Prop 36
Article
Prop 36 is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between October 22, 2024 and November 04, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “ngest disagreement was over Prop 36, which increases penalties for various crimes”; “Prop 36 doesn’t just raise drug crimes from misdemeanors to felonies”; “Prop 36 requires that the court refer patients”. It most often appears alongside San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: October 22, 2024
- Last seen: November 04, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
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- San Francisco (3 shared issues)
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- Boston (2 shared issues)
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- Los Angeles (2 shared issues)
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- Oakland (2 shared issues)
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- Prop 36 (2 shared issues)
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- Trump (2 shared issues)
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- 2010 (1 shared issues)
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- 2014 (1 shared issues)
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- 2016 (1 shared issues)
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- 2019 (1 shared issues)
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- 2021 (1 shared issues)
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- 2022 (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
The strongest disagreement was over Prop 36, which increases penalties for various crimes. I’m hoping to publish a guest post on this one later this week. Kudos to ACX Oakland for including district maps and recommendations for various transit and utility positions.
Proposition 36 is a California ballot measure that increases mandatory sentences for certain drug and theft crimes.
The campaign for Prop 36 is based on the premise that Prop 47 failed, leading to increased drug use and retail theft (but don’t trust me – it says so in the text of the measure). 36 would repeal some parts of 47, add some additional sentencing increases, and leave some elements in place (the LA Times has a good breakdown of the changes here).
It’s easy to round this off to a simple tradeoff: are we willing to put tens of thousands of people in jail if it would decrease the crime rate? But this would be the wrong way to think about the measure: there is no tradeoff. Prop 36 will certainly imprison many people, but it won’t help fight crime.
1: Comment of the week is Graham on the Prop 36 post - he argues that the reason cops aren’t enforcing the existing misdemeanor penalty for shoplifting (up to six months in jail) is that by the time it gets through the DAs, this is reduced to “a stern talking to”, and it’s not worth cops’ time to arrest anyone who won’t be punished. Therefore, in order to get the six months in jail that’s already on the books, we apparently have to increase the law to three years in jail. I appreciate this perspective, but it only leaves me more confused - for example, didn’t San Francisco recall its soft-on-crime DA and replace him with a tough-on-crime DA who promised to throw the book at shoplifters? Don’t these charts from the San Francisco DA show that most arrests lead to charges, and the problem is almost entirely that most reports don’t lead to arrests? I still don’t feel like I understand the dynamics behind why our current laws can’t be used to arrest and imprison shoplifters.
Inline links: Graham on the Prop 36 post, these charts