Who's Behind It: Started as a partnership between San Francisco District Attorney George GascÓn and Bill Lansdowne, former San Diego police chief, it became a political piggy bank after a slew of rich people stepped up, including Christian conservative businessman Wayne Huges, philanthropist "Chuck" Feeney, Napster founder Sean Parker, and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings.
Who Stands to Benefit: In theory, schools and drug addicts, as the money saved from reduced prison sentences would go toward education and drug treatment programs. But if you ask the opponents, they'll tell you nobody will benefit from this — not even the rich people backing it.
If anything should call your attention to this proposition, it's the fact that both liberals and conservatives are backing it (a comfortable place for onetime Republican GascÓn). Although it's not unheard of for elections to attract strange bedfellows, when Republicans and Democrats are willing to get together for political reasons, that certainly suggests something must be really strange in California.
Prop. 47 aims to reduce overcrowding in state prisons by shifting penalties for some felony crimes. If passed, those crimes — forgery, shoplifting, possession of most illegal drugs, and in some cases grand theft — would be downgraded to misdemeanors rather than felonies. Nonviolent criminals who've been sitting in prison would have the chance to apply to be re-sentenced, and thus released from prison. This does not make cops across the state happy, who say California will not benefit from having more criminals, nonviolent or not, back on the street.
But proponents say the money saved from this sentence reform would go toward schools, victims of crime, and drug treatment for criminals. "Thirteen states and the District of Columbia all treat simple drug possession as a misdemeanor, and several other states have thresholds for property crime misdemeanors at far higher amounts than the modest proposal in Prop 47," says Lenore Anderson, executive director of Vote Safe, a nonprofit supporting Prop. 47.
To date, proponents have raised more than $4 million — and the big spending has clearly worked. A June 2014 poll showed that 57 percent of voters were ready to pass Prop. 47 (61 percent were Democrats and 50 percent were Republicans). That number crept up to 62 percent by September, according to a Reason.org poll. But money and happy polling results don't always turn into victories, as evidenced by Prop. 19, the 2010 initiative to legalize marijuana.
John Lovell, a volunteer with the "No on Proposition 47" campaign who also worked against Prop. 19, says that many of the same Prop. 19 players are now working for (and against) Prop. 47 toward similar ends: Prop. 47 opponents also worked against Prop. 19. "With Proposition 19, we were outspent 10 to 1 and showed it was winning and at the end of the day, it lost by 700,000 votes," says Lovell.
Now, a similar scenario is playing out: The proponents have gathered all the billionaires while the opposition is filled with a lot of concerned cops without deep pockets, Lovell says. "We've been down this road before," he says. "Even though the other side has all the money, the lesson from Prop. 19 is that we can raise enough money to get our message out."
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