Innovation and Adaptation: Orange County's Response to Proposition 36.

On November 7th, 2000 voters of the State of California overwhelmingly passed Proposition 36, the Substance Abuse and Crime Prevention Act of 2000 (SACPA). This law marked a significant change in California drug policy by mandating treatment instead of incarceration for non-violent drug offenders. Between 2001 and 2005, more than 140,000 drug offenders in California were sentenced to probation and entered treatment as a result of this law. This paper will discuss the impact of Proposition 36 on criminal justice agencies in Orange County, CA. It will examine how drug offender sentencing has changed since inception of the law and discuss ramifications of this change. It will also describe how court calendars and probation caseloads have changed over the past several years and explain how law enforcement, judicial, and corrections agencies have coped with and adapted to the changes which resulted from the passage of Proposition 36.This current paper is part of a larger study which is currently ongoing and uses a case study approach to understand how Proposition 36 has changed the case processing and sentencing of drug offenders and the agencies tasked with processing and supervising these offenders. The study includes both time-series analyses of multiple case processing and sentencing outcomes and interviews with practitioners to determine the impact of this much-watched legislation. This presentation will report on some of the preliminary results of the study as they pertain to various criminal justice agencies and discuss the implications for practitioners and policy-makers. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]