Although our State, our Nation, our society claim to profess an obedience to law, crime remains widely committed throughout our society.  Five decades of data prove police only solve 2% of major crime.  Equally alarming, based on decades of data the President’s Commission on Causes and Prevention of Violence estimated that only 1.5 percent of the perpetrators of the millions of crimes committed annually end up in county jails, state or federal prisons.  

Every aspect of our injustice system has failed us all.  Data has shown for decades that our methods of policing, courts & prisons have failed as deterrents of crime and as rehabilitative institutions.  So what is the purpose of police, our judicial system, county jails, and state prisons if they regularly fail our Communities?  What is their purpose if we fail Victims, Families & Survivors of crime? What is their purpose if we fail those who committed the crime – both those who enter the prison industrial complex and the other 98% who don’t? These institutions perpetuate antiquated concepts of crime, justice and rehabilitation.  Social metaphors providing false senses of security and opportunities so we may continue to ignore systemic societal ails that caused many of them in the first place.

I am a prison industrial complex abolitionist.  I realize the term seems rigidly absolute and extreme.  It isn’t.  

The prison industrial complex is a term used to describe the overlapping interests of our government and for-profit industries that use surveillance, policing and imprisonment as solutions to our economic, social and political problems.  Our prison industrial complex is a mutually reinforcing web of relationships that exploit communities, our incarcerated & formerly incarcerated. As a prison industrial complex abolitionist I have a long-term vision and a practical policy program calling for both an end to our prison industrial complex and government investment in jobs, education, housing, health care, critical social services and sustainable environments — all the elements that are required for a productive and violence-free life that so many communities in California lack.

Life is precious. And as an abolitionist I, others, ask ourselves how we can resolve these inequities and get people the resources they need long before they turn to the commission of a crime. Especially since these inequities manifest themselves into literal health hazards that threaten our very existence in communities across our State.. 

Literal health hazards are seen as Central Valley ranks as the worst air quality in the nation, to the constantly leaking/exploding oil refineries of Richmond and Carson. Literal health hazards are seen in the federally confirmed fracking water  and radioactive waste contaminating the Lost Hills, Fruitvale, Taft & McKittrick communities and nearby aquifers to the 100+ cities across California with lead poisoning rates 2x or more higher than Flint, Michigan.  Health hazards are seen in dilapidated yet expensive housing, to the 3-5+ year waitlists for affordable public housing across the State.  Literal health hazards are seen in defunding public health and critically needed social services for decades.  Health hazards are seen in localities across our State defunding public education and reinvesting those same very resources into more police and the school-to-prison pipeline – to the point of law enforcement personnel drastically outnumbering guidance counselors, nurses, social workers, and additional support staff for students.  Health hazards are seen in the militarization of our police, state-sanctioned violence, extrajudicial killings, our incessant overpolicing of the Poor & a criminal injustice system that constantly gets it wrong. 

Furthermore, our prison industrial complex works exactly as it is designed to – it is not broken.  In its operational success lies the raw truth – the prison industrial complex is incapable of being reformed.

Again I repeat.  Life is precious.  Yet so many of us feel sick, disrespected, belittled, & ignored.  Why is our government furthering the belief that our lives, our communities here are not precious?

No more.

To guide us in this moment, we need to hold central that Abolition is both a vision and a political strategy that encompasses and incorporates every thread of our social fabric.  Fervent calls for abolition can be found in every aspect of our society, from to Federal Judges across this country to advocacy lawyers to human rights organizations to community activists to peace advocates to religious books and teachings to our incarcerated to our formerly incarcerated through to surviving families – we all know our carceral state is not the way.  Our responses to “criminal” behavior must be directed not only at the individual committing the crime, but also directed to the malfunction & inequities of the individual’s environment—our community. When funded appropriately our communities, absolutely not the prison industrial complex, have the solutions we need to resolve harm and end state and interpersonal violence. 

It’s time to stop talking about reforming policing, our courts, and our prisons with empty platitudes and half measures.  It’s time to start working for their complete and absolute abolition.

It’s time to dismantle the largest state carceral system in this country and replace prisons with a variety of alternative programs – community based programs that work and provide true restorative justice to all stakeholders.

It’s time to begin creating a full and complete alternative to prisons by building the kind of society that does not need them: An equitable redistribution of power and resources so that individuals, the community & functioning systems can equally address both burglary by the poor and embezzlement by the wealthy.

It’s time to build a stronger sense of community, one that can support, truly rehabilitate and reintegrate those who commit crimes while providing restorative justice to Survivors, surviving families & impacted communities. And equally as important, we must End Poverty In California by ensuring a robust system of social services that can enable safe, secure, healthy, for #OurCalifornia. 

Our government has come to rely on grandiose and wasteful systems that harm individuals, our communities and our opportunities for resilient and sustainable futures.  I can’t say that I have all the answers, but I can wholeheartedly say we deserve better than what we currently have because it isn’t helping any of us.  Our carceral system has consistently shown an inability to address safety, meet the needs of all stakeholders in #OurCalifornia, reduce crime, or rehabilitate individuals who commit crime.  If our carceral state has never met or achieved its goals – it is time we find alternatives that will.

Communities should determine for themselves what public safety looks like. Rather than providing a top-down blueprint for what a neighborhood with safety and well-being for all must look like, communities should be allowed to develop themselves, and create the tools and the resources to establish mechanisms of accountability, safety, and healing that work for them all, that work for #OurCalifornia.

As an abolitionist, I am calling for swift and radical changes – changes that will transform our prison industrial complex as we know it into what #OurCalifornia deserves… funding for life-affirming infrastructure, spaces that amplify equity for communal crimes and harm to all impacted parties, restorative justice, resilient communities with robust social safety nets and empowered members of our communities creating safe, secure, healthy, sustainable and equitable spaces for themselves.  As an abolitionist, I know these are conditions that allow us to not only survive but thrive.  When #OurCalifornia’s most marginalized are protected and succeed, we all win.  

As your gubernatorial candidate for 2022, I proudly call for our government, and our communities to abolish our prison industrial complex.  We need to reimagine justice and ensure public safety for all Californians.  I intend to End Poverty in California, and this is how I believe reimagining public safety and changing our priorities with policing, legislation and our injustice system, state-sanctioned imprisonment, parole and re-entry system will help us achieve this:

Policing

The first police departments in this country formed out of slave patrols in the South & hired hitmen to suppress labor movements in the North, both unironically based on denying human rights to uphold capital gains for the wealthy.  The State of California’s history of law enforcement officers is not much different.  Police in localities across the colony, and eventual State, were self-appointed enforcers of the Fugitive Slave Act, the Indian Removal Act & remained hired hitmen to suppress labor movements.

Furthermore, the historical connections of law enforcement officers to Supremacy movements and ethnic cleansing campaigns in this State is astounding.  County Sheriffs Departments across the State, from San Diego to Los Angeles to Klamath were responsible for creating and leading the California Militia. Sheriff’s County Deputies led and controlled extremely violent and State-sanctioned California Militia units responsible for well-documented war crimes on California Indians for decades including rape, torture, lynching, trafficking, fire campaigns, scalping, & genocide. The California Militia found time to suppress striking miners, bricklayers, and commit mass-murder in events like the “July Days” the name of protecting capital.  Eventually these same California Militia Companies & units spawned individual city police departments. These newly formed departments terrorized migrant workers, unhoused populations, and publicly tortured people with disabilities.  This is a sentence that still applies today, some 170+ years later.  

In the following century, policing agencies in our localities continued to expand in size, power, outright public corruption, and racial injustice. By 1968, the Kerner Commission reported that nearly half of the urban uprisings since 1965 were sparked by instances of police use of excessive force. The federally commissioned report also advocated for the creation of jobs, improved housing, and an investment in education in urban cities that had been neglected of tax funded services provided to white communities. President Lyndon B. Johnson ignored those recommendations in favor of expanding policing and incarceration. Every President and Governor of California has since ignored those recommendations and further expanded policing and incarceration.

Since the implementation of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, both federal and independent data continues to prove that investing billions of tax dollars into programs that embed police into our communities (DOJ’s Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS)) does not reduce police violence, crime, nor repair years of injustice or community relations.  California’s law enforcement are armed with more than seven billion dollars’ worth of surplus military equipment off-loaded by the Pentagon to our 509 law-enforcement agencies since 1997.

To say that many good or even admirable people are law enforcement officers, that they are dedicated and brave public servants may all be true, yet and still the argument fails to address both the nature, scale of the crisis and the legacy of centuries of racial injustice. The best people, with the best of intentions, doing their utmost, cannot fix this system from within and have not succeeded in doing so despite centuries of reforms.  The system continues to exploit and extract exactly as it’s supposed to. 

Policing agencies began and continue to be a tool used to maintain capitalist social order – deconstructing this and their harm is long overdue. Fear-mongering #DefundThePolice and abolition movements will be amplified by my positioning in this race, and they are meant to distract from the fact that:

• our current systems consistently fails all our communities;
• state-sanctioned violence of our prison industrial complex is extremely profitable for the wealthy in this State and our Country;
• defunding public education, housing, infrastructure, healthcare and opportunities for peaceful lives and communities continues to be unproblematic for the State or local governments to do when the Poor, and especially People of Color are involved;
• decades of data show police solve only 2% of crimes committed in this country;
• overpolicing specific populations does not reduce crime or increase public safety;
• unaccountable law enforcement and systems that enable this will not be reformed; 

#OurCalifornia pays taxes and it isn’t horrific, frightening or audacious to say the People of this great State deserve to have a say in where their tax dollars are spent on resources and programs they wish to receive.  There’s nothing to fear from resilient and sustainable communities. The Poor, gender nonconforming, the Disabled, our unhoused, and especially Black, Brown, and Indigenous Peoples have carried the burdens and repercussions of an unjust government and unjust system.

No more.

The call to defund the police is a call for all communities to finally have all the resources and services afforded wealthy communities.  The time for abolition of our injustice system is now. And to guide us in this moment, we need to hold central that abolition is both a vision and a political strategy.  Part of this strategy is recognizing and actualizing that we cannot call for reforms that further entrench and legitimize policing in any form as a solution to social, economic or political problems. When #OurCalifornia’s most marginalized are protected and succeed, we all win. And as a prison industrial complex abolitionist, the reforms I am calling for are aimed at diminishing the political, economic & social power of policing.  

