The Story Behind the Story of Proposition 36
Californians are being asked to weigh in against drugs, shoplifters, and the inconvenience of being around unhoused people via Proposition 36, which promises prison time for repeated arrests for possession and/or theft. Based on publicly available polls, it will pass by a large margin.
Then what?
Will drug abuse wane as dealers are taken off the street? Will stores unlock the plexiglass where an unpredictable selection of merchandise is kept? Will we see less homelessness?
I’ll give it five years. And the answer will still be the same; in none of those scenarios listed above will it have an impact. Just as rounding up the marijuana smugglers of the seventies, cocaine kings of the eighties, the crack dealers of the nineties, etc., did little to nothing to stop people from self medicating.
The latest War-on-Drugs-Lite will not work. 100%
Fentanyl is the evil drug needing to be exterminated these days. Politicians of both parties operate under the assumption that our southern border is a super highway, bringing truckloads of China Girl (street name) to every nook and cranny of the country.
Here’s the real deal, via the New York Times:
The amount needed to provide everyone in the United States who uses fentanyl with a year’s supply would require only a single trailer truckload of pure drug. To deliver the same amount for heroin would require six trailer truckloads. Consider that the U.S.-Mexico border is crossed daily by some 20,000 trucks, 200,000 cars, 100,000 pedestrians and a huge number of flights, trains and boats. The difference in the size and weight of fentanyl, compared to heroin, makes significantly interrupting the supply at the border nearly impossible.
The above figures do NOT include that 11 million plus shipping containers passing through US ports annually: only 3.7% are inspected. One hundred per cent are screened and plugged into a database with an algorithm that’s supposed to be predictive. If you’ve tried to use any of the AI systems out there to find restaurants while traveling lately, you should have an idea of just how bad algorithms can be.
Another story in the New York Times chronicles how US citizens are being recruited to smuggle drugs.
“Americans are taking Mexicans’ smuggling jobs,” said David Bier, a border security expert at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “The cartels are really using U.S. citizenship as an asset that they can leverage.”
Bars, gyms, rehab facilities, trailer parks — these are all places where recruiters have found couriers in recent years, court records show. A college football star was lured in by a friend after dropping out of school. A mother raising three special-needs children took the job while facing eviction. A homeless man was recruited from an encampment in a Walmart parking lot.
Federal agents uncovered a recruitment network inside more than a dozen San Diego high schools, where from 2016 through 2020 students working on behalf of criminal groups in Mexico persuaded their classmates to cross the border with fentanyl, according to three former federal agents directly involved in the operation.
How’s Prop 36 gonna fix that?
There will be another drug menace after fentanyl falls from the marketplace. And another one after that. And another… If I had to guess at what it will be next, I’d look hard at a certain owner of a social media network.
How about those plexiglass merchandise barriers? Let me tell you a little story about the Target in Mission Valley…
A while back they dropped merchandise moats around nearly everything in the personal care sections of the store. A bunch of them have disappeared. Although vitamin supplements should be easy to shoplift, that section was the first to be liberated from plexiglass, maybe because I witnessed lines of people waiting for an overwhelmed employee to show up.
Do you know what the Mission Valley Target did to reduce “shrinkage”? They closed up all the self-checkout lanes. They were getting killed; three cans of cat food turned into one, etc., etc. There still are items behind plexiglass barriers, but I’ll bet they figured out this wasn’t as good as they thought it would be.
I still wonder if being cost-effective was even considered in the first place. I’ve always felt like the cases around everyday stuff were more of a psychological messenger. The “bare shelves” look that started in the pandemic at Target continues to this day; now they just pile whatever’s overstocked in those spaces. It hasn’t gotten as bad as a Drano display in the makeup section, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
Perhaps those bare shelves exist because suppliers haven’t been paid. I can’t believe that every manufacturer of lens wipes has suddenly stopped producing. The empty spaces at Target say something about how the company is run.
And guess what? Even though I’m still in and out of Target for prescriptions, etc. The stuff they locked up that I use comes via Amazon now. I ain’t waiting for a disposable razor or some new socks. Yes, I suppose there could be other workarounds, but I fear they'll be as cumbersome as upgrading phones used to be.
Via Trade publication Retail Brew:
Upon discovering that an item they want to buy is in a locked case, less than one in three shoppers (32%) get a store employee to unlock the case, according to a reader survey from Consumer World, a consumer advocacy website. For 55% of respondents, it’s a lost sale, because when a product is locked up, they try to buy it elsewhere. The remaining 13% try to find an alternative product in the same store that is not locked up.
