California Governor Jerry Brown outlined plans this week to save $500 million a year by keeping citizens with “non-violent, non-serious, non-sex offenses,” and no prior convictions out of state prison. Such felons would have to stay at county jail, Brown is proposing, and that’s a step in the right direction, drug law reformers say.
The Drug Policy Alliance endorses Brown’s proposal, because it reverses a historic trend toward sending low-level offenders to state prison that was “part of the tough on crime insanity that got us mass incarceration in the U.S.,” said Margaret Dooley-Sammuli, deputy state director of the Drug Policy Alliance.