As your gubernatorial candidate for 2022, I proudly call for our government, and our communities to abolish the prison industrial complex – and that begins with policing.  We need to reimagine justice and ensure public safety for all Californians.  I intend to End Poverty in California, and these are the policies and the vision I believe will achieve it:

• Fully support the will of Californians, localities and #DefundThePolice movements across the State should they choose reinvestment in communities across #OurCalifornia with services, programs and support needed that are community driven;
• Create annual State budgets that #DefundThePolice and reinvest State funding into futures that cultivate safety with life-affirming infrastructure and unarmed non-police teams as effective alternatives to policing, including but not limited to:
  • Community-led public safety systems;
  • Rapid response teams;
  • Mental health specialists – trained in culturally responsive de-escalation, working with individuals with disabilities, restorative justice, and more – responding to individuals experiencing a mental health crisis;
  • Trauma-informed crisis intervention teams trained to disarm, de-escalate and connect individuals to services;
  • Community-based transformative and restorative justice processes that address the root causes of harm and violence;
    • Ex. Restorative justice circles led by intersectional feminist organizations for domestic violence and gender-based violence Survivors;
  • Addiction Specialists;
  • Community-led & traffic patrol/response;
  • Community mediators, as employees of the local public health department, who are trained in mediation, applied psychology, conflict resolution and relationship management for minor community disputes;
  • School climate specialists—trained in culturally responsive de-escalation, working with students with disabilities, restorative justice, and more—who can intervene in emotionally or physically volatile situations and act with the best interests for all students involved;
  • Expand locality non-emergency numbers (511) for concerned community members to call instead of 911 and dispatch any of the above unarmed individuals to respond;
• As we are 1 of only 14 States in this country to have this, repeal California’s Law Enforcement Officer’s Bill of Rights (CA’s Public Safety Officer Bill of Rights Section – 3303) – its sole intention and use in practice to protect American law enforcement personnel from investigation and prosecution arising from conduct during official performance of their duties, and provides them with privileges based on due process additional to those normally provided to other citizens;
• As no federal statute explicitly grants Qualified Immunity and it is a judicial precedent in absence of the law that was established by the Supreme Court to shield law enforcement officers who defy the Constitution – I will create legislation that explicitly denies Qualified Immunity and its applications in the State of California to all law enforcement officers;
  • Law enforcement officers and agencies will be bound to and compliant with the United States Constitution and face the consequences of their actions and choices;
• Create a publicly accessible database, LEO Public Conduct Database, of all law enforcement officer complaints (formally lodged and community-based) in the State of California for complete transparency, employment sanctions and finally end loopholes that allow law enforcement to be rehired in other localities after previous termination;
  • In funding this reliable State tracking and reporting of all complaints and incidents there will be specific data and review available on harassment, extortion, assault, sexual assault, excessive use of force, and use of deadly force by law enforcement officers, whether lethal or not; 
• Create State legislation that requires all law enforcement officers in the State of California responsible for taking out $20million Personal Liability Coverage Policy as they must be personally responsible for civil settlement amounts for law enforcement officers found responsible for violating constitutional and civil rights, damage, excessive force, assault, sexual assault, fraud, theft, falsification of reports or any loss of life – ending multimillion taxpayer funded settlements for law enforcement officers’ continued misconduct;
• Fund a Statewide public service program available in all localities that clearly informs Californians of their detailed rights when interacting with law enforcement officers and agencies;
• Create State legislation which suspends the use of paid administrative leave for law enforcement officers under investigation;
• Create legislation that withholds pensions of law enforcement officers involved in excessive force, and utilizing restorative justice reinvesting those funds into communities directly harmed by those violent and unnecessary actions;
• Create State legislation that classifies Police Unions as special interest lobbying.  This classification allows for alignment with protecting our democracy and banning elected officials from receiving campaign funding or donations in this our State;
• Ensure State legislation implements hiring & employment practices applicable for all law enforcement agencies operating in the State & holding these agencies accountable for failing to meet or uphold these standards. Hiring and employment practices include, but aren’t limited to:
  • Ensure hiring, promotion, transfers is in alignment with standards set for all State Law Enforcements Officers. Employment offers must be equally weighted on relative testing passed and if applicable, an unproblematic record within the LEO public conduct database;
  • Increase education requirements for employment eligibility for all law enforcement officers operating within the State;
  • Ensure officers involved in domestic violence 
  • End training practices that justify the use of escalation and excessive force, ie shouting “gun, gun, gun”
  • Hypervigilance within stressful situations become vicious cycles for law enforcement to fail to address their health and compounds risk for all parties in communities when they’re unable to read situations or respond appropriately to others. I would increase psychological evaluations and without penalty encourage time off for any law enforcement officers to heal;
  • Capping law enforcement officer overtime accrual and overtime pay for military exercises – ensuring public accountability;
  • Withdraw participation in police militarization programs;
• Ban all locality law enforcement agencies’ ability to utilize civil asset forfeiture – as a predatory tool abused on the Poor to then militarize unaccountable policing agencies;
• Call for the federal repeal of 1033 program;
• Ban use and immediately end all contracts for by any State of California department or locality government/public office including but not limited to Stingray, Dirtbox and any other similarly invasive surveillance program bound to be abused by our governments without federal legislation to protect the privacy of residents of the United States;
• Ban use and immediately end all contracts for facial recognition technology by any State of California or locality within government/public office including, but not limited to Clearview, Palintir, Snowflake,  and any other similarly invasive surveillance program abused and/or bound to be abused by our governments without federal legislation to protect the privacy of residents of the United States;
• Create legislation that withholds 5yrs of State & locality funding for each Law Enforcement Department’s violations of:
  • Excessive civil rights violations, including but not limited to spying and predatory policing tactics (ex LAPD’s Operation LASER), falsifying police reports, etc;
  • Failure to fully submit all relative data to LEO Public Conduct Database;
  • Abusing overtime cap;
  • Department Body Camera Abuses;
  • Illegal use of non-authorized surveillance methods – be it facial recognition or other mass surveillance techniques conducted illegally, Stingray, Dirtbox, Palintir, Clearview, Snowflake et.al.;
  • Unprofessional conduct which warrants department investigations by Federal Agencies;

Legislation and Our Unjust Legal System

California State legislation and our courts have long been used to criminalize and prey on members of our communities most in need of services, protection & government support. Policing funnels into and is strengthened by our legislation and legal system.  They mutually coexist to support one another.  Historically, and still today, our legislation and unjust legal system are used as predatory tools that provide vastly different sets of systems, justice and outcomes:

For those with capital & those without.

For those with property & those without.

For those from specific ethnic or cultural backgrounds & those who are not.

For those who conform to rigid gender and sexual roles & those who do not.

This has always been our way.  State laws determined who was a slave, freedman, indebted servant, apprentice, clerk, based on miscegenation laws was based solely on ethnic & cultural identity.   State law and locality courts determined which settler-colonist had the right to ownership of trafficked and stolen Indigenous children.  Under California’s Fugitive Slave Law, our California Supreme Court determined freedmen had no right to justice and could be deported back to Southern States to live the rest of their lives as slaves.  Special commissioners were paid more to deport Black Freedmen & Women, than to release them – thus a majority of these specially commissioned trials resulted in deporting Freedmen, Women & Children back to the South for two decades.

Our State’s legislation has legalized atrocities to humanity, many of which are the outcome of policy failures and horrible intentions.  Still in localities across this State, we criminalize extremely human and common situations unworthy of criminal labels, incarceration and state fees.  A massively disproportionate number of police calls and arrests in cities across the State involve chronically homeless populations – in spite of them totaling less than 3% of our State’s population.  Right now, police response, court appearances and imprisonment for homelessness, recreational drug use & legal-age consensual sex work are all driven by city, county and State laws criminalizing it.  It’s a waste of resources, an abuse of human behavior and common existence.

No more.

The calls to deconstruct this unjust legal system and concepts of safety must involve action and radical change within our courts and legislation.  In order to abolish our prison industrial complex, we must call for all communities to dismantle legislation and court structures that deny us all the resources and services and opportunities for peace often afforded wealthy communities.  

We must dismantle our unjust legal system and rebuild with life-affirming infrastructure that enables and empowers us to serve all our communities the way we are supposed to serve them all.  I have a responsibility now, in running for Governor and elevating other seats of power, to push for that transformative, non-incremental change at every turn.  The time for abolition of our injustice system is now. And to guide us in this moment, we need to hold central that abolition is both a vision and a political strategy.  Part of this strategy is recognizing and actualizing that we cannot call for reforms that further entrench and legitimize policing in any form as a solution to social, economic or political problems. When #OurCalifornia’s most marginalized are protected and succeed, we all win.  And as a prison industrial complex abolitionist, the reforms I am calling for are aimed at diminishing the political, economic & social power of policing through legislation and all facets of our courts.

As your gubernatorial candidate for 2022, I proudly call for our government, and our communities to abolish our prison industrial complex, reimagining justice and ensuring public safety for all Californians.  I intend to End Poverty in California, and this is how I believe reimagining public safety and changing our priorities with decriminalizing homelessness, decriminalizing personal possession of all narcotics, decriminalizing sex work, defunding our police state and legal system and abolition of pretrial predatory bail risk assessment systems and pretrial detainees will help us achieve this:

Decriminalizing Homelessness

There are nearly one thousand “anti-homeless” codes and ordinances in the State currently used by local legislators, law enforcement officers and judges within our carceral state to target and criminalize a human circumstance. A majority of these vagrancy laws have long been found unconstitutional – both by SCOTUS and the California State Supreme Court – yet legislators, law enforcement officers and judges in all our localities are eager to utilize this legislation to terrorize unhoused Californians. 

As your gubernatorial candidate for 2022, I proudly call for our government, and our communities to abolish the prison industrial complex – and that includes our legislation and legal system.  We need to reimagine justice and ensure public safety for all Californians.  A lack of public and affordable housing is both an abject policy failure and public health issue.  Our unhoused deserve to live with dignity and our government must protect the human rights for all in #OurCalifornia. I intend to End Poverty in California, and these are the decriminalization policies and the vision I believe will achieve it:

• Using the authority and precedence of the SCOTUS decision Martin v Idaho (2019) and the State of California’s current unavailability of temporary, permanent or affordable housing, I will ban all legislation which criminalizes a human circumstance to bolster our jail populations for an expanding carceral state.  #OurCalifornia needs services not jails or criminal records;
• Formally apologizing for our Governments’ actions, predation and failures.  This apology will include pardoning all active sentences, waiving all fees & expunging all criminal records any #OurCalifornia residents who were targeted by localities or the State with unconstitutional vagrancy & anti-homeless laws;
• Ensuring permanent public housing is available to every resident in our State under my #UniversalHousing program;
• Expanding the Whole Person Care Program to ensure social support services are provided to those in need (current or new to the WPCP system) as we all cope with this pandemic and economic crises in our State.  People fall out of orbit, but most are resilient and can achieve greater for themselves and our society when given the opportunities to heal and thrive;
• Ban heavily used legislative loopholes and currently legal maneuvers used by localities and courts to ensure State Psychiatric admission and care through our prison system;
  • With immediately ending this process and ensuring State and locality use of #MediCALForAllCalifornians for all individuals in crisis, or need of long-term mental healthcare – we will provide paths to critical care and peace without police, courts or prisons;
• Create a publicly accessible database, LEO Public Conduct Database, of all law enforcement officer complaints (formally lodged and community-based) in the State of California for complete transparency, employment sanctions and finally end loopholes that allow law enforcement to be rehired in other localities after previous termination;
  • In funding this reliable State tracking and reporting of all complaints and incidents there will be specific data and review available on harassment, extortion, assault, sexual assault,  excessive use of force, and use of deadly force by law enforcement officers, whether lethal or not; 
• Unarmed community-led policing alternatives and changes in State legislation is both humane, practical & cost-avoidant. This will also substantially reduce the State’s current court size and response times improving the right to a speedy and fair trial;

Decriminalizing Personal Possession of All Narcotics

In 1971, President Richard Nixon declared drugs to be “public enemy number one” and launched a War on Drugs that continues to ravage our communities and countries across the world today.  It has been an unjust and immoral tactic employed by the United States government to justify anti-Socialist wars, and empower criminal enterprises abroad to destabilize the Global South for substantial political power and profit of the system.  At home, the War on Drugs have been used as a tool to effectively splinter peace movements, increase drug use, decrease public safety and reinforce exponential expansion of our prison industrial complex.

