But polling showed that the easing of drug crimes was Proposition 47’s most popular reform, so the rollback pressure shifted to the $950 line that divides petty theft, a misdemeanor, from grand theft. Soon after its passage, critics targeted its removal of felony charges for simple drug possession.
Petty theft with a prior was eliminated by Proposition 47, the 2014 criminal justice reform ballot measure that police tend to blame for all of society’s ills. In adopting Proposition 47 on Tuesday by a huge margin, Californians made a statement about the tough-on-crime policies of the last generation that increased prison costs and populations many times over while too often accelerating, rather than reversing, the descent of offenders and often whole communities into cycles of crime and victimization, incarceration and recidivism. 47 is a first step in revising stance on crime
