Editor’s Note: Frequent Fox and Hounds contributor, Joe Mathews, will give his unique perspective on all eleven November ballot measures over the course of the next month. He will take them in the order they appear on the ballot.
I, for one, could not be more delighted that I get to vote on Prop 36.
Because there’s nothing that a voter is better at than making sophisticated tweaks in criminal sentencing laws.
And Prop 36 is sophisticated, which is a very nice way of saying complicated.
Why must we vote on Prop 36? Because three strikes was enacted by the voters, who simply had to act because the legislature approved three strikes itself only eight before the voters did. You obviously can’t trust the legislature since they were so slow to adopt the legislation.
And you can’t trust judges, to make decisions based on the person in front of them. Instead, it’s much better if voters tweak the rules for those sentencing decisions, every time we want to go a different direction with three strikes.
Because we’re the people and we know. What do those judges know?