California’s death toll to crime and drug overdoses is staggering. From 2014 to 2023, 19,396 Californians have been murdered and from 2014 to 2022, the last complete years of statistics from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), a total of 61,009 have died from fatal drug overdoses, mostly from opiates.
Over a million more might have died were it not for the life-saving efforts of the emergency medical system and hospital trauma centers who have helped to save crime victims’ lives. At the same time, the availability of millions of doses of Narcan has saved over 300,000 lives who would have been lost to overdose deaths.
In the same ten years, the official reported amount of stolen property totals over $31 billion dollars and in no year in the last ten has more than 35 percent of that loss been recovered. In 2023, the number of crimes cleared by arrests or exceptionally is 40 percent for violent crimes and a scant 7.8 percent for property crimes.
All told the numbers of victims seriously injured, killed, or who overdose in the last ten years is 1.48 million and the total numbers of crimes reported in that same ten years is over 10 million.
Yet, as of December 2024 the state prison inmate population stands at 91,745 and the total population of California’s 57 county operated jails is just 58,441. Simple arithmetic tells us that the chances that a criminal will be caught and sentenced to a term in prison or county jail is even lower – about .015 percent.
Simply put, the chances that a drug dealer, murderer, or thief will be caught are very low indeed much less being sent to prison.
The odds that you will be a victim of a crime are far higher than the odds that a criminal will be caught and arrested for one.
Many call that “mass incarceration.” I call it “mass victimization.”
Politicians, prisoner rights groups, and civil rights attorneys have made an industry out of misleading the public, fleecing the state budget out of hundreds of millions of dollars, and building political careers based on the lie that California over-incarcerates and is inhumane in its treatment of inmates.
The statistics tell a different story. In 2022, there were a total of 389 inmate deaths in state prisons, all but 47 of which were due to natural causes. 25 were murdered and 21 committed suicide, which puts the overall state prison mortality rate at 404/100,000 and the county jail mortality rate was almost exactly the same. As a comparison, the US mortality rate is 798.8/100,000.
That is true even when corrected for age. In prison, 40 percent of the population are over 45, while the US population over the age of 45 demographic is 43 percent.
I do not contend that a term in state prison or county jail is enjoyable, but from a public health data standpoint it is a significantly healthier place to be.
Today criminal rights groups like Californians for Safety and Justice are making the argument that recently passed Prop 36 will lead to higher incarceration rates and more deaths inside prisons and jails as well as a raft of exploding costs. To support this assertion their website contains a number of graphic tools supporting the idea that holding criminals accountable through the possibility they will be caught and incarcerated is a curve that only increases.
What they and for that matter even the Legislative Analyst’s Office have failed to consider is the effect of deterrence in the minds of would-be criminals and there is ample evidence that it does.
In 1994 the Department of Corrections estimated that if Three Strikes were to pass the prison population would increase 190 percent to a staggering 254,554 inmates. It did pass, and the prison population did increase but by only 31 percent over the next ten years. Something else happened – the State of California experienced the largest drop in crime in modern history. From 1994 to 2011, Three Strikes saved 28,169 lives who would have been murdered if the homicide rate remained just at its 1994 levels. In fact, it would have been far worse. In 1963, the year I was born, there were 673 murders in California. By the time I was thirty, there were 4,096 – an increase of 508 percent.
Today, the fatal number of overdoes has risen similarly. In 2014, there were 3,214 overdose deaths and by 2022 there were 10,952 – an increase of 240 percent.
The California District Attorneys Association, their partners in victim advocacy, and California’s beleaguered retailers were absolutely right to directly connect thefts with drug use and perhaps less directly with deaths. Voters listened to them and through their lived experience saw through the chaff of political disinformation to pass Prop 36, the most significant anti-crime legislation in 30 years.
The decision to commit a crime is, in most cases, a choice. Would-be-criminals evaluate the benefits of committing a crime against the consequences of being caught, prosecuted, and incarcerated, and make their choice accordingly.
Prop 36 will change that equation and crime will drop just as it did in 1995.
Steve Smith is a senior fellow in urban studies at the Pacific Research Institute.