The really BIG lie baked into the arguments for Prop 36 is that it will have some impact on homelessness. I witnessed a debate on this measure at the Voice of San Diego Politifest between attorney/advocate Genevieve Jones-Wright and Chief Deputy DA Patrick Espinoza.
When the the arguments turned to homelessness, it was —almost— laughable for the simple reason that law enforcement seems to actually believe drug and alcohol addiction are driving the increases in unhoused populations. (It’s seniors who can’t afford housing!)
This untruth also factored into much of the divide in the debate between District 3 Council candidates Stephan Whitburn and Colleen Cusack. She says –correctly– that the No Camping ordinance passed in San Diego amounts to criminalization of the unhoused condition. He says, not true, a place to stay elsewhere is available IF there are openings in shelters or safe camping zones.
Side note: VOSD would have been well-advised to put a bucket next to Whitburn; it was needed to handle all the contempt dripping off the Councilman’s brow. I guess when the “vacation home industry” is so invested in your campaign you’re allowed to be a prick.
As is true with Prop 36’s “treatment mandated felony”, the carrots being offered instead of sticks (jail) don’t exist in anywhere near sufficient quantities for homeless solutions and drug treatments.
Eighty percent of shelter bed requests are never fulfilled. Drug court programs require participants to go cold turkey and offer no assistance in dealing with withdrawal. Given the reported availability of drugs in San Diego’s jails, incarceration would seem like a better option.
But wait! How about all the new facilities coming online?
It’s true that Gov. Newsom’s Proposition 1 –with bond money for construction of housing and mental health/addiction treatment– passed in June 2024. If California is really lucky (i.e., no NIMBY resistance), the first construction of those facilities will be completed sometime in 2026.
And perhaps the first of the mental health and social service workers brought on will be trained by then; we just have to pray they haven’t figured out how crappy the pay is and how little respect they’re given.
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You might be asking yourself why Walmart, Target, and Home Depot, along with the entirety of the law enforcement industrial complex, are pushing so hard for Proposition 36 when it’s a non-solution.
The symbolism of public approval for harsher penalties is the name of this game.
Law enforcement exists as an entity all-too-often outside the checks and balances of democracy, and its advocates would like to see it stay that way. The last decade-plus hasn’t been too good for this outside-the-system workforce. Justice Department inquisitions, cell phone cameras, and nosey reporters have at times challenged the way things were done.
Political campaigns are chock full of soft on crime rhetoric, and if a politician isn’t buying into the get tough program, then they’re the “enemy”; not somebody with a different viewpoint. In fact, an informed public is the last thing the people with guns and badges want.
Locally, the biggest joke in government is the “transparency” the County Sheriff keeps talking about when cornered on the deplorable conditions at the incarceration facilities she matters.
Sunday’s Union-Tribune had a front page story by Kelly Davis & Jeff MacDonald on the progress the San Diego jail has made since the paper published a blistering investigation five years ago.
The short answer is: not much. Sheriff Kelly Martinez now reports the news when a death has occurred.
Of the 70-plus deaths that occurred after the publication of “Dying Behind Bars,” at least 19 prompted lawsuits, costing taxpayers many millions of dollars. In the last five years, settlements and jury verdicts in lawsuits brought by the families of people who died in jail — as well as claims brought by people injured by deputy negligence or misconduct — topped $75 million.
“It’s a pattern,” said attorney Danielle Pena, who has represented more than a dozen families in jail-related litigation over the past decade. “And that pattern is what it was five years ago, which is lack of transparency, lack of accountability.”
Data published by the state Department of Justice shows that the San Diego County jail-mortality rate has climbed even higher in the past five years. The percentage of fatalities continues to exceed other county jail systems.
One of the changes at the state level involved legislation introduced by Sen. Toni Atkins giving county boards of supervisors the authority to take over the administration of local jails. It was gutted and replaced with a promise of a Sacramento bureaucrat who would “oversee” jail deaths.
The thing people need to realize with Prop 36 is that it is an exercise of power by a group of people dedicated to the argument that state-sponsored violence (arrests/incarceration) has precedence over other means of conflict resolution.
Their success with building a coalition and manipulating public opinion in this instance is just a one win in a battle; they’ll be encouraged to keep fighting for more authority, more control, and more power.
It doesn’t have to be this way. We can have an orderly and safe society without the threat of violence as our first line of defense. It wouldn’t come easy. It wouldn’t come fast. But it could be done.