One in five inmates in California is behind bars for a low-level crime, such as simple drug possession or petty theft. Annually, this is forty thousand offenders punished in the same way the state punishes those who commit violent and heinous crimes.
In 2013, I began hearing rumblings of a new state ballot measure, California Proposition 47, to reduce certain nonviolent felonies to misdemeanors. In theory, this would be life-changing for so many people, but I was skeptical. I knew how diluted California props tended to become. Sure, it all sounded great now, but what would Prop 47 really end up doing?
Then I received a call from Robert Rooks, the state director of the NAACP, telling me he was leaving to go work with Californians for Safety and Justice, the new nonprofit initiating Prop 47. The more I learned about the initiative, the more my skepticism faded, and I realized the truly profound impact this could have on people like me and communities like mine.
Under Prop 47, an estimated 1 million people in California could be eligible to reduce their sentences, clean up their records, and change their lives. Prop 47 called for downgrading six low-level felonies to misdemeanors: simple drug possession, and petty theft, shop-lifting, receiving stolen property, forgery, and writing a bad check, so long as the value was under $950.
The act would also go further, retroactively affecting those who already were sentenced by reducing their time and sending them home. This measure would ease overcrowding in prisons and jails and save taxpayer money—an estimated $100 million dollars annually—with the savings to be allocated to community-based drug and mental health treatment programs, school programs for at-risk kids, and crime victim services.
For those like me, who’d already served time, Prop 47 would allow us to clean up our records by reducing applicable felonies to misdemeanors. This would forever lift the burden and stigma of having to check that felony box.
But we had a battle before us, with formidable opponents. Prop 47 threatened to take the wind out of law enforcement. It would take the wind out of judges. And it would take the wind out of the lucrative prison-industrial complex.
Then again, we did have reason to be optimistic. In 2012, Proposition 36, the Three Strikes Reform Act, had overwhelmingly passed, removing the mandatory twenty-five-years-to-life sentence for a third nonviolent offense (though it still fell disappointingly short by not touching the mandatory double sentence for a nonviolent second offense). In the first two years of the act, over nineteen hundred prisoners who were serving life sentences were scheduled for release, saving the state an estimated $20 million. Opponents of the reform had growled that crime rates would spike. But, as the former lifers were freed and tracked, recidivism rates were a mere 3 percent—a tenth of the state average.
I was front and center when Californians for Safety and Justice organized a meeting in L.A. to discuss their strategy to mobilize voters around Prop 47. As they described the TV ads and paid media they had planned, I started waving my arms. “Hey, you left out my community. I didn’t hear anyone mention knocking on doors in South L.A. That’s the community that’s most directly affected by this.”
Heads shook. “It’s the rare campaign that does direct voter contact where the voter turnout is low,” I was told.
I was all too used to hearing that my community had low voter turnout, which was why no campaigns put money or resources there. But to me this was the dog chasing its tail: if no one engages the voters in low-income communities like South L.A., why would they be inspired to go to the polls? I saw this as the perfect opportunity—Prop 47 was a powerful organizing tool since it directly affected people in my community. Fortunately, the executive director of Californians for Safety and Justice, Lenore Anderson, agreed. “Political advice be damned,” she said. “We’re trying to build a movement, not just win a campaign.”
Lenore allocated a grant for A New Way of Life to begin training in direct voter contact, community education, and outreach. I employed the women at A New Way of Life and some members of All of Us or None to travel throughout South L.A., Long Beach, and Compton, knocking on the doors no one else wanted to knock on. We held community forums; we stood outside grocery stores; we walked and we talked, in all the places that for so long had been ignored.
No surprise, people were interested. Most every person we spoke with had been impacted in some way by the War on Drugs. These were citizens and voters who knew that tough-on-crime policies hadn’t worked, and that no one was safer as a result. These were voters who lived the devastation created by the government’s and the media’s dogma that drug crimes deserved little leniency. They knew harsh drug sentences didn’t ultimately curb addiction or help young people “just say no.” And, they knew the difference the Three Strikes Reform Act had made on their families. They vowed to get out to vote.
Working with the County Register-Recorder and the L.A. Sheriff’s Department, we went into the men’s and women’s county jails and registered people to vote. The rules about voting rights weren’t widely known. Though incarcerated, many of the inmates were not yet convicted and still had the right to vote. Plus, anyone serving time for a misdemeanor conviction maintained the right to vote in California. I was astounded to discover that, of the approximately sixteen thousand inmates in L.A. County jails, an estimated half were eligible to vote—but, outside of independent efforts like mine, these inmates wouldn’t have been engaged in the voting process. Another way that our justice system’s mantra of “innocent until proven guilty” had fallen short.
Some of the sheriffs were happy to comply with our registration efforts, but you could look in the eyes of others, the “old guard,” and see their disdain for what we were trying to do. No matter, they had no choice; it was the law.