Our system is not broken – it’s working exactly as intended and it will continue to exploit us all unless we make systemic change happen.  The U.S. has both the world’s highest incarceration rate and among the highest rates of illegal drug use – that’s not by mistake.  Decades of research has found strict and excessive criminal punishment to be an extremely small deterrent to drug use, if it exists at all.  As a result, drug prohibition has failed to reduce drug use. We are actively sacrificing our tax dollars, public health & public safety – and for what?

Portugal decriminalized personal possession of all drugs in 2001 in response to high illicit drug use, and now has significantly lower rates of all drug use than the European average. They’ve substantially decreased overdoses, drug-related suicides as well.  Equally as important, are the resounding effects and improvements for users overall health, reduction of HIV, Hepatitis, all other blood-borne and sexually transmitted infections among users through humane and effective community-led, community based programs that emphasize harm reduction and ensuring those who need help, can safely seek it and get it.   All of this greatness was achieved without jeopardizing the safety of children – Portugal’s post-decriminalization has seen reductions in drug consumption from minors.

It’s a humane, just, compassionate, healthy and cost-avoidant policy.  Decriminalization puts #OurCalifornia’s tax dollars to better use.  Arresting, prosecuting and imprisoning people for drug-related offenses is expensive and counterproductive to the communities we’re trying to build if we continue to criminalize a public health concern.  

Drug use is roughly comparable across ethnic and racial groups in our State and our country, however People of Color are significantly more likely to be stopped, searched, arrested and imprisoned with harsher sentencing for drug-related offenses. 

Though overall arrests for marijuana-related offenses have fallen since the pass of 2016’s Prop 64, arrests of Black people for marijuana possession have significantly increased.  While Black Californians make up 6% of the State’s population, the racial disparities in arrests and those being detained is undeniable. Data from 2016 shows that Black Californians represented 32% of those being arrested and detained for marijuana.  While data from 2019 shows that Black Californians now make up 43% of those still being arrested and detained for marijuana – 4-5times their White Californian counterparts – despite legalization.  These racial disparities mirror trends nationwide with other States who have legalized marijuana and are an absolute reflection of societies and governments that devote more police resources to controlling and over-policing Black communities.  Furthermore, the data proves that legislation alone is not enough to undo racially-biased policing and predatory practices of the legal system in #OurCalifornia that are based on personal discretion of drug enforcement, prosecution and sentencing of People of Color, especially Black, Brown & Indigenous Peoples.  Inherent bias, be it racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic, will always result in the overrepresentation of the Poor, and People of Color, especially Black Californians, being arrested and incarcerated.

Billions and billions of our tax dollars are wasted annually on law enforcement agencies and our legal system without any positive impact on public safety, public health or drug use.  Our State’s legislation and legal system intentionally heightens the risk of drug users and the general public contracting HIV, Hepatitis and other bloods-borne and sexually transmitted infections by not having harm reduction policies in place.  State and federal data shows that failed drug screening tests, personal possession, missed appointments & unpaid fines remain the largest reasons California parolees return to prison – technical violations of parole rather than committing an alleged crime.

Our State continues to rely on extremely expensive drug enforcement, prosecution, sentencing, imprisonment, parole violations & re-sentencing with ineffective government spending on drug treatment and further incarceration for absolutely no reason.  This system isn’t effective, reduce crime or improve public safety. Our government is continuing this circular justification of defunding other public services at our expense while failing to resolve any issues they claim they need additional funding for.

No more.

Because criminalizing drugs does not really prevent drug use, decriminalizing does not really increase it.  Respect will.  Dignity will.  Protecting human rights will.  Recognizing personal autonomy will.  Significantly expanding effective community-based programs will.  When #OurCalifornia’s most marginalized are protected and succeed, we all win.

Drug use and drug dependency are a public health concern – not a crime. I support the full decriminalization of drug use – it has proven more humane, far more effective, just and cost-avoidant than criminalization.  Furthermore, it addresses predatory tactics of our legal system and the racial disparities inherent to the War on Drugs. Oregon was the first State in this country to decriminalize all drugs in November 2020 and I believe that California should be the second in November 2022.

As your gubernatorial candidate for 2022, I proudly call for our government, and our communities to abolish the prison industrial complex – and that includes our legislation and legal system.  We need to reimagine justice and ensure public safety for all Californians.  Data shows that drug use is a public health challenge to be successfully  managed, not a war to be won.  Drug users and drug dependent individuals deserve to live with dignity and our government must protect the human rights for all in #OurCalifornia. I intend to End Poverty in California, and these are the decriminalization policies and the vision I believe will achieve it:

• Support the full decriminalization of drugs within the State of California;
• Mitigate significant racial, ethnic and economic disparities associated with drug enforcement, prosecution, sentencing and imprisonment; 
• Formally apologizing for our Government’s actions, predation and failures.  This apology will include pardoning all active sentences, waiving all fees & expunging all criminal records any #OurCalifornia residents who were targeted by localities or the State for all crimes involving drug possession and/or use;
• Protect the human rights of people who use drugs by treating them with dignity, providing equal access to all Ending Poverty In California services;
• Adapt laws to ensure if/when #OurCalifornia uses drugs they have access to justice and do not face punitive or coercive sanctions for personal use;
  • Ensure the principle of proportionality is applied for drug-related crimes, and ensure the State has put in place public health-based alternatives to incarceration, administrative penalties and other forms of corrective action.
• Working to end the intersecting forms of stigma and discrimination to drug users and drug dependent people in #OurCalifornia that hampers access to healthcare, harm reduction, legal services, education, employment and social protection services, or when interacting with law enforcement; 
  • Ensuring environments drug users and drug dependent people who need assistance who need this assistance are more likely to seek it and get it. 
• Include, support, fund and empower communities and grassroots organizations – including organizations and networks of people who use drugs – in all aspects of the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of drug policies and programs, as well as the design and delivery of HIV, health, and social protection services;
• Undertake a rebalancing of investments in drug control and funds saved from law enforcement agencies and our legal system now freed from expensive drug enforcement, prosecution, sentencing and imprisonment to ensure sufficient funding for human rights programs and health services, including comprehensive packages of harm reduction, HIV services, community-led responses and social enablers;
  • Reinvest substantial sums of monies previously used on drug enforcement to pay for new community-based harm reduction efforts in all localities across the State on a scale that can be easily, voluntarily and confidentially accessed by all people who are drug dependent – including but not limited to:
    • Drug treatment rehabilitation centers;
    • Opioid substitution therapy;
    • Needle-syringe programs;
    • Methadone and other medication-assisted treatment, which is endorsed by the American Medical Association;
    • Naloxone – including injectable and nasal forms;
    • Safe consumption rooms;
• Ensure use of social contract modalities for engaging allied grassroots organizations for the delivery of community-led and community-based harm reduction services;
• Reduce overdose death rates, HIV, viral Hepatitis,blood-borne and sexually transmitted infections within the State;
• Ensure that all people who are drug dependent have access to noncoercive and evidence-informed drug dependence treatment that is consistent with international human rights standards;
• Ensure that all users of drugs within #OurCalifornia have culturally competent care and fully accessible to the full range of healthcare services needed:
  • Access to prevention, testing, and life-saving treatment for HIV, viral hepatitis, blood-borne and sexually transmitted infections;
  • Ensure adequate availability and appropriate access to opioids for medical use to reduce pain and suffering;
  • Facilitate access for people who use drugs to HIV, sexual and reproductive health needs through an integrated, people-centered approach that is gender-responsive and youth-friendly;
  • Ensure that #MediCALForAllCalifornians/SB562 systems are structured in a way that makes services accessible and acceptable to people who use drugs, including both integrated and stand-alone services, as needed
• Fund research to analyze the data of our State’s decriminalization, specifically our successes and strengths, areas of improvement, and policy or application blindspots, along with tangible and nontangible cost-benefit analysis;
• Create a publicly accessible database, LEO Public Conduct Database, of all law enforcement officer complaints (formally lodged and community-based) in the State of California for complete transparency, employment sanctions and finally end loopholes that allow law enforcement to be rehired in other localities after previous termination;
  • In funding this reliable State tracking and reporting of all complaints and incidents there will be specific data and review available on harassment, assault, excessive use of force, and use of deadly force by law enforcement officers, whether lethal or not; 
• Ensure that the California Cannabis Advisory Committee allows for a consortium of small cannabis farmers and marijuana industry leaders of color to review, audit and create legislation to ensure the industry is not structured by the State to favor large corporate interests when the industry in our State has been built off the backs of small farmers and People of Color;
• Support legislation that fully legalizes all drugs:
  • As a means for State regulation and socioeconomic benefit;
  • I stand in Solidarity to reduce the violence and harm endured by people in Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, Peru, Costa Rica, Afghanistan & Mexico as a result of our government-funded international drug trades and genocidal criminal enterprises. We all deserve opportunities for economic prosperity and to live in peace;

Decriminalizing Sex Work

When an adult makes a decision of her, his, or their own free will to exchange sexual services for money, that is not sexual violence – that is sex work.  Sex work is the consensual exchange of sex between adults. Human trafficking and sexual exploitation of children are two entirely separate issues which are both serious human rights abuses and crimes and which should always be investigated with predators held to account.

However when the State insists upon criminalizing adult, voluntary, and consensual sex – including the commercial exchange of sexual services – it is incompatible with the human right to personal autonomy and privacy. When we can protect and empower our most marginalized communities, we all win.

Sex workers are far more vulnerable to violence, including rape, assault and murder from predators who see sex workers as easy targets because our current system intentionally leaves them unprotected.  When we as a society continue to stigmatize their work, dehumanize their existence and dismiss their calls for sociopolitical support and action – we impose further harm on human beings by denying human rights, dignity & equality under the law.  

Criminalization consistently undermines sex workers’ ability to seek justice for crimes against them – including substantial abuse and exploitation from law enforcement officials.  There’s over century of data in our State that shows law enforcement officers harass sex workers, extort bribes, physically, verbally and sexually abuse sex workers. Furthermore, criminalization decreases the likelihood they will seek or receive help from police.  Our criminalized environments further increase risk and significantly reduce options for sex workers to work in safe locations.

Two-Spirit, Trans, non-binary & gender nonconforming people, especially Black, Brown & Indigenous Peoples, bear the brunt of overpolicing and criminalization of sex work – whether they are sex workers themselves or not.  The harassment, stops, arrests and detaining of people for #WalkingWhileTrans or merely existing in our State is a horrific trend.  Furthermore, the overpolicing of Poor and BIPOC communities, means that Black, Brown & Indigenous Two-Spirit, Trans, Non-binary & Gender Nonconforming sex workers *and* non-sex workers bear the brunt of this harm with needless, violent & fiscally irresponsible interactions with law enforcement officers.

