California politics: Jerry Brown opposing the "3 strikes" law revision

This is a good story highlighting the problems of California's initiative system.  Kevin Drum has a good post on the general issue:  Why I Hate Ballot Initiatives 09/28/04.  He summarizes the problems well.  And I'm with him in almost always voting against them, even when I agree with the general thrust of one, because I think it's a really bad way to make law.  They're superficially democratic, but in practice they do more to hamper democracy than to promote it.

Kevin does make one mistake in that post: not all initiatives are constitutional amendments in California.

One of the worst ones we've ever passed was a badly written "3 strikes" measure mandating long sentences for a third felony.  The law made no distinction between violent and non-violent crimes.  It's led to some absurd results, with people being sentenced to longer terms for crimes that involved no violence to persons than some murderers get.  The general concept behind "3 strikes" is sensible: previous crimes should be heavily taken into account in sentencing.

But this law was badly written.  This November, Proposition 66 on the California ballot would modify that law.  Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, former state governor and current candidate for state attorney general in 2006, testified against the proposal to the state legislature this week: Don't change '3-strikes' law, Brown warns 09/28/04.

Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown told a legislative committee Monday that passage of a ballot measure to modify the state's "threestrikes" law would "wreak havoc" in his city and in communities all over the state.

"Under this law, you're going to cut loose thousands of people who the prosecutors of this state - all 58 of them - think should be locked up for the rest of their lives," Brown told the hearing on the upcoming Proposition 66 measure. ...

As governor, it was Brown who signed the 1977 determinate sentencing law that sought to impose uniform guidelines on prison terms. OnMonday, Brown said the law he signed resulted in major "unintended consequences," the single most important of which was the creation of automatic release dates for most offenders, which severely restricted the state's parole system from exerting control over convicts once they leave prison.

Brown said Proposition 66 will compound the problems created by the 1977 law.

"It will be cutting loose people who don't have a skill set, don't have a game plan and will be wreaking havoc on the community," Brown said.

Brown's reference to "unintended consequences," which is a favorite concept (superficially at least) for conservatives, actually reflects his Illichian view of looking critically at developing processes.

One of the main issues on which Brown is focusing in his campaign for attorney general is a meaningful reform of the prison training and parole systems, to ensure that people released from prison will have the personal and educational skills to be able to make a living when they get out without going back to crime.

What he's arguing on this issue is it doesn't make sense to remove the bad consequences of the current law without providing meaningful reform of the training and parole components of the criminal-justice system.