As election day grew near, we staffed a Tele-Town Hall, calling thousands of people in L.A. County. When I looked around the room at the women of A New Way of Life on those phones, I counted the many who were still on parole and did not, themselves, have the right to vote. This, I realized, was a new type of underground railroad.
Going into the vote, Prop 47 was endorsed by the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. We felt hopeful we had it. Then again, I’d felt that way with the Ban the Box vote, and it had flipped against us. I went on the radio with Mark Ridley-Thomas, reminding people, Get up, get out to vote!
On election day, I was with the Sybil Brand Commission doing a jail inspection and saw the room designated for voting. A prisoner could take a seat at a desk, fill out a ballot, and drop it in a box; the only difference was that there was no curtain. I stood for a while and quietly watched people in prison uniforms casting their vote. An amazing sight.
All the effort paid off. Prop 47 passed with nearly 60 percent of the vote—and, in L.A. County the numbers were an even more impressive 64 percent. My community had mobilized and showed up. It was as though voters were saying, “The laws were too harsh, the system was unjust. We’re sorry for what happened, and here’s how we’re making up for it.”
All of us who had organized the campaign celebrated with a huge party downtown at L.A. Live. Making for an odd juxtaposition, in the party room next door another celebration was taking place for the reelection of Sheriff Lee Baca, who was regarded, especially in my neighborhood, as overseeing a department rife with corruption and abuse. Baca had been with the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department since 1965, and was now entering his fifteenth year as head of it. Though California sheriffs were elected every four years, the job held no term limits, and rarely had an incumbent been unseated. They were all cronies, indoctrinated in the same old-boys’-club ways. In L.A. County—the largest sheriff’s department in the world—the average sheriff stuck around for two decades. Which was why there’d been only four sheriffs since 1932—fewer sheriffs than there’d been popes at the Vatican during the same timeframe.
So, there was Baca, celebrating another victory—even though, just two years earlier, the ACLU had filed suit to remove him after documenting an unprecedented amount of severe inmate abuse. The ACLU’s title of their report said it all: “Cruel and Unusual Punishment: How a Savage Gang of Deputies Controls L.A. County Jails.”
Of course, in my community, we’d long since known how it was when law enforcement was given exclusive power over a vulnerable population. In 2007, we invited Sheriff Baca to attend All of Us or None’s Peace and Justice Community in Compton to discuss conditions of confinement and his policies around use of force. Though he did show up, instead of engaging in a productive discussion he made a simple announcement: “You all need to pray,” he said. We need to pray?
It would take until 2016 before Baca would be charged with lying to federal investigators during an FBI probe into civil rights abuses and corruption in the county jail system. It didn’t surprise me when he pled guilty—or when he withdrew his guilty plea after the presiding federal judge rejected the proposed six-month prison sentence as too lenient—but what did surprise me was that Baca got to keep his nearly $330,000 annual pension, courtesy of the taxpayer.
On that triumphant night, seeing the sheriffs partying it up next to us cast a shadow over our Prop 47 victory. It spurred in me that nagging urgency, that perpetual reminder that although this was a major step in the right direction, we still had far to go. The following day, before a single person was even released under Prop 47, there was already grumbling about a spike in crime rates.
When Saúl and I spoke about the passage of Prop 47, he shared my guarded outlook. “It’s a good law on paper, though not perfect,” he said. “But we know from the civil rights movement that having laws by themselves is not enough. The legislation is not the victory, the successful implementation is the victory.”
He was right, and we got to work restructuring our legal clinic to include processing of Prop 47 petitions so that people could reduce applicable felonies to misdemeanors.
With the help of our staff attorney, CT Turney, I filled out a Prop 47 petition for myself. As I did, something came over me, blotting out my mixed emotions and momentarily silencing the voice in my head that nothing I was doing was really enough. With the approval of my petition, I would, for the first time in my adult life, have no felonies to my name. Just think, to erase the felon branding I’d been wearing for four decades, to no longer be identified and judged by crimes I’d committed when I was a person so different from the woman I was today, and to—hallelujah—be able to visit my nephew and others in prison without having to declare I was a convicted felon.
As I delivered my petition downtown to the clerk’s office, a camera crew from Californians for Safety and Justice followed me, along with Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas’s justice deputy Derric Johnson, to witness the momentous event. While the actual act of filing was mundane, the significance engulfed me. This was the embodiment of hope, for myself and for a million others. The maddening and disheartening cycle of qualified people ready and wanting to work but getting knocked down by the stigma and restrictions of their records, Prop 47 could bulldoze through that wall of No. At last, I could feel the sun shining through.
Some sixty days later, a judge granted my petition. The attorneys and I then decided to push the boundaries of the law further, by following up the Prop 47 success with a petition for expungement. A legal one-two punch: Prop 47 had reduced my old felonies to misdemeanors, which then, technically, made me eligible to expunge the misdemeanors. It seemed logical, but it hadn’t been done before, and we didn’t know if the judges would go for the extra measure. Especially since many judges weren’t terribly happy about Prop 47 because they felt it diminished their power—and it had.