UNAIDS, public health experts, sex worker organizations, and other human rights organizations have found that criminalization of sex work also has a negative effect on sex workers’ right to health.  California law enforcement officers and prosecutors have routinely used a sex worker’s possession of condoms as evidence to support prostitution charges. A practice by our State which ultimately incentivizes sex workers to not carry condoms for fear of arrest.  Yet in their lines of work, not having condoms significantly increases the likelihood of engaging in an exchange of sexual services without protection.  Our State’s legislation and legal system intentionally heightens the risk of contracting HIV and other sexually transmitted infections on marginalized communities.

Criminalization of sex work reduces personal and public safety, strengthens criminal enterprises and exploitative measures, drastically reduces the health of sex workers, and wastes our tax dollars on ineffective and unnecessary actions.  

No more.

Our government has no business forcibly involving itself on acts between consenting adults – and utilizing legislation and our legal system to do so is a waste of tax dollars and public resources. I support the full decriminalization of sex work with the State of California.

Decriminalizing sex work maximizes sex workers’ legal protection and their ability to exercise other key rights, including to restorative justice and health care. Legal recognition of sex workers and their occupation maximizes their protection, dignity, and equality.  Data also shows that decriminalization can help reduce crime, including sexual violence, against sex workers and the general public.  When #OurCalifornia’s most marginalized are protected and succeed, we all win.

As your gubernatorial candidate for 2022, I proudly call for our government, and our communities to abolish the prison industrial complex – and that includes our legislation and legal system.  We need to reimagine justice and ensure public safety for all Californians.  Sex workers deserve to live with dignity and our government must protect the human rights for all in #OurCalifornia.  I intend to End Poverty in California, and these are the decriminalization policies and the vision I believe will achieve it:

• Ensure full decriminalization of sex work;
  • Supporting SB233 and further expansion of the bill for full decriminalization;
• Ensure California State legislation clearly distinguishes between sex work and sex crimes – like human trafficking and sexual exploitation of children.  
  • Clarity and distinctions will help protect both sex workers and crime victims in our State and hold predators, Corporations who knowingly violate these laws accountable;
• Formally apologizing for our Government’s actions, predation and failures.  This apology will include pardoning all active sentences, waiving all fees & expunging all criminal records any #OurCalifornia residents who were targeted by localities or the State for all laws which criminalized sex and sexual services between consenting adults;
• Maximize sex workers’ legal protection and their ability to exercise their human, constitutional and civil rights in a nondiscriminatory fashion.  
• Provide legal recognition of sex work as an occupation, maximizing their protection, dignity & equality.
• Elevate California’s first Sex Workers Union to ensure the protection of human and labor rights of sex workers within our State within the State Union Department;
  • Protect sex workers’ right to organize, collective bargaining, labor rights, labor relations law, 
• Work with grassroots sex worker organizations, sex workers & sex work labor leaders to create California’s first Sex Workers’ Union.
  • Empower the Sex Workers’ Union to create legislation and community-based programs that address discrimination based on socioeconomic, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, race, ethnicity, or immigration status affecting sex workers in our State;
  • Empower the Sex Workers’ Union to create legislation that addresses workplace safety, health, successful business models & critical support systems currently lacking for sex workers in our State;
• Reinvest funding from previous criminalization efforts into sex-worker led and community-based initiatives for public education and all needed support services;
• Reinvest funding from previous criminalization efforts into sex worker-led research to analyze the data of our State’s decriminalization, specifically our successes and strengths, areas of improvement, policy or application blindspots, along with tangible and nontangible cost-benefit analyses;
• Create a publicly accessible database, LEO Public Conduct Database, of all law enforcement officer complaints (formally lodged and community-based) in the State of California for complete transparency, employment sanctions and finally end loopholes that allow law enforcement to be rehired in other localities after previous termination;
  • In funding this reliable State tracking and reporting of all complaints and incidents there will be specific data and review available on harassment, extortion, assault, sexual assault,  excessive use of force, and use of deadly force by law enforcement officers, whether lethal or not; 
• Ensure full access and use of #OurCalifornia’s Ending Poverty In California services, including but not limited to:
  • Restorative Justice;
  • #MediCALForAllCalifornians;
  • #UniversalHousing;
  • Collective organizing, labor rights and safe working conditions;
  • Nutrition & #SNAPForAll;
  • #ChildcareForAll;
  • State Jobs Guarantee;
  • Public Education & workforce development;
• Support repeal of SESTA/FOSTA and its tech applications and encourage State Legislation which challenges SESTA/FOSTA, specifically:
  • The government has no place in the consensual behavior of adults, and the bill’s significant targeting of legal, already marginalized and underserved populations of legal sex workers – especially those who are LGBTQ, BIPOC or Poor is not something I support;
  • As it stands, SESTA/FOSTA’s regulatory structure is currently only feasible for the largest tech companies as a result of their extensive legal resources.  Smaller networks and firms in the State of California, and the country, are often incapable of navigating or complying with this law – thus reducing innovation and legal content.  My government intends to support small business, spur innovation and increase legal  content;

Abolition of our Police State and Legal System

We have long been a Police State.  So with the rise of:

• Big Tech, 
• the militarization of local police, 
• legislation that enables officers to abide by an entirely different playbook, 
• and constant expansion of our prison industrial system with legislation, overpolicing, for-profit prisons and our government’s reliance on slave labor

Our government has come to rely on grandiose systems that harm individuals, our communities and our opportunities for resilient and sustainable futures.  As a society, we must realize that we do not have unlimited resources. Too many of our tax dollars have been diverted under the outright lies we’ve been told about crime and public safety.  Too many of our resources are being taken up by mass incarceration, expansive government systems which legitimize themselves no matter how harmful, and this incessant punitive policing of “the other.” 

Our State and localities have been hyperfocused on expanding systems that support overpolicing by defunding mental health services, defunding housing, defunding public education and denying food security.  Our State and localities have allowed Corporations to poison our air, our water, our soil, our bodies for profit — to violently extract resources from the ground and for a profit.  Our State and localities have intentionally failed to address these ills of our communities, our society as a whole because they are actively creating conditions in which our living and learning environments are filled with hazards.  When a State’s focus is on how it can sustain and support itself – and not its People… it’s time to reevaluate our State’s government and Governor.

Members of my community, members of your community, members across #OurCalifornia is now engaging with this criminal legal system at a disproportionate rate because our State’s finite resources are being used against us.

We have to dismantle and rebuild in a way that is going to enable us to serve our communities the way we are supposed to serve them. I believe that we all have a responsibility now to take our government and our communities back.  #OurCalifornia is powerful, and it’s time we ALL hold our electeds to account – the ones who have a seat at tables we’ve long been denied, to push for that transformative, non-incremental change at every turn. It is going to take everybody, from all different professions, to commit to doing this work, making some mistakes along the way and getting it right for us to see a change. This is a movement of, for and by the People.  We cannot rely on legislation and the legal system that got us here to get us out of this neoliberal hellscape.  

No more.

Most elected officials are not activists or community organizers. However the time has now come now where we can no longer afford to have people with such exaggerated positions of power within our legal system be one thing – their designated titles of government/public service.  We must move past being a prosecutor, district attorney, judge, clerk, bailiff, attorney general and fully commit to being a public servant for our communities.  That means advocating for food security and sovereignty, recognizing and combatting the environmental injustices of our frontline communities, supporting complete tribal sovereignty and anti-racist policies, addressing our affordable housing shortage, and working to end policies and remove harm from the system that impact ALL our communities.  This time is now.

We must earn the trust of our communities, of our most marginalized and we cannot do that with transforming our work, our efforts and the outcomes of our legislation and legal system.  The sentiment of wanting to defund the police is really about reinvesting in community, and in many cases across our State, finally investing in poor communities, rural communities, urban communities, Black and brown communities for the first time.

As your gubernatorial candidate for 2022, I proudly call for our government, and our communities to abolish the prison industrial complex – and that includes our legislation and legal system.  We need to reimagine justice and ensure public safety for all Californians.  I intend to End Poverty in California, and these are the policies and the vision for our legislation and legal system I believe will achieve it:

• Actively work to decrease and ultimately erase the footprint of our current criminal legal system, including but not limited to: a complete re-evaluation of our penal code; biased system applications of the severity of alleged crimes committed, pretrial risk assessment, & sentencing – as data consistently shows the Poor and specifically People of Color receive significantly higher bail, harsher criminal statutes and sentencing; Minimum mandatory and maximum sentencing statutes;
  • Similar to efforts and outcome of Realignment – AB 109, reclassify the way the State looks at crimes to effectively eliminate the possibility of prison time, from penal to motor vehicle codes.
  • Divest from previously ineffective and costly overpolicing efforts to reinvest in new community-led and community-based systems that will allow all communities and localities across this State to thrive;
  • Work with grassroots organizations, abolition activists, members of our legal system & community members to ensure just transitions that meet the needs and demands of this moment with fully transparent audits and State support of systemic change of legislative and legal system needs for #OurCalifornia;
  • As data shows that a minimum of 4 out of 10 individuals entering the justice system are disabled, we must transform ableist courts, including predatory and punitive measures which have been proven to penalize disabled populations;
  • Elevate effective community-led initiatives and programs that will dismantle the prison industrial complex and permanently decrease our legal systems’ footprints, and provide restorative justice to all harmed by crime;
  • Legislation and penal code changes will significantly reduce policing structures, government and docket loads for most courts within our State which are extremely wasteful, and counterproductive as data has long shown they create additional crime;
  • Reinvestment of those funds to begin addressing the resilient and sustainable communities #OurCalifornia needs with entirely new legislative and non policing, community-based, community-led alternatives to uplift our communities – especially our most marginalized – and End Poverty In California;
• Create a publicly accessible database, Courts Public Conduct Database, of court officials’ complaints (formally lodged and community-based) in the State of California for complete transparency of conduct, actions and data.  These court officials can include but are not limited to: District Attorneys, Prosecutors & Judges;

Abolition of Cash Bail, Predatory Pretrial Bail Risk Assessment Systems and Reliance of Pretrial Detainees

According to data from the Federal Reserve, raising $400 for an emergency (health, auto, housing, family, etc) would be hard for just about half of all Americans. Yet, across this country & our State, a person’s ability to often pay $400 or more determines who stays in jail before trial and who returns home.  So it should be no surprise then that decades of California data consistently has shown that a minimum of 55% of people in our city and county jails are there because of an inability to pay their determined cash bail.  

California’s current bail system enables judges to set bail such that it would be unaffordable to the defendant:

• without a finding that the defendant would actually pose a threat to society,
• without considering the defendant’s ability to pay, and
• without considering non-monetary alternatives.  

These obscenely high & fixed amounts assigned penalize the Poor – as wealthy defendants walk free.  This two-tier system criminalizes poverty and is a structural linchpin of mass incarceration and racial inequality.  

