Jim Cooper@SheriffJCooper
The press releases I’m sharing are from my time as a Public Information Officer in the 1990s. I still remember these cases. They weren’t just reports. They were real victims, real families, and real trauma that doesn’t go away. Those experiences stay with you and shape how you view this job and the responsibility to protect others.
Today, that perspective is even more personal. As a father and now a grandfather to a three-year-old, I don’t see these issues in the abstract. I think about the kind of world we are creating and what we are willing to accept.
California voters were told Proposition 57 was about non-violent offenders. That was never true. To date, more than 30,000 individuals have been released under these policies, with another 25,000 eligible for early release. Those are just based on numbers we know about. Reliable data on who is being released and under what circumstances is difficult (and virtually impossible) to obtain, even within the system. And it seems to be by design.
Court rulings and the law itself have expanded eligibility, and individuals convicted of serious sexual offenses must still be considered for early release. At that point, the decision is no longer made in a courtroom. It is made by the Board of Parole Hearings. This is an appointed board. They are not elected, not accountable to the public, and they were not involved in investigating or trying these cases. Yet they can override the outcome of a sentence.
At the same time, California stands out nationally. While many states explicitly exclude violent and sexual offenders from elderly parole, California allows consideration as early as age 50 after 20 years served.
And this is not a new problem. For nearly two decades, legislation has repeatedly been introduced to re-classify crimes like rape of an unconscious person, human trafficking, and lewd acts on a child as violent for parole purposes. Those efforts have failed time and time again.
In one case, an offender convicted of a sustained, calculated pattern of sexual violence against children as young as four years old became eligible for release due to elderly parole. Cases involving prolonged sexual violence against children, crimes that resulted in life sentences, are now being considered for release. These were deliberate, predatory acts. And now those cases are reviewed not by a court, but by an appointed board with untethered discretion.
Proposition 57 shifted power away from the courtroom and into the hands of an unelected body with limited oversight, all in an effort to decrease the overall prison population. They are not held accountable for their decisions the way law enforcement, elected officials, or the courts are. They operate with impunity, and are consciously making California more dangerous.
The only way you can reverse the harmful effects of Proposition 57 and the Board of Parole Hearings is to take it back to the ballot box.
