California’s Prop. 36 promised ‘mass treatment’ for defendants. A new study shows how it’s going

It’s been nearly a year since Californians overwhelmingly approved Proposition 36, a tough-on-crime measure providing what backers called “mass treatment” for those facing certain drug charges. But few defendants have found a clear path to recovery under the law, according to new data released by the state.

Prop. 36 gave prosecutors the ability to charge people convicted of various third-time drug offenses with a so-called treatment-mandated felony, which would give them a choice between behavioral health treatment or up to three years in jail or prison. If they accept, they would enter a guilty or no contest plea and begin treatment. Those who complete treatment have their charges dismissed.

In the first six months since the law took effect, roughly 9,000 people have been charged with a treatment-mandated felony, according to the first-of-its-kind report released this month by the state’s Judicial Council. Nearly 15% — or 1,290 people — elected treatment.

So far, of the 771 people placed into treatment, 25 completed it.

The data reflects how different counties are using the law, with the highest number of treatment-mandated felonies charged in Orange County at 2,395. Kings and Napa counties each had one such charge.

San Diego County accounted for roughly one-third — or 427 of 1,290 — cases in which defendants chose to pursue treatment, but did not report how many were placed into treatment or completed it.

The report notes that this missing data contributes to “a substantial portion of the drop-off” in regards to the overall number of people who elected treatment but have not yet been placed.

Francine Byrne, director of criminal justice services at the Judicial Council, said counties are still figuring out how to implement the law — and in many jurisdictions, it can take people a while to opt-in to treatment as they move through the court process.

“It’s not acceptable that so few people are actually going into treatment,” said Jonathan Raven, an executive at the California District Attorneys Association, which supported the measure. “The goal of this ballot measure was to take that population of people who have a substance use disorder and get them help, find them a pathway out of the criminal justice system and dismiss their cases. And that doesn’t seem to be what’s happening across the state.”

Raven said that district attorneys have been trying to implement Prop. 36 based on the will of the voters, but have been doing it “with one hand tied behind their back.”

The measure did not include dedicated funding when voters passed it, which was one of the reasons why Gov. Gavin Newsom opposed the measure. Behavioral health experts have long sounded the alarm over the lack of behavioral health treatment and staffing across California, but proponents argued that Prop. 36 would be the great “forcing function” for the state to scale up treatment.

Since the law passed, Republican and Democratic state lawmakers requested upwards of $600 million annually to implement it. Newsom and the Legislature ultimately approved a one-time state budget allocation of $100 million.

On top of that, Newsom last month announced that the state had awarded $127 million in grant funding to build more behavioral health treatment capacity. Those funds were made available through Proposition 47, a 2014 voter-approved measure that reduced the penalties for certain non-violent drug and property crimes and stipulated that the resulting savings would be used for, among other things, substance use disorder and mental health treatment.

None of that funding was available during the time period associated with the report, which looked at case counts between Dec. 18 and April 30.

Kate Chatfield, executive director of the California Public Defenders Association said the data proves that Prop. 36 “is a fail” — not because people are treatment resistant but because treatment is not available.

“There’s no indication that anything will change,” she said. “Meanwhile, proponents are spending precious county resources on prosecution and incarceration in local jails and saying — magically — some money will appear for treatment. Proponents are the ones preventing those resources from being spent on treatment.”

Cayla Mihalovich is a California Local News fellow.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.