By Allen Hopper, ACLU of Northern California

California voters came out in droves to support Proposition 19 this November. More than 4.1 million people voted for Prop. 19, which would have allowed adults 21 and older to possess and grow small amounts of marijuana for personal use and allow cities and counties to tax and regulate commercial sales. That’s more votes than Meg Whitman or Carly Fiorina garnered. Though the measure didn’t pass, the degree of support marks an undeniable leap forward in the movement to end marijuana prohibition. In the end, Prop. 19 achieved a higher percentage of “yes” votes (46%) than any state-level legalization measure on the ballot over the past decade.  

This is clearly only the beginning of a new, more rational public discussion about marijuana. It’s no longer a question of whether marijuana prohibition should end, but rather when and how. Post-election polling data shows that many voters who rejected Prop. 19 nonetheless believe that marijuana should be made legal. Even the leaders of the opposition to Prop. 19 publicly stated that they are not opposed to marijuana legalization, “if it’s done the right way.”  

There is already talk about another initiative on the California ballot in 2012, and California Assemblyman Tom Ammiano has pledged to introduce a new statewide tax and regulate bill. And California is not alone in its efforts. Several other states are likely to have legalization or decriminalization on the ballot in the near future, including Washington, Oregon, Alaska, Colorado and Nevada. What we know is that it is clear that states do indeed have the right to decide for themselves whether or not to keep state marijuana prohibition laws on the books.  

The war on drugs has failed, and people are ready for a change. The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world. One in every 31 adults is on probation, in jail or in prison. FBI figures show that over 800,000 people in the U.S. are arrested for marijuana offenses each year. The vast majority of these arrests are for low-level, nonviolent simple possession offenses. Drug law enforcement in the United States is a driving force behind some of the worst aspects of our flawed criminal justice system, including tragic racial disparities. People of color are arrested at far higher rates than whites for marijuana offenses, even though rates of drug use are equal across racial lines.  According to the Prison Policy Initiative, we incarcerate black men in the United States today at rates more than five times higher than in South Africa during apartheid.  

The public is taking notice that ending marijuana prohibition will ease our overwhelmed state and local budgets, and will free up law enforcement resources to address serious and violent crime.

Despite the disappointing outcome, Prop. 19 was a giant step in the right direction. Let’s keep the discussion going.    



Allen Hopper is the Police Practices Director at the ACLU of Northern California.

By Diana Tate Vermeire, Racial Justice Project Director, ACLU of Northern California

The state’s criminal justice system is quickly becoming the only social service California is willing to fund. Our prison system is bursting at the seams, while school funding is drying up at the well. In the midst of a fiscal crisis — one that only seems to be getting worse — California continues to prioritize criminal justice spending instead of investing in the future of our state. Public education and crucial social service programs like welfare-to-work continue to experience drastic cuts, but California is loath to cut criminal justice spending.

Rather than choosing to prioritize basic necessities like a quality education, a job, and a place to live, our state’s leaders are instead forcing social service agencies to close their doors, deny services, or turn certain individuals away altogether. Meanwhile, our jails and prisons remain open to anyone brought to their doors, no matter the cost. That choice-pouring scarce financial resources into the criminal justice system rather than much-needed social services-has resulted in the disproportionate incarceration of people of color, and an alarming uptick in the number of women – both women of color and white women –  who are behind bars.

A new study by the ACLU of Northern California and the W. Haywood Burns Institute explores how racial, ethnic, and gender disparities in access to education, employment, and housing impact presence in the criminal justice system in three California counties: Alameda, Fresno, and Los Angeles. An important finding is that — surprise, surprise — these factors are related to how likely it is someone will wind up in jail or prison. It’s no far leap to presume that this is not an accident, but a direct result of the choices California makes.

But our study also found that counties are not collecting data in a way that allows us to fully understand how the existence of the racial, ethnic, and gender disparities outside the criminal justice system creates or reinforces those same disparities within it. This lack of data means that policymakers are creating policies without fully understanding the impact of their decisions.

Without adequate data from the counties, we turned to first-hand stories of people’s life experiences before and after their contact with police, jails, or prison.  

We interviewed people on probation, and their responses were alarming.

–  Those who attended schools where police officers regularly patrolled campuses had a greater likelihood of being arrested at a young age, expelled, and suspended.

–  Nearly two-thirds of the people interviewed reported they had inadequate income at the time of their arrest, and around 20 percent indicated that they turned to crime to help make ends meet.

–  In Alameda County, people on probation were less likely to have graduated high school, compared to the county’s average graduation rate.

