Proposition 47 Prisoners

Guest: Milena Blake, JD, Staff Attorney on Stanford’s Justice Advocacy Project  Overcrowded prisons are a problem nationwide, but they’ve become so serious in California that the US Supreme Court ordered a significant reduction in prison headcount by next year. Initially, the plan involved releasing some prisoners early and transferring others from federal prisons to county-run jails with more space.  Then California voters got involved. Last year they passed a proposition that converted six types of non-violent felonies into misdemeanors. And it’s retroactive, so a Stanford Law School report says some 13,000 people doing time in California prisons and jails on those offenses have had their sentences reduced and been released in the last year.