California’s bail industry is an unnecessary and largely unaccountable $2 billion industry that profits from trapping people both inside and out of jail, and often for long after their charges with the courts have been resolved.  With its well-documented predatory and exploitative practices, California’s private and public bail industry extracts massive money from our communities with the fewest resources – the Poor & marginalized populations. Factoring in the impact of pretrial detention on families, communities, and social services, the true economic cost of this crisis on local communities is estimated to approach $14 billion annually. 

The median bail amount in California ($50,000) is more than five times the median amount in the rest of the nation (less than $10,000).  And as such, according to the Department of Justice, California has relied on pretrial detention at 21 percentage points more than the rest of the United States.  Decades of data also confirm that Indigenous, Black, & brown people are more likely to be detained with arbitrarily higher cash bail amounts than white people for similar charges and criminal histories.   Bond schedules in one California study, identified local arbitrary bond schedule amounts for public intoxication ranging from $75 to $10,000 where white people received significantly lower bail amounts, making it bail roulette for Indigenous, Black and brown people.  Testing for racial discrimination in the parametric model used in a number or pretrial risk assessments concluded that being Black increases a defendant’s odds of being held in jail pretrial by 25%.

The Partnership on AI has found pretrial risk assessment tools are often invalid, inaccurate, or biased in predicting real world outcomes because these tools are simply using the wrong metrics. Many algorithms are programmed to measure the likelihood of an individual incurring another arrest, not whether they are a threat to public safety.  Additionally, algorithms are likely to reflect the existing biases and oppressive practices of overpolicing and criminalization of the Poor and historically marginalized communities. 

The economic, psychological & social impacts devastate families and entire communities for generations, guts the presumption of innocence, and applies very real penalties for poverty.  And the penalty for poverty in the State of California’s justice system is being caged in city/county jails as a pretrial detainee.

The longer pretrial detainees remain in our city and county jails – the more harm we do to them.  

California’s cash bail system and current risk-assessment alternatives often leads to the detention of people who do not pose a real threat to public safety.  Pretrial detainees are presumed innocent under the law, yet still suffer the same documented harms of incarceration.  Individuals who are arrested still require basic needs which often go unmet in the jails across our localities, and could be better met outside California’s justice system and carceral state.  One in five jail inmates has a serious mental illness, and a minimum of two in five incarcerated in jails require medication. According to multiple Supreme Court of the United States cases the State of California has lost – our jails and prisons are systemically negligent in providing constitutional minimums of healthcare, including medication and appropriate medical and psychiatric treatment with incarceration officials deliberately indifferent to the needs of individuals under State care.  Only 11% of people with substance-use disorders in the justice system receive any type of treatment.

Our unjust legal system also preys upon pretrial detainees living in poverty to accept unjust or wrongful convictions.  Data confirms that detained defendants are 25% more likely to plead guilty than similarly situated releases, and are 43% more likely to be sentenced to jail, receiving jail sentences that are more than twice as long on average.  Furthermore, data shows that the longer pretrial detainees remain in our horrifically brutal and unconstitutional spaces, the more likely they are to commit future crimes, meaning that incarceration has a very real criminogenic effect and does not promote or increase public safety. These differences persist even after fully controlling for the initial bail amount, offense, all demographic information, and criminal history characteristics.  State-sanctioned imprisonment causes more crime.   

The toll this crisis takes on #OurCalifornia is catastrophic, and the burdens are levied almost exclusively on the Poor, and disproportionately on Communities of Color, marginalized and underserved populations.  People who are jailed pretrial often wait months, even years, for their cases to resolve. And in that time while they wait for an unjust system to determine their innocence or convict them of crimes they may not have even committed, the Poor lose their jobs, homes, children, and critically essential community ties.  Being a pretrial detainee risks the same sexual violence, deterioration of mental and physical health, and the infliction of lasting trauma – same as individuals convicted of crimes in our jails and prisons.

Again, the longer pretrial detainees remain in our city and county jails – the more harm we do to them.   

In RE: KENNETH HUMPHREY, on Habeas Corpus, the First District Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled in 2018 that the pretrial detention of Kenneth Humphrey unconstitutional because “a defendant may not be imprisoned solely due to poverty.” Should the ruling be upheld, it may constitute an existential challenge to the state’s bail system. Concurrent challenges—motivated in part by high rates of pretrial detention in California relative to the rest of the nation—have all been posed by the Judicial Council, Attorney General and state legislature. 

And with direct and immediate reaction, California’s bail industry launched a three-pronged attack to ensure the protection of their $2 billion industry.  Substantial lobbying, November 2020’s referendum to repeal SB10 and an initiative quietly filed to grant bail constitutional protection.  While corporate lobbying still remains, the initiative filed to grant bail constitutional protection was promptly dismissed.  There were a range of opponents to the referendum to repeal SB10, also known as Prop 25 on the November 2020 ballot, including the California Bail Agents Association, the American Bail Coalition & the California Peace Officers’ Association – however the most notable opposition were civil rights advocates, the Partnership for AI, the California Conference of the NAACP and countless others stated that the algorithm should not be used for release decisions, and the SB10 does not sufficiently address racial biases inherent to our criminal justice system.  Since Proposition 25 failed, Senate Bill 10 was rejected resulting in the retention of cash bail in the State.

California’s current pretrial risk assessment algorithms fail to reduce the volume of people who are arrested and often digitally replicate systemic and historic oppression by relying on data built from a history of criminalizing the Poor, our disabled, Indigenous, Black, brown & gender non conforming bodies.  As algorithms, risk assessment tools are designed to learn from these rules and their consequences using biased data collected by biased individuals working in an oppressive system. 

Forty-nine of California’s 58 counties use pretrial risk assessment tools alongside bail.  California localities use a range of assessment tools including extremely controversial technology specifically created for parolees – COMPAS.  The Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions – COMPAS, was created specifically to help probation and parole officers determine the level of supervision required for an inmate upon release however has been shown to be predictively invalid, and scores are designed to be different based on race and gender – so all other factors being equal, risk assessment results will differ based on race and gender alone.

Our current injustice system operates under the standard premise that risk assessment tools are objective and inherently neutral because they are based on data.  Our overreliance on this prison technology will not disrupt or reform our existing criminal injustice system – but instead create forward progress in the same inequities that our criminal injustice system was built upon. The State’s incessant investing in pretrial risk assessment actually diverts resources away from more critical reforms, exacerbates inequity, bias and blatant inaccuracies in the system – just to maintain the same levels of policing and biased applications of the law.

Our current injustice system relies on judges and lawyers to be unbiased with equitable applications of the law and understand the complexities of how these algorithmic predictions function in order to make fair interpretations of the data they’re presented.  Meaning individuals with the most power to preside over a case, a person’s freedom must effectively interpret statistical information, confidence intervals, and error bands, and be well-versed in the uncertainty of the results. 

California’s current risk assessment algorithms and tools take into account personal characteristics like age, sex, geography, family background, and employment status. As a result, two people accused of the same crime can receive sharply different bail or sentencing outcomes based on inputs that are beyond their control—with no way of assessing or challenging the results.

No more.

Nonincremental and systemic change to our criminal justice system requires careful thought, consideration and intention to ensure public safety and the human rights all in #OurCalifornia is entitled to. Accordingly, the abolition of cash bail cannot be replaced with equally problematic algorithms that fail to address our justice systems structurally inherent biases on the Poor, communities of Color & marginalized populations.

Risk assessment tools can help create a more just society, but only if they utilize an abolition framework, which envisions the use and implementation of technology to reduce the role of incarceration and policing in the criminal justice system through alternatives that address the underlying causes of crime and promote public safety.  When these tools are framed in abolitionist praxis, pretrial risk assessment can help begin to create a justice system that is fair, effective, and rehabilitative. 

Furthermore, increasing the State’s use of successful and effective non-cash bail & nonpolicing alternatives is essential to ensuring just and equitable treatment under the law, while ensuring decarceration of pretrial defendants.  The Pretrial Services Agency (PSA), an independent federal agency with a 45-year track record, is widely regarded as the gold standard of pretrial criminal justice reform. Even without bail, PSA has a phenomenal track record with 90 percent of released defendants appearing at all of their scheduled court dates and 91 percent remain arrest-free between pretrial release and their trial date.  It can be done and I refuse to allow Bail Corporations and Policing structures amplify unfounded fears in the face of critically necessary change that #OurCalifornia deserves.

As your gubernatorial candidate for 2022, I proudly call for our government, and our communities to abolish the prison industrial complex – and that includes our legislation and legal system.  We need to reimagine justice and ensure public safety for all Californians.  I intend to End Poverty in California, and these are the policies and the vision for our abolition of cash bail, predatory pretrial bail risk assessment systems and reliance of pretrial detainees that I believe will achieve it:

• As findings bolster a growing body of evidence that risk assessment tools are not effective at reducing the use of money bail and pretrial incarceration and have little impact on racial disparities in pretrial release rates, we must audit and compare all 49 counties’ pretrial risk assessments currently used in the State of California to provide greater accountability, transparency and feedback for #OurCalifornia;
  • Utilizing/Expanding Stanford’s Risk Assessment Factsheet to audit and compare pretrial risk assessments within the abolitionist framework;
• As algorithms are proprietary, they are not subject to State or federal open government laws.  Create new legislation that changes this specifically for any algorithmic pretrial risk assessments used in the State of California within our justice system;
  • As the pretrial risk assessment tool will be subject to State open government laws a defendants will now be able to challenge the validity of the results 
• Mandate algorithmic & nonalgorithmic pretrial risk assessment tools are recreated utilizing abolitionist metrics if they are used in the State of California.  These abolitionist metrics will align with a broader effort to both increase public safety and reduce the role of incarceration in California’s prison industrial complex including.  These metrics and tools include, but are not limited to:
  • Account for the biases in crime data that stem from this Nation’s, State’s & localities’ settler colonist & racist history and the criminalization of historically marginalized communities;
  • Account for inherent gender and racial bias (with added point accumulation in COMPAS)
  • Should not consider arrests that do not result in convictions while assessing the risk that someone will commit a dangerous crime if released before their trial;
  • Account for inherent and unequal punishment of Poverty in order to not violate the equal protection clause & ensures input questions do not include the consideration of employment history and financial resources;
  • Should not factor demographic, socioeconomic background, family characteristics and neighborhood crime rates which may serve as a proxy for race. Because these variables and weighted outcomes are highly correlated with race, their inclusion in assessments often have a racially disparate impact;
  • Should adopt a narrow range of questions, such as strictly based on past or present criminal behavior, and individual assessment of a defendant’s conduct, mental states, and attitudes;
• Pretrial risk assessment tools require effective governance, transparency, assessment and accountability. Algorithms cannot exist behind a veil of secrecy, and must be made accessible for public examination, debate, and ongoing regulation both inside and outside the courtroom by plaintiffs, defendants, and the general public.  To ensure independent, objective, nonpartisan and inclusive reviews, create a California State Pretrial Risk Assessment Commission for independent, objective and nonpartisan review and governing body:
  • The CSPRAC will include members from:
    • The Judicial Council;
    • Pretrial Detention Reform Workgroup;
    • California Bar Association;
    • Nonpartisan Policy Organizations;
    • The Partnership on AI
    • Our Incarcerated
    • Members of the General Public
  • Review outcomes of State research on Stanford’s Risk Assessment Factsheet to audit and compare the 49 pretrial risk assessments currently used in this State;
  • Determine validity and effectiveness of pretrial risk assessment tools to be used in the State;
  • Create legislation that regulates pretrial risk assessment tools both in and out of the courtroom;
• Ensure State legislation places meaningful and intentional limitations on the use of risk assessment information in order to protect against due process violations and unintentional, unfair, biased, or discriminatory outcomes inherent to our current injustice system:
  • Risk assessment tools must clearly distinguish between and detail the types of risks being assessed;
  • Risk assessment scores must be accompanied by detailed descriptions of how they were calculated—ie “audit trails”—and all of the information necessary to enable a reproducible calculation of a particular individual’s risk score;
  • Courts should not be allowed to rely on proprietary risk assessment tools if a vendor refuses to disclose information about how the risk assessment tool was developed;
  • The California Judicial Council must define processes by which defendants get access to risk assessment information and can challenge both the risk assessment tool and/or their score;
  • The Judicial Council must place limits on the use of the pretrial risk assessment information in additional proceedings;
  • Courts must not use information generated from a pretrial risk assessment tool if it has not been evaluated and found to satisfy criteria that independent scientific research confirms will accomplish our government’s desired public policy goals—and if the results of such review have not been published and shared with defendants;
  • Pretrial risk assessment information must be used only to aid in the assessment of what conditions of release are appropriate;
  • Pretrial risk assessment tools, and court officials, should not consider arrests that do not result in convictions while assessing the risk that someone will commit a dangerous crime if released before their trial;
• Create legislation that mandates judicial consideration and weighted use of non-cash bail alternatives to ensure the Constitutional rights of arrested individuals is not a penalty for the Poor;
• Fund nonpolicing alternatives that are community-based and community-led caseworkers for released defendants, particularly the higher risk individuals, who may have lower barriers to success;
  • Ensure defendants with physical and mental health needs are met by referrals to community counseling partners;
  • Connect defendants directly to their local EPIC office to provide help with employment and housing in order to help disrupt cycles of poverty and crime;
  • Ensure courts do not immediately issue bench warrants for a defendant’s failure to appear, and de-escalate the need for police intervention. Conduct a “failure to appear investigation,” which includes phone calls to the defendant, the defendant’s family/associates, to other jurisdictions and even to hospitals, if the defendant has known health issues;

State-Sanctioned Imprisonment in California

Prisons do not keep up safe, nor do prisons reduce crime.  To the contrary, data has consistently shown our methods of mass incarceration needlessly expand our government, government spending, criminal enterprises, and substantially harm the labor market which denies our communities opportunities for peace, safety, health or wealth.  Though the discussion of criminal justice and mass incarceration often takes place at the federal level, the vast majority of people who are incarcerated in the United States are incarcerated by state authorities.

California has the largest prison system and network in this country.  Only coming second to higher education in this State (our UC, Cal State & Community College Systems) – California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is the second largest government employer in California.  And specifically the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is home to the largest amount of prisons, correctional facilities,  fire camps, juvenile justice facilities, detention centers, health facilities and rehabilitation clinics in the country.  This is not by mistake – but design.

This network is expansive. Having been cultivated from a horrific history and violent practices of California missionaries, bolstered by convict leasing, racist legislation, mass incarceration and bureaucratic tools of social control – the CDCR is home to 33 adult correctional institutions, 13 adult community correctional facilities, and 8 juvenile facilities in California.  Pre-COVID, these 54 facilities housed 123,000 incarcerated individuals, just slightly below the Supreme Court mandated target of the State’s 137.5% maximum design capacity, which by all accounts and basic math is still substantially overcrowded.  

As the Supreme Court mandated target applies systemwide, and not to individual prisons, the State of California & CDCR have chosen to keep a number of their spaces well above 100% occupancy.  13 of the 35 state-owned facilities individually operate from 137.5% – 200+% capacity.  And about 15,000 additional inmates are not counted in the institutional population because they are housed in camps or in one of the eight contract facilities that the state does not own. Four contract facilities are privately operated; three are publicly operated by the cities of Delano, Shafter, and Taft; one is privately owned but operated by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.  The State also formerly housed incarcerated individuals out of state—more than 10,000 in 2011— however all had been returned to facilities in California by June 2019.  And in a drudgingly slow and lethal response to COVID-19, the State & CDCR have reduced population numbers to a 30-year low – with 99,929 incarcerated individuals still imprisoned under State care – numbers that place our carceral state as a whole still operating over 100% design capacity, with individual facilities still well over the 137.5% Supreme Court mandate.

Our carceral state is what it has always been – a shameful effort to maximize populations under California State care for maximum profit of the wealthy, corporations & the government.

California’s first mass incarceration system was instituted by Franciscan missionaries, who later in conjunction collaborated with the US ARMY, California legislators and 303 California Militia units in operating a system of twenty-one California missions that echo from colonial past into our carceral present.  Mass murder, surveillance, sexual violence, corporal punishment, and overt denial of humanity were all means of control used constantly within the initial 21 California missions to colonize the bodies, minds & spirits of California Indians.  In the name of Doctrine of Discovery and later the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny: came the colonized transformation of Indigenous people to baptized Catholic workers enduring imprisonment for life with forced and unfree labor.

These missions remained used by the State’s newly recognized government in 1850, California legislature and 303 California Militia units under the misnomered legislation “1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians” for at least an additional two decades.  While missions were heavily used as one of many lethal means of Indian removal, localities also began creating their own jails via boats & brick-and-mortar.  Governor John McDougal insisted that a state prison was needed to isolate the worst villains from society, so our State’s first prison, San Quentin, was erected in 1851. San Quentin initially housed mostly California Indians, Freedmen the State falsely determined were runaways, and striking or combative Chinese and White laborers.  Bank robbers and outlaws, although prominent throughout the state, were few and in between in San Quentin initially.  And the rich were rarely prosecuted, let alone imprisoned for their crimes which were often well documented and reported.  Shortly thereafter, California legislature passed the 1851 “Act providing for securing of State Prison Convicts,” where a private contractor would provide security and care to convicts in exchange for the right to sell their labor.  Convict leasing gained widespread use and support in direct response to the abolition of slavery after 1865 across the United States and subsequent reconstruction era.

From 1851-1944, the legislature organized the State’s four prisons into one adult penal system which included minimum and maximum security facilities – but the State remained one of the largest and most profitable convict leasing producers in the country for manufacturing, agriculture, service & government enterprises.

California’s cheapest and most productive labor workforce resides under the control of the California Department of Corrections & Rehabilitation.  And even in this pandemic and subsequent economic crises, California’s prisons, jails & detention centers remain extremely profitable at the expense of #OurCalifornia.  Private corporations are incentivized to lobby for policies that maximize prison populations in order to sustain a business model that is only profitable because they are allowed to exploit artificially deflated labor costs. Over 4,100 corporations profit from mass incarceration in United States – and a minimum of 513 California Corporations deny #OurCalifornia employment opportunities so they can continue to exploit artificially deflated labor costs, keep operating costs low and sell cheap goods to government agencies, private companies and the general public. 

Our carceral state is what it has always been – a brutally expansive system whose sole intention is to exploit substantial labor for obscene profits of private corporations and the government.

Other sentiments of 1851 remain present in our carceral state – people who have committed crimes and/or who are disabled as a class, are unworthy of liberty or rights. This has been and continues to be reflected in our State’s history of eugenics on marginalized populations under State care, or the State’s generally unconstitutional and inhumane treatment.

Dr. Leo Stanley, documented eugenicist and San Quentin’s Chief Surgeon from 1913-1951, performed over 10,000 testicular implants while at San Quentin, thousands of lobotomies, and thousands of forced sterilizations.  He was not alone in actions.  In fact, eugenics within the State’s carceral system was extremely common for Californians who were deemed “unfit to produce” – a label that regularly befell the physically or mentally disabled, Women, Black, Brown and Indigenous individuals.

This 1909 California eugenics law traditionally and disproportionately forced Women of Color under the State’s care to unknowingly surrender their complete reproductive capacities.  While the law was repealed in 1979 – this practice and predation on Women, specifically Black, Brown & Indigenous Women has continued well through the last decade in our prisons, juvenile justice facilities, detention centers, health facilities and rehabilitation clinics.

Since 2006, the state’s prison medical care system has been in receivership after a Supreme Court ruled in Plata v. Brown that the state failed to provide a constitutional level of medical care to its prisoners.  And as of 2009, the state has also been under a Supreme Court order to reduce prison overcrowding to no higher than 137.5% of total design capacity.  To maintain federal compliance, California has begun placing and housing a number of our incarcerated out of the State.  

These spaces operate above maximum capacity on #OurCalifornia’s dime.  Averaging around $81,000, housing an incarcerated individual in California now costs #OurCalifornia 138% more than a year at California’s most expensive private university with room, board & other fees combined – and for what?  For the last decade, the State annually spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year in class-action litigation costs alone, and additionally pays hundreds of millions of dollars for violating Constitutional rights, and abhorrent treatment of State incarcerated, parolees and incarcerated juveniles.  Horrific abuses in California’s prison system persist despite decades of court orders meant to curb violations of prisoners’ civil and constitutional rights – especially incarcerated individuals who are disabled. 

City, County & State report after report have identified willful neglect, malice, overcrowding, cruel and unusual punishment by our carceral state for failing to provide basic needs and sanitary spaces – and all before Covid-19.  The treatment endured by prisoners during this pandemic has been nothing short of horrific and heartbreaking.  The pandemic laid bare our State’s dysfunction, and the State’s widespread abuse of individuals within our county jails, State prisons, medical facilities, rehabilitation clinics & detention centers.  Long before Los Angeles County was a national COVID-19 hotspot – some of the State’s county jails, prisons & detention centers had infection rates of 1 out of every 3 – a rate that remains today for many of the prisons, jails & detention centers across the State.  COVID-19 death rates are 240% higher than any other identified community in the State based on a lack of basic services, sanitation, social distancing, and failed quarantine methods.

Coronavirus outbreaks in San Quentin, Adelanto,  Lancaster, Corcoran, California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison, High Desert, California Health Care Facility, Avenal, California Men’s Colony, Central California Women’s Facility, California Medical Facility and countless others underscore California’s continued unconstitutional, cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners.  Furthermore, advocates have confirmed that about 50% of California’s incarcerated that have died from COVID-19 in our government’s custody were disabled.

Our carceral state is what it has always been – constructed to exploit and deny human rights of our most marginalized in their care.

