SACRAMENTO, CA — One year after California voters passed Proposition 36, Los Angeles County Public Defender Ricardo Garcia said the measure has “moved us backward in time,” warning that instead of addressing the root causes of addiction and poverty, the state has returned to “punishing poverty and addiction.”
“People are being charged with felonies just for having a record,” Garcia said. “It creates truly lifelong barriers — in housing, jobs, stability — and it really doesn’t, at the end of the day, make our communities any safer. So we’ve gone back to criminalizing poverty and addiction.”
Passed in November 2024, Prop 36 was marketed as the “Homelessness, Drug Addiction, and Theft Reduction Act.” It was backed by major retailers like Target, Walmart, and Home Depot, along with law enforcement groups including the California Correctional Peace Officers Association and the California District Attorneys Association. Supporters told voters the measure would expand access to treatment for people struggling with addiction.
But the promise of treatment has not materialized.
According to data from the Judicial Council, only 771 people statewide have been ordered into treatment under Prop 36, out of 8,895 total cases. In many counties, there are simply no residential treatment options available. The lack of resources has led to people being jailed rather than diverted to care.
In Sacramento County, for example, about 270 of roughly 900 Prop 36 drug cases were referred to treatment. After 90 days, only 20 percent remained in programs — which typically last more than a year — making it unlikely that many participants will complete treatment and have their convictions dismissed.
Garcia said Los Angeles County has seen one of the most severe impacts.
“In December of 2024 to the present, the number of people held in custody on Prop 36 cases has gone from 12 to over 950,” he said. “For the week of October 26th, about 512 people were arrested for magistrate review crimes, which include Prop 36 arrests, and only 7% of those people were released.”
He called it a clear reflection of misplaced priorities.
“You have a driving arrest number under what I think is really a false narrative, meaning arrest individuals, pick them up, put them in custody, and they will get treatment,” he said. “But we’re not seeing the treatment available for individuals who are being picked up. We have the most Prop 36 filings here in Los Angeles as compared to anywhere in the state of California, which proves there’s an emphasis on punishment over treatment.”
Even before Prop 36, Garcia said Los Angeles had a bottleneck in treatment availability. The new mandate, he argued, has only worsened the problem.
“Treatment mandates are meaningless when there are no beds to send someone to,” he said. “You end up with a system that sets people up to really fail by offering them treatment or diversion without that infrastructure.”
Garcia warned that the law is deepening racial inequities in the justice system. In Los Angeles County, Black people make up just 8 percent of the population but account for 23 percent of Prop 36 bookings. For repeat theft charges, the disparity is even starker — 31 percent of those charged are Black, nearly four times their share of the county population.
“We are seeing similar outcomes and numbers under Prop 36,” Garcia said. “While our Black and Brown, but predominantly Black, neighbors make up six percent of the population, they continue to be the largest numbers being arrested and pulled into the county jail system.”
Statewide data reveal similarly stark patterns. Orange County, which makes up about one-twelfth of California’s population, accounts for more than one in four of all drug felonies under Prop 36, giving residents three times the risk of prosecution compared to the state average. Smaller rural counties with fewer than 200,000 residents file Prop 36 drug felonies at roughly twice the state average. Critics have called it “justice by geography,” where the same conduct can result in vastly different outcomes depending on the county.
In Kern County, data show that of 290 people referred to treatment, only 100 were admitted into a program — and none had completed treatment as of June 2025. In Napa County, Black residents make up just 2 percent of the population but account for 26 percent of Prop 36 theft charges. And in Amador County, the average sentence for drug possession cases increased from 6.3 days to 180 days after Prop 36 took effect, even as overall sentence lengths in the county decreased.
Garcia said Prop 36’s consequences are especially devastating for immigrants, noting that the measure’s mandatory felony provision triggers some of the harshest penalties under federal immigration law.
“The mandated felony is still a conviction for immigration purposes,” he said. “It carries some of the most harsh consequences under federal immigration law. The intent of Prop 36 has an adverse impact for people trying to remain in the country legally, and especially in this current federal immigration climate, it really creates a lifelong consequence for anyone not born in the United States, including family separation.”
He explained that even people who are sentenced to treatment rather than jail face devastating outcomes.
“The inability to ever return to the United States, even if a person never spends a single day in jail, is absolutely destructive to that family’s wellbeing and future,” he said. “And when you consider that in some of these circumstances, we’re truly looking at people who are ill, suffering from substance use disorders or mental health challenges, and we’re not addressing that reality because of the lack of resources, you’re left with the devastating impact of the felony conviction.”
Garcia said underfunding and policy failures have left counties with no way to meet voter expectations. “We’re straining our already thin budgets and community resource budgets,” he said. “The state is not fully funding it in a time when really we have unprecedented financial uncertainty here in Los Angeles.”
He said voters thought they were supporting treatment, not incarceration.
“The reason why voters in such large numbers supported Prop 36 is because they didn’t see it as a carceral solution, but they saw it as a forced treatment solution,” Garcia said. “But without resourcing and without funding, that part is proving to be hollow and we’re seeing greater incarceration.”
The public defender said forced treatment itself is not a true solution.
“You cannot force people into treatment,” he said. “Just like we don’t support forced or involuntary medication, Californians want people who are ill to get treatment. Unfortunately, the fearmongering and propaganda around public safety when this bill was passed didn’t (shed) the whole picture.”
Garcia described the campaign for Prop 36 as one built on emotional imagery and fear. “It showed the unhoused all over the place,” he said. “People saw tents, people rambling through the street, and that had a direct and emotional impact on people every single day. They wanted those people to get help, but they didn’t know how.”
He added that the cycle of viral crime footage and media repetition fueled public pressure for punitive responses.
“Most people who vote never experienced that personally, but they feel like they do when they turn on the news or look at their Facebook or Instagram feed,” he said. “That loop is there every day making it seem personal.”
The result, Garcia said, is “an abandonment of people dressed up as progress.” Without guaranteed beds, stable funding, or coordination with treatment providers, he said Prop 36 has “guaranteed failure.”
“No one gets well in a cell,” he said. “No one gets care in a cage, and no one gets healthy behind those concrete walls of any jail anywhere in California. If we want to truly help people, we need to focus on the building and development of community-based supportive services that keep people in community so they feel valued.”
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