Voters resoundingly permitted Measure J, Los Angeles County’s landmark prison justice reform, close to the shut of tumultuous 2020 following the police homicide of George Floyd in Minneapolis and summerlong protests that referred to as on the nation to acknowledge and proper persistent unequal remedy of Black Individuals, particularly within the justice system.
In passing the constitution modification, voters made it clear that they needed extra of their tax cash directed to psychological well being care, financial alternative and different public security options to police, prosecution and jail.
A vastly disproportionate proportion of L.A. County’s jail inhabitants is Black and Latino. The identical communities are grossly underserved by healthcare and financial improvement packages.
Measure J directs the county to spend 10% of its domestically generated discretionary income on a “Care First, Jails Final” method.
Implementation hit a snag when a Los Angeles County Superior Courtroom decide dominated two years in the past that the poll measure violated the state Structure by locking in annual spending necessities which might be usually inside the discretion of the Board of Supervisors.
However the board properly proceeded to make price range choices as if Measure J, and the voters’ will, remained binding. In every of the final two years, the supervisors permitted progressively larger annual allocations for nontraditional public security packages in anticipation of subsequent 12 months’s county price range, when the total set-aside was imagined to kick in.
And now it should. An appeals court docket just lately overturned the trial court docket ruling and ordered that Measure J be absolutely reinstated.
That makes L.A. County one of many few jurisdictions through which a racial reckoning and a elementary rethinking of public security within the wake of Floyd’s demise could change into extra than simply speak.
For instance, when she was in Congress, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass twice launched the essential George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, however it twice died within the Senate. In Minneapolis, the place a police officer murdered Floyd, voters rejected a landmark public security overhaul. And in most American cities, regardless of claims that legislation enforcement has been “defunded,” police budgets have held regular or have elevated, in some circumstances sharply.
Now a nervous nation racked by mass shootings and law-and-order posturing has misplaced a lot of its urge for food for change. That places us in critical hazard of falling again onto the identical silly actions which have lengthy fueled a harmful cycle of prison recidivism: defunding psychological well being and drug remedy, publicly supported housing and employment improvement, whereas additional bulking up police.
Los Angeles County is transferring — though nonetheless too slowly — in a extra constructive course. Final week, county officers started accepting purposes for a second 12 months of Measure J grants to organizations that provide packages like job coaching, bridge housing and drug remedy. Every of those and different “Care First” packages are solidly inside the county’s purview however traditionally have been underfunded, largely as a result of their clientele lack political clout.
The pushback is fierce. It’s grounded within the self-interest of police unions, the bail bond trade, politicians of each main events (however principally Republicans) and others who really feel threatened by the shift away from ever-larger jails and police forces towards more practical and lasting responses to dysfunction and dysfunction, akin to expanded psychological well being care. The opposition to nontraditional public security packages is adept at concern mongering and deception. It’s properly organized and properly funded.
And a few of it lives contained in the county’s personal home. Public worker unions, usually considered politically progressive, tried to dam Measure J in an effort to maintain county cash from going to exterior service suppliers.
However the Board of Supervisors put the measure on the poll anyway, and 4 of the 5 members endorsed it, on the urging of a rising era of prison justice reform activists in organizations together with Black Lives Matter-LA and Dignity and Energy Now, alongside institution gamers, mainly the United Approach of Better Los Angeles.
Their success, and the ruling by the appeals court docket, might make Measure J the nation’s most lasting and consequential prison justice reform technique to come up from the social actions of 2020.
It received’t be computerized. The supervisors haven’t but saved their commitments to companion prison justice reforms, akin to closing the damaging Males’s Central Jail and redirecting incarceration funding towards psychological well being care, or remaking the juvenile justice system. Too many profitable packages, together with the Workplace of Diversion and Reentry and Housing for Well being, stay underfunded.
It’s time now for the Board of Supervisors to recommit itself to its Care First agenda with packages that break the cycle of recidivism and make the county safer and extra simply. Voters rightly demanded significant change, and are entitled to get it.