We filed for expungement, and waited. Some months later, CT hurried into my office, waving a piece of paper.
“We got it!” she exclaimed.
“We did?” I had to see the approval for myself. Wow, did that feel victorious.
The first wave of implementation saw over 4,400 people who met Prop 47 criteria released from state prisons. Thousands more from county jails were re-sentenced and eligible for early release. The impact was greatest for women prisoners, the majority of whom were incarcerated for low-level crimes.
Stanford Law School later released a Proposition 47 Progress Report, citing the exceptionally low recidivism rate of prisoners whose sentences were reduced under Proposition 47: 5 percent.
Ingrid Archie, who’d been arrested after leaving her baby in the car while she ran into the Dollar General store, was in county jail awaiting sentencing when Prop 47 passed. Before going in front of the judge, she asked her public defender if she qualified for Prop 47. No, her lawyer told her, and advised that Ingrid take the plea deal of three years; otherwise, she’d be looking at seven.
After a couple of months in prison, Ingrid saw a flyer about Prop 47. As she read the details, it seemed she did qualify. Her original felony charge a couple of years earlier for petty theft—she’d stolen two items of baby clothes—was far under the $950 threshold. Because she’d been on probation for the petty theft when she was arrested at the Dollar General store, she automatically received a prison sentence—but Prop 47, it seemed, would override that. She wrote to the court, asking to have paperwork sent to her if she was eligible. A Prop 47 petition arrived, along with mailing instructions.
Five months later, she was approved and her charges were reclassified as misdemeanors. After another four months, she was granted a release date. She called me to pick her up.
During the eight months Ingrid had been incarcerated, she lost custody of her three daughters. The youngest, who’d been four months old when Ingrid was arrested, was placed by the Department of Children and Family Services with Ingrid’s sister. Ingrid’s two-year-old was with her father. And her teenager, Simone, was placed by DCFS with her stepmom, in a house with three teenaged stepbrothers. Ingrid had, at least, felt relieved that all her daughters were with family.
Because Ingrid had completed parenting classes in prison, she was allowed monitored visits with her kids. The day after she was released was Simone’s fourteenth birthday, and her stepmom brought her to A New Way of Life for a surprise birthday gift of seeing her mom. Only, Ingrid was more surprised.
“Simone, are you pregnant?” she asked as soon as she saw her.
Everyone denied it. “She took a pregnancy test,” her stepmom insisted.
A month later, Ingrid got a call that Simone was in the hospital. She raced there. Simone’s blood pressure was spiking, she was threatening to seize, her kidneys were failing. It was preeclampsia, the doctor told Ingrid, and they needed to perform an emergency C-section.
Ingrid stumbled outside for some air and fell down crying in the parking lot. Her thoughts raced to who might be responsible.
She called me. “I am going over there, and—”
“Ingrid,” I said. “Don’t.”
“I don’t care if I go back to prison. If I had known about this when I was in there, I never would’ve made it out.”
I told her to call the DCFS social worker, which she did. Once she calmed down, she went back inside the hospital. She was a thirty-four-year-old single mom of three, and now a grandmother.
Ingrid had never known a point in her life when she wasn’t faced with desperation. Here was a person who’d grown up in chaos and was trying so hard to move herself and her family forward. The first time Ingrid had been incarcerated, she earned her GED, determined to leave prison with something. When a substance abuse program was offered, she jumped at that, too, and was able to work one on one with a counselor. “It made me understand why my mom chose drugs over her children,” Ingrid had told me. “It didn’t make the situation better, didn’t make me feel better, but I understood.”
Ingrid had always been eager to work, and when she first came to A New Way of Life, I connected her with Bed, Bath and Beyond. Because of her record, she could only be hired for seasonal work, and when that job ended, she found a job at a Verizon call center, until her background check came in and she was let go. Upon her release this time, we found her a temporary job at the nonprofit First to Serve, as the house manager of a winter shelter, doing intake, making sure people got a shower and a bed, and deescalating any situations.
Ingrid’s granddaughter was doing well, but Simone needed to be stabilized. For two weeks, Ingrid slept in the hospital. But when Simone was at last released, Ingrid wasn’t allowed to care for her. Simone and the baby were sent to a group home.
It would take a year of paperwork and calls and hearings before Ingrid could bring her children home. Eventually, we secured her housing, and she and the girls moved into a two-bedroom duplex in South Central. Throughout everything, Ingrid was always quick with a hug, maintaining a steadfast warmth and optimism. She joined A New Way of Life in promoting our legal clinic by canvassing the area and letting people know about their rights. When she held voter registration drives in South L.A. neighborhoods, she stayed in touch with the people she registered, keeping them abreast of community and policy issues that might be important to them, and reminding them to get out to vote. I admired her so much, I hired her full time. Her job title: Prop 47 specialist.