Debate over Prop 47 and homelessness rekindled by Prop 36

Critics of Proposition 47 have long claimed that it increased homelessness by removing incentives for people to receive addiction treatment instead of jail sentences. The claim has now become a key talking point for the Proposition 36 campaign.

The rhetoric around the initiative to scale back portions of the 2014 criminal justice law changes has revived an old debate: Is homelessness mainly driven by addiction and mental illness, or by economics?

Yolo County District Attorney Jeff Reisig, a leading proponent of Proposition 36, said it would be wrong to blame nationwide trends for California's homeless population. He pointed to figures published by the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, gathered from data published by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for the years 2014 to 2022.

"If you look at the statistics, this is not cause and effect irrefutably, but from the time Prop. 47 was passed in 2014, official government data shows homelessness went up in California over 51% while in the rest of the country combined, it went down 11%," Reisig said. "There's been many, many studies that have looked at that trend."

He pointed to other blue states with high housing costs--such as Illinois, Maryland, and New York--and said they did not have similar increases.
Reisig added, "That's a staggering number. People will say it's the high cost of housing. But if you actually look at the data across the country, you find that that can be easily debunked."

"Correlation does not imply causation, and I haven't seen an analysis showing that Prop. 47 substantially increased rates of homelessness as he seems to suggest," countered Benjamin F. Henwood, director of the Homelessness Policy Research Institute at the University of Southern California.

Henwood added, "I also don't know of data that undermines the thesis that housing costs are a main driver of homelessness. In fact, Gregg Colburn and Clayton Aldern's recent book entitled, Homelessness is a Housing Problem, provides clear and convincing evidence that housing costs including median rents do a good job of predicting rates of homelessness."

That book, published in 2022, attempted to use a statistical lens to correlate homelessness with other factors. It concluded that factors such as drug use, mental illness, poverty, government support and weather did not correlate to rates of homelessness --but housing market conditions did.

Homelessness clearly went up in the years after Proposition 47, and California has by far the largest homeless population in the country. The California State Auditor's Office published figures in April that were in line with Reisig's numbers.

"More than 180,000 Californians experienced homelessness in 2023--a 53 percent increase from 2013," according to the "Homelessness in California" report.

The report also found the number of homeless people was trending down slightly at the time Proposition 47 passed. But it also said two programs championed by Gov. Gavin Newsom that directly focused on getting people into housing, Homekey and the CalWORKs Housing Support Program, "were likely cost effective."

Reisig said that one major goal of Proposition 36 is to increase participation in drug courts under California's pretrial diversion law.
"It's not an accurate statement to say that drug courts and drug treatment in custody or through court programs are not successful," Reisig said. "About 70% of people that participate do experience success, in that they graduate, and their recidivism rates are much lower."

"I just see the arguments for Prop. 36 as being overly simplistic in terms of understanding the connection between the various forces at play," said Charis E. Kubrin, a professor of criminology, law and society at UC Irvine. "I really think it is just an attempt to identify a mechanism that will get people's attention to want to roll back the reforms of Prop. 47."

She said homelessness is difficult to address because it has many causes. For instance, outside of a handful of large cities, few places have housing costs and shortages comparable to California.

Kubrin noted advocates of tougher criminal laws unsuccessfully pushed Proposition 20 in 2020. It would have restricted parole and made it easier to charge thefts as felonies. It lost 23% of the vote.

In the past decade, she contended, rates for most categories of property crimes, such as shoplifting and burglaries, have either remained flat or gone down slightly. Other sources say property crime has risen along with most other types of offenses.

One very shocking and visible kind of crime really has gone up, Kubrin said: smash and grab robberies, often involving several coordinated thieves. But these crimes are a poor match for the changes included in Proposition 36, Kubrin said.

"Frankly, smash-and-grabs have very little to do with Prop. 47 by nature of what they are," Kubrin said. "Most fall well over $1,000 dollars. Most of the time there's a firearm involved, which immediately makes it a felony. So, one really has nothing to do with the other."