediate aim at that portion of Brown’s speech.

“Since passage of his ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ policies, violent crime and property crime have skyrocketed while police are forced to play ‘catch-and-release’ with criminals who would previously have been behind bars,” Sen. Scott Wilk, R-Antelope Valley, said in a statement.

Prop. 47 was a 2014 voter initiative that reclassified many non-violent felonies as misdemeanors, allowed for potential resentencing for 10,000 prisoners, and instituted a review process to ensure criminals released under the law did not pose a risk to public safety.

It passed by nearly 20 points despite near-universal opposition from law enforcement groups.

Last month, several groups introduced the Reducing Crime and Keeping California Safe Act of 2018, which would modify Prop. 47 guidelines that reclassify any theft of less than $950 to misdemeanors.

Under the proposed initiative, a conviction for a third theft of property valued higher than $250 would become a felony.

“Under Prop. 47, a thief could walk out of a retail store with a flat-screen television every day of the week, and all they would get each time they were caught and convicted is a misdemeanor,” Michele Hanisee, president of the Association of Deputy District Attorneys, said in a statement promoting the initiative.

Hanisee’s group, the California Police Chiefs Association and several other Prop. 47 opponents did not return calls seeking comment for this story.

The California Coalition Against Sexual Assault opposed Prop. 47 but changed its position after it passed.

“We actually have pivoted significantly and are looking at the racial disparities across all types of crime,” said Emily Austin, the group’s senior policy associate.

In the new study, researchers Steven Raphael with UC Berkeley and John MacDonald with the University of Pennsylvania found the amount of time the average black defendant spent in pretrial custody dropped by almost half, as did the disparity between blacks and whites. They also showed other racial groups faced disparities. For instance, Asians were likely to face tougher charges and to have a harder time getting their cases dismissed than whites.

Furthermore, they showed these differences often didn’t just result from one or two interactions in which a police officer or district attorney treated them more harshly. Rather, the worse outcomes for minority defendants were often the cumulative effect of multiple law enforcement interactions over years.

For instance, among the reasons an African-American defendant might have gotten a longer sentence was having received tougher treatment during earlier dealings with law enforcement, they said. Prop. 47, they said, could reduce these differences over time.

“Pre-trial detention, criminal history, and criminal justice status at time of arrest generate relatively worse outcomes for Blacks relative to Whites,” they wrote, adding, “For nearly all disposition outcomes, racial disparities narrow with the passage of Proposition 47.”