And even through 2020, legislation permits California city & county jails offer pay-to-stay, or self-pay, jail programs – where affluent incarcerated people can rent upscale jail cells with luxury amenities including private spaces, clean linens and Queen-size mattresses, laptops, flat-screen TVs & even pay for work-release options.  These incarcerated people, often referred to as “clients” or “customers” can bring in their own food, clothing and a wide range of other personal items.  What initially started out as a legislative antidote to overcrowding has evolved into a two-tiered justice system that allows people convicted of all crimes, including violent felonies (identified as injurious or sex crimes), to buy their way into safe and extremely comfortable jail stays. The average cost of a stay was $1,756 per day – with stays ranging from a day to years.  Ultimately, large sums of money afford luxury, convenience and most importantly… an acknowledgment of humanity regardless of the crime.  City jails across California go as far as promoting options to pay for safe, clean and respectable living spaces – openly acknowledging the benefits of their paid alternatives and fiscal enterprise because “serving a commitment in jail is a highly disruptive experience and can negatively affect a person’s career and their ability to provide for their family…we provide options to traditional incarceration that help address these concerns.” Therein lies the truth – the Poor are not worthy of such opportunity, freedom, forgiveness or respect.  Pay-to-stay jail programs are the direct juxtaposition of the brutality, squalor, horrifically abysmal medical care and countless other cruel and inhumane conditions that remain permanent features of public jail systems for the Poor across this State. There remains two vastly different state-sanctioned justice systems and state-sanctioned carceral states that revolve around the State’s determined value of an individual’s worth.

Our carceral state is what it has always been – constructed for two distinctively justice systems – a pleasant one for the wealthy, and an exploitive horror of injustice for the Poor.

No more. 

We must dismantle our carceral state and rebuild with life-affirming infrastructure that enables and empowers us to serve all stakeholders in our communities, and rehabilitate individuals in the way we are supposed to finally end cycles of crime and violence in communities across #OurCalifornia.  In running for Governor, I have a responsibility now to push for that transformative, non-incremental change at every turn.  

The time for abolition of our injustice system is now. And to guide us in this moment, we need to hold central that abolition is both a vision and a political strategy.  Part of this strategy is recognizing and actualizing that we cannot call for reforms that further entrench and legitimize policing in any form as a solution to social, economic or political problems. When #OurCalifornia’s most marginalized are protected and succeed, we all win.  And as a prison industrial complex abolitionist, the reforms I am calling for are aimed at diminishing the political, economic & social power of policing through the largest prison network in the country.

As your gubernatorial candidate for 2022, I proudly call for our government, and our communities to abolish the prison industrial complex – and that includes our carceral system.  We need to reimagine justice and ensure public safety for all Californians.  I intend to End Poverty in California, and this is how I believe reimagining state-sanctioned imprisonment I believe will achieve this:

• Defund the largest prison network in the country – the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation;
  • Ensure that our incarcerated within State Psychiatric Care, Medical & Rehabilitation finally receive the same level of premium quality and service as all others in the State under #MediCALForAllCalifornians;
    • Finally and fully address the 2011 Supreme Court of the United States mandate to ensure Constitutional rights to healthcare within our carceral state;
• End the State & Carceral System’s reliance upon prisons as a means to remove individuals in mental health crises from the general public and admit them to State psychiatric care through the California Department of  Corrections and Rehabilitation;
  • We must transform ableist prisons and the actions within them.  Predatory and punitive measures, including California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation solitary confinement and variations of it, which have been proven to have devastating harm disabled populations under State care;
  • Reorganize the expansion of State Psychiatric Care, Mental Health & Rehabilitation under #MediCALForAllCalifornians without affiliation or attachment to our injustice system as many within our State Psychiatric Prisons are not criminals – merely disabled people without residential environments able to meet their needs of care;
  • Create and appropriately fund a network of small Therapeutic Farms that are long term farm-based residential programs providing effective and holistic approaches to mental health and addiction within a community setting:
    • With max occupancy of 30 residents per Therapeutic Farm, our goal is to ensure premium levels of service and care in order to empower self-reliance & self-worth in supportive and natural community settings. 
    • Therapeutic Farms will focus on long-term, residential treatment for schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, failure to launch, addiction, and many other psychiatric disorders through a variety of therapies including: 
      • Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT);
      • Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT);
      • Trauma-Focused  Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT);
      • Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT);
      • Behavior Modification;
      • Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT); 
      • Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR);
      • Empowering individuals to enhance therapy and treatments with creative tools  like Eagala, animal-assisted psychotherapy,  narrative therapy, ecotherapy
    • These Therapeutic Farms will be in counties across the State for individuals struggling with mental health and addiction issues and offering multifaceted support with services including:
      • Ranch-based work therapy;
      • Psychiatry;
      • Individual therapy;
      • Group Therapy;
      • Medication management;
      • Team-advising model;
      • Wide variety of fitness, wellness, sports and arts offerings/activities;
      • Transition services;
      • AA/NA/MA, SMART, & Refuge Recovery;
• #FreeThemAll. It is ethically, socially & economically the right thing to do as our current carceral system fails us all.
  • Prioritize high risk incarcerated individuals within all State early release programs; 
  • Immediate decarceration for all nonviolent criminal and civil crimes;
  • End the State & Carceral System’s reliance upon prisons as a means to admit individuals in mental health crises and ensure proper and appropriate placement within spaces trained to work with disabled individuals;
  • Unduly long prison terms are counterproductive for public safety and contribute to the dynamic of diminishing individual or public good. Reduce long-term sentencing, and re-evaluate minimum mandatory sentencing as a whole;
  • Ensure that rehabilitation, violence prevention and harm reduction remain at the forefront of the new systems which we build for community members who commit crime:
    • The 2019-2020 CDCR budget for both adult and juvenile rehabilitative services and administration totaled $491,235,000 out of the CDCR’s $15.5Billion budget.  That’s a measly 3.17% dedicated to rehabilitation.  And applied to the 126,293 adults and children in the CDCR’s care for that year – rehabilitation costs averaged out to be $3889.65 per person in CDCR care (out of the $122,873.72 it costs #OurCalifornia to keep each individual incarcerated for the year within our facilities). 
  • Identify alternative community-led and community-based programs and measures to reinvest funding for criminal offenders, in and out of the carceral state, that effectively and humanely address all stakeholder needs;
    • True rehabilitation means investment and that will never be achieved with 3% of all total budgeted costs – i believe we need an absolute minimum of 50%;
  • Commit to changing State budget priorities that defund and underinvest in educating children and young adults, especially those in high-poverty neighborhoods, that defund and underinvest in affordable housing, that defund and underinvest in quality employment and labor market development all to reinvest in the expansion of our carceral state and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.  This is not sound economic policy and this is extremely inhumane in the ways it targets the Poor in #OurCalifornia;
    • Abolitionists, Community Activists & nonpartisan economic policy powerhouses like the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities all agree that a multifaceted approach improves public safety, reduces crime and increases the economic health of our most marginalized communities across the State;
      • expanding access to high-quality preschool;
      • reducing class sizes in high-poverty schools; 
      • revising state funding formulas to invest more in high-poverty neighborhoods;
      • reclassifying low-level felonies to misdemeanors;
      • expanding the use of mandatory alternatives to prison (such as fines and victim restitution);
      • shortening jail and prison terms;
      • and eliminating prison sentences for technical violations of parole/probation, and/or for new non-felony crimes committed;
• Ending the California Prison Industry Authority (CALPIA), as it is a self-supporting state entity operating California’s correctional industries in a manner similar to private industry and profitable enterprise that creates exploitive conditions for artificially deflating labor costs and supplying said labor to exploitive Corporations and government entities.  
  • The CALPIA is overseen by the Prison Industry Board, which acts much like a corporate board of directors;
  • CALPIA has three statutory objectives:
    • 1) develop and operate manufacturing, agricultural, and service enterprises that provide work opportunities for offenders under the jurisdiction of the CDCR; 
    • 2) create and maintain working conditions within enterprises similar to those which prevail in private industry to assure offenders assigned therein the opportunity to work productively to earn funds and to acquire or improve effective work habits and occupational skills; and
    •  3) operate work programs for offenders that are self-supporting through the generation of sufficient funds from the sale of products and services to pay all program expenses, and which provide goods and services to be used by the CDCR, thereby reducing the costs of its operation;
  • Although CALPIA receives no annual appropriation from the Legislature – this private industry denies #OurCalifornia quality employment opportunities by artificially depressing labor costs which Corporations and government entities consistently choose over us;
• Create legislation which ensures all county and city jails have State oversight;
  • Immediate release of individuals not convicted of a crime within all city & county jails.
    • Since 1970, California’s total city and county jail population has increased 180%. In 2015, pretrial detainees constituted 53% of the total jail population in our State.  That’s 53% of people who have not been convicted of a crime, but are too Poor to make bail.  Data has consistently shown the longer an individual remains a pretrial detainee, the more likely they 
  • Align jail purpose, action and services to the new State level of standards and support locality paths of abolition;
  • Ensure accountability and conduct review boards are community-led with full authority over funding, employment & compliance through State legislation;
• Create legislation to repeal the California law that authorizes pay-to-stay programs in county and city jails across the State.  This amounts to two vastly different justice systems at play here with extremely different incarceration experiences and outcomes – a luxurious one for the wealthy, and an abhorrent one for the poor;
  • Specifically, according to Section 1203.1c(a) of the California Penal Code, inmates may be ordered by the court—if they have the financial wherewithal—to pay for the cost of their incarceration in the county jail;
• Revise current policy for Community-led Deadly Force Review Boards:
  • The DFRB conducts a full and complete review of all incidents involving a use of deadly force (except warning shots) and every death or great bodily injury that could have been caused by a staff use of force, regardless of whether the incident occurs in an institutional or community setting;
• Revise current policy for Community-led Joint Use Committee:
  • The JUC is currently a committee of field staff from the DAI tasked with reviewing and evaluating recommended revisions to the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation  Use of Force Policy and Procedures;
• Follow the lead of the San Francisco Treasurer’s Office and end the privatization and obscene markups resulting in predatory revenue generation off the Poor, and specifically incarcerated individuals’ support networks – which are primarily low-income Women of Color, within all State, County and City carceral spaces including but not limited to:
  • Phone calls;
  • Commissary;
• Empower inmate-elected Advisory Councils to assist in the creation of new policies to ensure humane treatment, just action & prompt responses for resolution from the community and State;
• Increasing community-based human rights monitors within every State-operated jail, prison, detention center, rehabilitation clinic & medical facility to document and publish research on the fundamental injustices from administrative corruption to guard brutality to general life inside under State care observed within & to guarantee our incarcerated the right to organize and have greater self-rule;
• Expanding Quality of Life Reforms within every State-operated jail, prison, detention center, rehabilitation clinic & medical facility.  Specifically new or improved programs that provide better opportunities for education, therapy, drug and alcohol treatment, workforce redevelopment training, art, athletics, and structured social activities;
• Expanding the right to vote to all Citizens of California – including incarcerated peoples:
  • Prisons /Jail /Detention Center populations are included in redistricting and gerrymandering  efforts, and Citizens deserve the right to vote on issues which impact them and their communities;
  • The time is now for California to join the growing national movement to strengthen our democracy by empowering everyone — regardless of their present or past involvement with the criminal legal system — to have their voices heard and counted;
• Officially recognize California’s prison labor as labor entitled to State protections & the State’s minimum wage of $25/hr;
• California has the largest transgender prison population in the country, with 1,203 trans people incarcerated as of February 2019.  I will end the standard practice of housing according any incarcerated to their gender assigned at birth – this practice is not gender-affirming or life-affirming;
• End substance possession & substance use rule violations of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation – as it is a form of criminalization that is incongruent with my decriminalization of personal possession of all narcotics;
  • Whether coping with trauma, depression, addiction, or general isolation from incarceration –  substance possession & substance use rule violations are punitive measures forced upon individuals within an inhumane and unconstitutional system that does not properly care for individuals under their supervision;
• Formally apologizing for our Governments’ actions, predation and failures in State-sanctioned eugenics and the forced sterilizations of Men and Women, but especially the intentional targeting of Black, Brown & Indigenous Women with forced sterilizations that illegally continued through the last decade within our State’s carceral network:
  • This apology will include pardoning all active sentences, waiving all fees, expunging all criminal records and appropriate redress and compensation for any #OurCalifornia residents who were targeted by localities or the State with decisions that denied their humanity and worth over alleged crimes and mental health;
• End the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) optional partnership with ICE;
  • This is a tactic repeatedly used to leave individuals indefinitely incarcerated in the federal system after individuals have completed California sentencing. And especially during this pandemic this policy has already proven lethal;
  • This willful act by the State and Governor also directly benefits unaccountable private for-profit prisons through bed-minimum schemes and indefinite/lifetime labor pools to further exploit and traffick humans. 

