County Supervisor Frost Supports Prop 36 and Requests Even More Incarceration,

 (c) by Mark Dempsey

County Supervisor Frost's latest newsletter touts her support for Proposition 36 - a measure that rolls back recent attempts to diminish our reliance on prisons to prevent crime, namely Props 47 and 57. Ms. Frost says "Our community has been increasingly troubled by crimes...over the past decade," [emphasis added] and she cites the "drug-addicted homeless...and rampant retail thefts." 

Her description of crime is the opposite of true.

As the population has aged, crime has steadily declined since its peak in the '80s. There is no massive surge in 2011 when Jerry Brown shifted felons from state prisons to local jails, or in 2014 when Prop 47 passed.

Incidentally, a recent Los Angeles survey of homelessness discloses the real culprit for the majority of the unhoused: rents have been rising faster than incomes. Where's Ms. Frost's support for rent control?

In "October of 2022, journalist Heather Vogell at ProPublica published a story on rising rent prices, which were spiking as the country opened back up after the Covid shutdowns. But Vogell’s investigative piece was not about Covid, it was how one algorithm of a single software firm - a private equity owned corporation called RealPage - was behind the increases. 'I think it’s driving it, quite honestly,' she reported one executive of the corporation telling clients." (from here)

In other words, illegal price fixing is behind rent increases. Where's the Frost comment about that?

Even now, with 5% of the world's population, the US has 25% of its prisoners. We need bigger jails like a hole in the head. Police spending is what has surged, not crime. It's currently 70% of the County's budget, and Ms. Frost has been voting to spend scarce County resources to build an even bigger jail--one that costs nearly a billion dollars. We may have lots of potholes in county roads, but we can console ourselves that our jail is bigger.

Hollywood says the cops almost always get the bad guys, but how are police/courts/jails at solving crimes in reality? In California, despite increased spending, they solved less than 14% of reported crime in 2022. 

What actually prevents crime? Better social safety nets. No medical bankruptcies making people desperate. Affordable housing--something Richard Nixon stopped the Feds from building in the '70s. 

 Given her record on the Sacramento Board of  Supervisors Ms. Frost's support of Prop 36 is no big surprise. By her lights, police, courts and jails are the smart response to crime. And that's true if 14% is your idea of an excellent outcome.

Update: "However, research overwhelmingly shows that criminalizing homelessness perpetuates the problem. It creates a cycle of arrest, incarceration and release, without addressing root causes, such as economic inequality, inadequate mental health and addiction services and a lack of affordable housing." (from here)