–  In Fresno County, with a county unemployment rate of less than 10 percent, 29 percent of men interviewed and 59 percent of women interviewed were unemployed at the time of their most recent arrest. Nearly 21 percent of the Black labor force in Fresno County is unemployed, but 64 percent of Black interviewees were unemployed at the time of their most recent arrest.

Our findings point to a disturbing reality: we have overfunded California’s criminal justice system at the expense of critical social services. Those services, which are meant to ensure our citizens have access to the basic necessities of life, have been sacrificed for more prisons and an expensive new death row.

Communities of color and women can no longer afford California’s business as usual. The rates of incarceration for people of color — and increasingly, women — are not caused solely by the systemic bias within the criminal justice system. They are also directly related to the racial, ethnic, and gender disparities of who has access to the basic necessities of quality education, employment, and housing.

It’s time California prioritizes public safety by investing in prevention and intervention strategies, particularly those that reduce racial, ethnic, and gender disparities. By no means will all crime be eliminated. But we can choose to invest in programs that help turn lives around and give opportunities, instead of giving up so easily. To help us get there, counties must collect better data so we know the realities of what we are working with, and policymakers can make better, more informed decisions.

Today, in recognition of International Human Rights Day, the American Civil Liberties Union released a comprehensive analysis of the pervasive systemic and structural racism in America. The report, Race & Ethnicity in America: Turning a Blind Eye to Injustice, is a response to the U.S. report to the United Nations’ Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) released earlier this year. The U.S. report was a whitewash, sweeping under the rug the dramatic effects of widespread racial and ethnic discrimination in this country.

It’s time to begin an honest conversation about the fact that racial bias remains perhaps the most significant barrier to opportunity for people of color, particularly African Americans and Latinos. The ACLU report finds that discrimination in America permeates education, employment, the treatment of migrants and immigrants, law enforcement, and access to justice for juveniles and adults.

The results for California are particularly disturbing. The report documents the persistence of racial inequity and institutionalized discrimination in California’s educational and criminal justice systems, and in the treatment of immigrants. Among the examples cited in the report:

•Compared to schools attended mostly by white students, schools with a high concentration of African-American and Latino students are 74% more likely to lack textbooks for students to use for homework; 73% more likely to have evidence of cockroaches, rats or mice; and three times more likely to report that teacher turnover is a serious problem.

•In California, African Americans are given third-strike, 25-to-life prison sentences at a rate nearly 13 times the rate of whites. African Americans are 6.5% of the population, but they make up 45% of third strikers.

•Children of color are 20 times more likely to be sentenced to life without parole than white children in California, the worst racial disparities in the country. The California Supreme Court is currently considering the case of a 14 year old boy who is the youngest person in the United States to be sentenced to life without parole for a crime involving no physical injury to the victim.

Other reports echo these findings. Just last week, the Justice Policy Institute released a study of racial disparities in prison sentences for drug offenses in the 198 most populated counties in the nation. Four California counties made it into the top ten for sending the most African Americans to prison for drug offenses: Alameda, Kern, San Francisco, and San Mateo Counties. According to the report, Alameda and San Mateo Counties each send 35 times more African Americans than whites to prison for drug offenses, even though research shows almost no racial difference in drug use or sales.

A study by Building Blocks for Youth showed that, in Los Angeles County, youth of color are 2.5 times more likely than white youth to be transferred to adult court and, once in adult court, 3 times more likely to be sentenced to confinement than are white youth. Research conducted by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency shows that African American youth are incarcerated at a rate 6 times greater than white youth in California.

The conclusion is inescapable: One of the most diverse states in the country, California has a two-tiered, separate and unequal educational and criminal justice system. In those institutions where we need justice the most, systemic racial bias is among the worst in the nation.

While the evidence of systemic human rights violations continues to pile up, California lawmakers continue to turn a blind eye. Despite overwhelming public support for limiting the three strikes law to violent felonies, the legislature has failed to act. As a result, judges continue to send people to prison for life for petty theft and other non-violent offenses. And despite overwhelming public support for alternatives to juvenile incarceration and judicial condemnation of the youth prisons, our state government has failed to shut them down.

The three simple criminal justice reforms that did pass the legislature this year—all intended to prevent wrongful convictions and ensure that only the guilty go to prison—were vetoed by the Governor, despite widespread support in newspaper editorials.  The California criminal justice system sends more people to prison, in raw numbers and per capita, than almost any other criminal justice system in the world—and the overwhelming majority of these people are African American and Latino.

California officials should be leading the conversation about how we can all work together to steer the state in a more promising direction. To turn this equation around, we need to have the courage to begin a more constructive—and productive—conversation about the relationship between race, justice and opportunity in this state.

Maya Harris is Executive Director of the ACLU of Northern California.