March
2007
Sign On To Support Prop 36!
Prop 36, California’s innovative program in restorative justice, allows non-violent drug offenders to receive treatment rather than incarceration. Despite its successes — including saving taxpayer money — since voters authorized it six years ago, the program is being de-funded by the Governor of California. If you would like to support Prop 36, please consider signing on to the following letter by emailing with your name and address by April 4.
We are also organizing a Local Prop 36 Lobby Day on April 13 — contact if you would like to be part of a PCU team in your area!
Dear Member of the California State Senate and the California State Assembly:
Writing as people of faith, we respectfully urge you to expand—and not let Governor Schwarzenegger reduce—our state’s commitment to addiction treatment via Proposition 36, California’s six-year-old treatment-rather-than-incarceration program for non-violent drug offenders.
Addiction affects all families, all congregations, all communities. Its victims need the opportunity to achieve long-term recovery. The treatment made possible by Proposition 36 has saved lives and brought healing to tens of thousands of individuals and families. We have seen Prop 36 working successfully to achieve what the state’s voters wanted it to achieve over the past five years: we have seen lives turned around, families reunited, and former addicts returned to their neighborhoods and faith communities.
According to UCLA’s research, over 60,000 people have successfully completed Prop 36 treatment to become productive, taxpaying members of society. Moreover, during its first four years Prop 36 reduced the number of persons incarcerated for drug-related offenses by 32%. Why would anyone wish to abandon or starve such a program? To do so would be both irrational and immoral. Our consciences recoil at the thought of it.
Abandoning this program is precisely what the Governor proposes to do. Despite the program’s success, Governor Schwarzenegger plans to cut funding for Prop. 36 drug treatment. He cannot even claim that doing so will save taxpayers’ money. UCLA’s analysis shows that for every $1 California invests in the program, we save at least $2.50. In a recent report, the Legislative Analyst’s Office found that Prop 36 saved $205 million in 2002-03 and $297 million in 2003-04. In the same report, the LAO advised against cutting funds to Prop 36 on the grounds that “reducing funding below the 2005-06 level of $145 million would probably eventually result in increased prison costs at least proportional to the amount of any reduction.”
No one in California—and surely no member of the legislature—can fail to recognize the importance of diverting non-violent offenders from our catastrophically overcrowded prisons, where effective drug-treatment services are virtually non-existent despite a $1 billion price tag. Yet where treatment behind bars has failed, Prop 36 treatment in community-based settings has succeeded. Funding Prop 36 services at an adequate level represents a key part of the solution to our state’s looming prison crisis.
California voters continue to endorse Prop 36 as both a cost-saving and life-saving measure. Fully 61% of the voters supported the initiative in 2000; by 2004, according to a Field Institute poll, support for the law had risen to 73% of the voters. The voters will not look kindly on political leaders who go along with the elimination of a program that is widely hailed as a national model of enlightened prison reform.
Cutting direct funding for county-provided Prop 36 services to a minuscule amount, and then requiring the 58 counties to match any additional draws from a reserve pool of funding, is not what the voters want, and it is not what compassion and common sense mandate. It is a formula for the slow death of a life-saving diversion program. For many counties, making such a change will mean no treatment at all. But everywhere, across the state, Prop 36 waiting lists will grow, treatment stays will shorten, and people will be rushed out of treatment before they have had time to get adequate care. Inevitably, fewer people will complete the program. The governor’s proposal cheats Prop 36 participants out of a real chance at recovery.
Prop 36 has provided ample proof that community-based treatment works! We urge you not to let the governor turn California back to a time when our primary response to drug addiction will once again be expensive, life-destroying incarceration. We urge you to let your faith, your conscience, and your solidarity with addiction victims inform your course of action in the legislature. Maintaining adequate funding for Prop 36 treatment is the right thing to do for the voters, for the state’s taxpayers, and for all those desperately in need of recovery and restoration.
Yours sincerely,