In the last few years, the California legislature has made an effort to rectify the devastating results of the state’s traditionally tough on crime policies. The laws enacted during the tough on crime era resulted in exceptionally long sentences, mass incarceration, and overcrowding of prisons. At the same time, research has shown that not only has public safety not improved, but these laws have also had an especially devastating impact on disadvantaged communities. AB 600 was signed into law by Governor Newsom on October 8, 2023, and came into effect on January 1, 2024. The new law provides c ..read more

In the last few years, numerous studies have shown that racial biases and discrimination have been widespread across California’s criminal justice system. It is undisputed that, in the last few decades, California’s tough on crime policies have disproportionately affected marginalized communities and people of color. For example, in its 2020 report, the Committee on the Revision of the Penal Code found that gang enhancements have been applied inconsistently and have disproportionately affected communities of color. Moreover, the report specifically states that in Los Angeles, 98 percent of peo ..read more

One of the main principles of our criminal justice system is that the punishment has to fit the crime. However, in the 1990s, California’s leaders pursued very actively tough on crime policies and during that time more than a hundred different sentencing enhancements were enacted. Throughout the past three decades, these enhancements have added many years to the prison terms of majority of inmates. As a result, currently, California hosts the second largest prison population behind Texas. Overwhelming evidence has demonstrated that sentencing enhancements have not been the successful deterrent ..read more

Despite the ongoing efforts by California’s leaders to improve the State’s criminal justice system and to make it fairer, California still has some of the most severe sentence enhancements in the United States. One of the main principles of the criminal justice system is that the punishment has to fit the crime. Unfortunately, California’s hyper punitive policies enacted in the 1980s and 1990s, resulted in a serious distortion of one of the most basic legal standards of the criminal justice system. By the end of the 1990s, California’s legislature had managed to enact more than one hundred dif ..read more

The United States of America has the largest prison population in the world. Not only does the US have more incarcerated people than even China, but the United States account for roughly 25 percent of the world’s total prison population, and within the country, California ranks second behind only Texas. The mass incarceration in California has not only caused prison overcrowding, but has also had a devastating impact on the State’s budget, as the annual cost per prisoner is over $100,000. The tough on crime policies of the 1990s have not only led to overcrowding of California’s prisons and a s ..read more

In the last few years, California’s legislature has been at the forefront of enacting laws aimed at reforming the State’s criminal justice system and rectifying the injustices and the disproportionate effect that some of the State’s policies have had on marginalized and minority communities. As part of the ongoing effort to fight the biases and racial discrimination that have been prevalent in our criminal legal system, in 2020, the California legislature passed AB 2542, or the Racial Justice Act, which came into effect on January 1, 2021. The law prohibited the state from obtaining or seeking ..read more

In 1987, California passed the Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention Act (STEP Act). The California legislature’s goal was to address the increasing criminal activities by street gangs and through the STEP Act it imposed a three-year sentencing enhancement for gang related crimes. Proponents of the law claimed that it would be applied narrowly and only in cases of serious and violent crimes and where the prosecution has clearly demonstrated a pattern of criminal activity. However, since its enactment, through legislation and court rulings, the severity of the STEP Act gang enhancements i ..read more

Bullying has been a major problem for a long time and hundreds of thousands of children experience some form of bullying every single day. While public awareness of the prevalence of bullying is at all time high, the problem not only has not been eradicated, but in the era of social media, it has become more serious than ever. Bullying can take many shapes or forms, and victims can be targeted due to their race, gender, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or for a variety of other reasons. It is a form of violence, which can be physical; verbal, including making threats or inappropriate s ..read more

Non-citizens, including lawful permanent residents, can experience profound immigration consequences for even minor or very old criminal convictions. Prior to 2017, California law only allowed defendants to challenge their conviction while they were in actual or constructive custody, i.e. parole or probation. As a result, countless people were left with no recourse and way of challenging their convictions. This gap has had a particularly devastating impact on the state’s immigrant community. Throughout the years, many immigrants in California have entered a plea or have been convicted at trial ..read more

Until 2019, countless of inmates in California had been serving unjustly long sentences for murder convictions, even though they never killed, attempted to kill, or intended for a person to die. Fortunately, as part of the ongoing criminal justice reform in California, in 2017, the state legislature acknowledged the need for more equitable sentencing of offenders and determined that reform in the laws is necessary to reflect one of the basic principles of the law and of equity, that a person should be punished for his o her actions based on their own level of individual culpability. As a resul ..read more