As a public defender in Los Angeles in the early 2000s, I represented countless clients battling substance use challenges. The typical response was to lock them up, even for simple possession, offering little to no access to treatment.
Tag: Prop36
For over a decade, the pendulum in California’s criminal justice policy has swung from a tough-on-crime approach prioritizing incarceration toward an approach emphasizing non-carceral strategies.
Ten years ago, California voters soured on the state’s decades’-long experiment with mass incarceration. After years in which badly thought out, financially devastating and morally corrosive laws such as Three Strikes and You’re Out made California less safe, in 2014 a majority of the electorate opted for a new approach.
In passing Proposition 47, Californians made a bet on a more effective approach to criminal justice. Instead of sending people to prison for minor crimes, more people would be sentenced to jail, and the resulting savings would be invested in proven crime prevention strategies like drug and mental health treatment programs, job training, services and support for crime victims and supportive housing.
In 1997, Tommy Eugene Lewis III was sentenced to 41 years to life in state prison for attempted murder after he shot and injured another driver. He was 18 years old.
Three years ago, at 43, Lewis was released from prison. He’d spent his entire adult life behind bars and wasn’t sure what was next.