In California, we invest $62,396 per prisoner per year.
That’s a trust fund nearly seven times bigger than the one we ration out per K-12 student.
But Proposition 47, also known as the Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act, can help curb over-incarceration and reduce penalties by allowing Californians to vote on whether seven categories of nonviolent property and drug crimes should be knocked down from felonies to misdemeanors. And as a public university, we stand to gain from both the savings of reduced prison spending and having more students behind desks, not bars.
This is where the Invest in Graduation Not Incarceration, Transform Education, or IGNITE, campaign comes in. IGNITE, a University of California Student Association campaign supported on our campus by the Undergraduate Students Association Council, focuses on prison reform as a way to increase access and equity at the UC. More importantly, many student groups outside of USAC still unfamiliar with the campaign can come together to learn about how this single proposition can impact our campus’s efforts to increase diversity.
USAC and UCSA have struggled in the past to gain real ground when lobbying for change. Last fall, USAC passed a resolution supporting UCSA’s IGNITE campaign without making a real dent in student awareness of or engagement with the issue.
But this year, USAC President Devin Murphy created a student coalition to involve the campus with IGNITE’s goals. Roughly 25 student groups were represented at IGNITE’s first coalition meeting of the school year last week, a laudable head count for an initial meeting. But there are more than 1,000 student groups on campus.
By reaching out to the remaining pockets of the student body, the IGNITE campaign can actually mobilize the student body this time around with a truly representative coalition that has far more connections than the 12-person student council that passed the resolution last year.
When Proposition 47 appears on November ballots, we will have the choice to reprioritize the potential hundreds of millions of dollars saved annually toward programs like mental health and drug treatment, and school truancy and dropout prevention. As a relative safeguard, this penalty change would not apply to those with records of murder, rape, sex offenses or gun crimes.
IGNITE’s outreach will ensure not only schoolwide Proposition 47 education, but also schoolwide engagement in a conversation that fundamentally circles around increasing campus diversity. By breaking down the school-to-prison pipeline, we can rerank our priorities and route more young adults toward furthering their educations.
The student coalition is working toward educating students about the proposition: The coalition will collaborate to register 5,000 new student voters before the November ballot as well as organize a rally with local elected officials on the UCLA campus.
The coalition’s greatest advantage will be its members who already have connections in various corners of the university – student leaders involved already hail from USAC offices to the Student Coalition Against Labor Exploitation. During this upcoming month, the campaign will spread Proposition 47 knowledge throughout campus. And in the long run, by capitalizing on members’ networks, IGNITE can create a presence on each UC campus – which should be the ultimate goal of a UCSA campaign.
Students must fully comprehend what a “yes” on Proposition 47 would mean on campus – increasing access to higher education can lead to increased diversity. While incarceration often merely puts a prisoner’s criminal activity on hiatus, mental health and drug abuse programs can rehabilitate people and keep them from re-entering the criminal justice system. Many former prisoners are stuck in a vicious cycle: Six out of 10 people released from California prisons go straight back into them within three years.
IGNITE’s mission to increase diversity and advance equity at UCLA makes it something all students on campus can rally behind.
For the larger UCLA community, Proposition 47 doesn’t have to be a matter of a “yes” or a “no.” It’s a matter of recognizing that we can cast our vote in state ballots and have them mean something right here on our college campus.
Email Lew at clew@media.ucla.edu or tweet her at @chloelew8. Send general comments to opinion@media.ucla.edu or tweet us at @DBOpinion.