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California Democrats think the top priority of the criminal justice system should be to keep criminals out of jail, rather than to secure justice for victims or maintain public safety. They have crafted the state’s criminal justice system to fit that purpose, from undermining existing laws to weakening sentencing laws.
Early Parole
California Democrats are always looking for ways to get criminals out of jail, no matter how much they deserve to be there. The result is things such as elderly parole, a parole system that allows criminals to become parole eligible if they are over the age of 50 and have served 20 years of their sentence.
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One such criminal who will be eligible for elderly parole under California law is Roy Charles Waller, known as the NorCal rapist. Waller committed multiple home invasions and raped nine women over a 15-year span, and was arrested at the age of 58 while in possession of a backpack with home invasion tools. He is a monster of the highest order, someone who should spend the rest of his life in a cell. He was sentenced to a minimum of 897 years behind bars.
Yet, with elderly parole, Waller will be eligible to be released in 2040, meaning he could end up serving just 20 years behind bars for raping nine women.
California Democrats have considered pursuing this “solution” for other criminals as well. They nearly passed a bill that would let murderers convicted of “murder with special circumstances” out early if they were convicted before June 5, 1990. That would be cold-blooded murderers who “killed multiple victims or killed in concert with a rape, robbery, kidnapping or torture” who, like the NorCal rapist, would be eligible for parole after serving just 20 years of their sentence.
Similarly, California Democrats are considering a bill that would allow criminals out of jail if they were sentenced to life in prison for a crime they committed before they turned 25. That leads to a system where someone could commit a cold-blooded murder at the age of, say, 20, and be let out by California law at the age of 45. The goal in all these cases is to weaken the sentences for heinous crimes to allow depraved criminals out of jail early, because the goal for California Democrats is always fighting “mass incarceration.”
Proposition Warfare
In 2016, California voters approved Proposition 57, which the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said would “stop the revolving door of crime by emphasizing rehabilitation, and to prevent federal courts from releasing prisoners.” The main purpose of the law is to keep juvenile criminals in the juvenile system, letting California’s soft-on-crime judges determine whether juvenile criminals can be tried as adults or not, rather than prosecutors. (The law also increased “good behavior” credits for criminals, because the goal is always to get criminals out of jail).
California Democrats then went further, barring any 14 or 15-year-old murderer from being tried as an adult. Families of murder victims across the state, particularly in California’s Central Valley, are now reckoning with the fact that teenage murderers can be let free on the streets after just a handful of years, as California Democrats think high schoolers are not mentally mature enough to understand that killing someone is wrong.
Meanwhile, in 2024, California voters approved Proposition 36, increasing penalties for smash-and-grab robbers, serial shoplifters, and felony drug dealers. This came as Californians became sick of the light sentences that turned jail into a revolving door for those criminals under a previous proposition. Gov. Gavin Newsom opposed Prop 36 and, when it passed, he chose not to help localities fund it, even as he jacks up California’s budget with no way of paying for the variety of wasteful programs he wants to spend money on, even as the budget deficit crisis grows worse.
Eliminating Sentencing Enhancements
Sentencing enhancements are exactly the kind of targeted laws that should be relatively noncontroversial. For example, a gun sentencing enhancement gives a criminal convicted of a crime a longer sentence if they used a gun in their crime, helping lock away dangerous criminals longer and serving as a deterrent toward other criminals from escalating their criminal behavior. Gang sentencing enhancements are common-sense as well, locking up criminal gang members for a longer time, as they are part of openly criminal, anti-social criminal organizations.
But California has weakened and undermined those enhancements as well. In 2021, California Democrats passed a law, ultimately signed by Newsom, that forced judges to dismiss multiple sentencing enhancements for minority criminals, as Democrats decided that sentencing enhancements are racist. Another law retroactively repealed sentencing enhancements for career criminals with prior convictions, lessening their current sentences. A third restricted the use of gang sentencing enhancements, meaning those enhancements could only be brought if prosecutors could prove that the crimes committed were done so with the goal of advancing the gang’s standing.
Meanwhile, California Democrats simply ignored when former Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon decided he would not let prosecutors pursue any sentencing enhancements in any cases. That included gun enhancements, which the gun-control-obsessed California Democratic Party should wholeheartedly support. California Democrats said nothing as Gascon flouted those enhancements, just as he ignored the state’s three-strikes law up until prosecutors in his own office sued him and won an injunction in court.
Criminal illegal immigrants
This has become a hot topic as of late, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents taking to the streets in Minneapolis to arrest illegal immigrants with criminal convictions. Their crimes include domestic violence, assaults, and sex crimes against children. Minnesota thinks it should be exempt from federal immigration laws and that it is an absolute travesty that ICE is trying to deport those violent criminal illegal immigrants who call Minneapolis their new home.
This is all happening because Minnesota is a sanctuary state that does not honor ICE detainers. Other states simply hand over criminal illegal immigrants to ICE when ICE issues a detainer, meaning they are taken right from the jail when their sentence has been served to be deported. This is the reasonable, logical way a criminal justice system should work.
California is also a sanctuary state, and thus, it also does not typically honor ICE detainers. Criminal illegal immigrants arrested in California are not held for ICE, instead given the slap on the wrist that most California laws call for and released back onto the streets. California law prevents state and local law enforcement from any direct cooperation with ICE.
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The result is the mass release of violent illegal immigrants onto the streets of California. The Los Angeles ICE raids that were much maligned by state Democratic leaders led to arrests of illegal immigrant criminals who committed the following crimes: second-degree murder, sexual penetration with a foreign object with force, assault with intent to commit rape, willful cruelty to a child, battery on spouse or cohabitant, sexual battery, assault with a deadly weapon, lewd action with a child, and human trafficking.
California Democrats do not think those crimes are serious enough to help ICE get those people out of the state (and the country), because California Democrats don’t think most crimes are serious enough to warrant serious punishments. The California Democratic model for the country, as Newsom and his colleagues have shown, is one that prioritizes helping criminals go free over any semblance of justice.