Parole & California’s Re-entry System

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has this hyperfocus on imprisonment – as evident by the budgeting priorities.  So much so that overpolicing of parolees and newly freed Californians can almost ensure parole revocation and re-incarceration.

California’s re-entry system does not safely or successfully place, house or ensure workforce rehabilitation and employment for all newly freed individuals from their care.  With an operational budget that reaches 7.16% of the total budget –  the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation parole & re-entry system has never been funded to fully assist individuals who are critically in need.

Our parole and re-entry system feeds the prison industrial complex – it isn’t about stemming crime or ensuring success of our formerly incarcerated. 

Incarceration annihilates an individual’s current and future earnings potential.   Being convicted of a crime (both misdemeanors and felonies) regularly disqualifies people from employment, housing, loans and voting.  National data shows that each year in prison reduces the odds of post-release employment by 24% and substantially increases the odds of living on public assistance.  These overarching collateral consequences constantly penalize individuals who have served their time – further marginalizing people in need and in poverty.

Although California’s parole and re-entry services utilize a variety of rehabilitative and re-entry assistance programs – being severely underfunded and still relying upon punitive measures and overpolicing of the Poor results in a patchwork system that makes returning to jail or prison much more likely.  And there are multiple options the State can choose to get a parolee there for suspected criminal activity.

Our parole and re-entry system feeds the prison industrial complex – it isn’t about stemming crime or ensuring success of our formerly incarcerated. 

A parolee charged with violating parole by committing a new crime can be reimprisoned on significantly less evidence than it takes to constitutionally convict “beyond a reasonable doubt.” The procedures of parole revocation also lead to less rigor in requirements of proof, & can include illegally obtained evidence. Instead of the unanimous (or near unanimous) jury required in criminal trials, only one or two parole board members or hearing officers need to be persuaded in many jurisdictions across the State. Rights to counsel and cross-examination are significantly more restricted than in a criminal trial, and evidentiary standards are also significantly less stringent. 

Again, parole revocation in lieu of prosecution is not the only official response to suspected criminal activity by parolees. The

parolee may be prosecuted and parole is revoked; but, however, most often a parolee may have their parole revoked for a violation of a “technical” condition of their parole – and not a crime.  These technical conditions are often:

• burdensome economic conditions imposed without providing resources to address it;
• failing to report a new address;
• failure to follow the rules of a mandated-program;
• violations for minor slip-ups including tone; 
• lengthy incarceration while alleged violations are adjudicated;
• flawed procedures; and
• disproportionately harsh sentences for violations that a parolee cannot meet;

Data confirms that the root cause of these parole violations typically stem from poverty, a lack of resources and support services, unmet health needs, overpolicing and racial bias with arbitrary application of law. Abject policy failures and systemic issues stack insurmountable odds against individuals trying their best to not return to a state-sanctioned cage.

Our parole and re-entry system feeds the prison industrial complex – it isn’t about stemming crime or ensuring success of our formerly incarcerated.  

COVID-19 and the subsequent federal mandates forced the State of California to comply with early release to further reduce our jail, prison, rehabilitation & detention center populations.  State officials, county probation officials and underfunded nonprofits were not prepared for an influx of individuals to be released.  California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation failed to finalize parole plans, ensure support teams, re-entry success.  California’s patchwork re-entry system remains incapable of finding transportation, housing, food and other services for thousands of newly released individuals from State Care.  California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation was incapable of providing effective care, constitutional healthcare, or complying with CDC guidelines or quarantine measures – and as a result our prisons, medical facilities, detention centers & rehabilitation clinics have extremely high COVID-19 contraction & death rates.  Many of the individuals who were exposed to the virus as a direct result of unconstitutional and inhumane care the State provided – were released into motels, group homes and the community without appropriate care to reduce the spread, or any social services to assist them in their new transitions.  

Pre-COVID and during this pandemic, State officials and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation have failed our newly freed, our communities and #OurCalifornia.

No more.

The post-carceral process cannot remain punitive, enforced by policing arms of the State.  We must achieve truth in our sentencing standards and ensure that our newly freed are given the resources they need to thrive upon their return to our communities and to#OurCalifornia. 

We must ensure our post-carceral experiences promote growth, Rehabilitation, self-reliance, restorative justice and true progress.  The State can no longer contribute to furthering environments where crime and recidivism flourish.  The State and Corporations can no longer be allowed to profit off our communities and deny us all our rightful opportunities to finally thrive with well-funded community-led  and community-based programs and the robust social safety nets that can provide us the resilient and sustainable communities we deserve.

As your gubernatorial candidate for 2022, I proudly call for our government, and our communities to abolish the prison industrial complex – and that includes the punitive system rife with overpolicing and wasted state expenditures of California’s parole and and post-carceral re-entry system.  We need to reimagine justice and ensure public safety for all Californians.  I intend to End Poverty in California, and these are the policies and the vision I believe will achieve it:

• Complete and immediate abolition of parole:
  • Sentences are based on justice, not prediction that formerly incarcerated individuals are safe for early release to the community;
  • Ending parole entirely as we know it achieves truth-in-sentencing;
  • Parole abolition ends the the punitive means and separate adjudicative system that enables:
    • Overpolicing;
    • Lower thresholds and standards of proof for alleged new crimes committed; &
    • The constant supervision of bodies and communities of the formerly incarcerated – specifically the Poor, Black, Brown & Indigenous communities across #OurCalifornia;
• Automatic Conviction Relief: Immediate State clearance of Californian criminal records for all misdemeanors & some felonies after time/service completed, i.e., so there’s no need to apply or petition for relief of charges or history anymore;
  • This is a financially excessive measure used as another means to penalize individuals long after their time has been served.
  • And specifically, this burden is often carried by the incarcerated individuals’ support networks – which are primarily the Poor, and low-income Women of Color across the State.
• End overarching collateral consequences and restore post-carceral employment rights in credentialed/specialized carceral workforces, ie EMTs, Barbers, CalFire can hire former felons who were credentialed/trained in CA’s prison fire program etc
• End overarching collateral consequences of incarceration, post-carceral instability & insecurity with opportunities for economic security and professional advancement through the State Jobs Guarantee program;
• End overarching collateral consequences of incarceration, post-carceral instability & insecurity with our Universal Housing Guarantee;
• Divest from arrests, overpolicing and incarceration for supervision violations while investing in increasing access to jobs, housing, social services, and voluntary, community-based substance use disorder treatment and mental health services—all services that have a record of improving public safety, strengthening people and fostering resilient communities ;
• Invest in community-led and community-based organizations that emphasize work in restorative justice, community corrections, & effective re-entry services including:
  • Intensive wraparound services;
  • Comprehensive case management; & 
  • Connecting our newly freed and/or formerly incarcerated to all available services in their local Ending Poverty in California office;

As an abolitionist, I know these are all conditions that allow us to not only survive but thrive.  When #OurCalifornia’s most marginalized are protected and succeed, we all win.  

As your gubernatorial candidate for 2022, I proudly call for our government, and our communities to meet this moment and build the futures we deserve.  I believe reimagining public safety and changing our priorities with policing, legislation and our injustice system, state-sanctioned imprisonment, parole and re-entry system will help us achieve this.  I am eager to work with the TJI Justice Project, Survived and Punished – CA, Drug Policy Alliance, California Immigrant Youth Justice Alliance, Advance Peace, California Coalition for Women Prisoners, The ARC – CA, Essie Justice Group, the Partnership on AI, California Victims’ Services Unit, Urban Peace Movement, Asian Law Caucus, Transgender Gender Variant and Intersex Justice Project, Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, California Prison Focus, Decarcerate Alameda County, Arab Resource and Organizing Center, School of Liberty and Liberation, Prisoner Advocacy Network, Movement Alliance Project, MediaJustice, Pretrial Services Agency, Anti-Police Terror Project, Californians United for a Responsible Budget – CURB, Transitions Clinic, Causa Justa Just Cause, Critical Resistance – Los Angeles, Dream Defenders, Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective, Flying Over Walls, Families United to End Life Without Parole, California Cannabis Advisory Committee, The Partnership for Safety and Justice, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, Community Ready Corps, All of Us or None, Center for Community Alternatives, Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth – RJOY, Anti-Recidivism Coalition, Worth Rises, California ReEntry Program, Castro Community On Patrol (CCOP), Al-Otro Lado, California Prison Focus, Californians for Safety and Justice, Families Against Mandatory Minimums, Root & Rebound Reentry Advocates, Cure Violence, Ella Baker Center, HOMEY, Dream Corps: #Cut50, Coalition for Police Accountability, The Fortune Society, Detentions Watch Network, Incarceration Nations Network, Grassroots Policy Project, Initiate Justice, Sustainable Economies Law Center, ACLU California Center for Advocacy and Policy, Justice Teams Network, Rosenberg Foundation, Penal Reform International, BlackOut Collective, A New Way of Life Reentry Project, Public Welfare Foundation, Legislative Analyst’s Office, California Families to Abandon Solitary Confinement, Open Society Foundations, the California Wellness Foundation, Institute for Policy Studies & so many other impactful and effective organizations, activists, advocates in human rights, healthcare, social justice, education, restorative justice, and abolition to usher in transformative and nonincremental systemic change to reimagine public safety and invest across #OurCalifornia in the resilient and sustainable communities we deserve.

State Deputization of chosen grassroots nonprofits who are successfully providing dynamic and critical social services to #OurCalifornia to act as an extension of our government in expanding their work and services with the funding, staffing and State recognition they deserve and will participate within the State Jobs Guarantee Program.

In the true spirit of Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in California campaign, I will call on fellow Citizens, Socialists, Governors, and fellow Socialist Gubernatorial campaigns across this country to adopt and implement the same.