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Next Steps for Proposition 57

The passage of Proposition 57 brings significant changes to California’s criminal justice system. At the same time, the initiative lacks specificity and there is great uncertainty about what its impact might be.

The measure increases the chances for parole of felons in state prison who are convicted of nonviolent crimes and expand inmates’ opportunities to earn credits for good behavior. This loosening of parole rules will ease prison overcrowding through the early release of thousands of inmates. Less controversially, it will also allow judges, rather than prosecutors, to decide if juvenile defendants over age 14 can be tried in adult court.

Proposition 57’s impact will depend on which inmates will be eligible for parole, how early they are released, and the effectiveness of the new credits—which will depend, in part, on whether the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) has the capacity to immediately provide effective rehabilitative programs.

The initiative is the latest of a number of reforms adopted since 2009, when a federal court issued a mandate to reduce overcrowding in the state’s prison system to improve inmate health care. Over the past several years, the total prison population has declined by about 41,000. At 113,700, the institutional population is now almost 2,200 below the court-mandated target of 137.5% of design capacity. Early in 2016, however, the prison population began to increase, and is now about 1,900 higher than it was at the end of January. If this average monthly increase of more than 200 inmates continues, the prison population could be above the mandated target within a year.

Proposition 57 gives CDCR two tools to address this population pressure. First, it makes prison inmates serving time for “non-violent” felonies eligible for parole consideration after serving the full sentence for their primary offenses, without having to serve time for additional crimes or enhancements, such as gang affiliation or prior felonies. But it is not clear which specific crimes will make inmates ineligible for early parole. The list of 23 violent felonies in the state penal code does not include crimes such as assault with a deadly weapon, certain rapes, and some gang crimes.

If eligibility is extended to those who have not been convicted of these 23 violent offenses, the Legislative Analyst Office (LAO) estimates that about 30,000 inmates currently in state prison would be eligible for early parole, as would an additional 7,500 inmates admitted in each year thereafter. However, the number of inmates who will be granted early release will almost certainly be lower than 30,000. The CDCR has the discretion to determine eligibility, and eligible inmates will be granted parole based on their assessed risk to public safety by the Board of Parole Hearings (BPH). There were 5,300 parole suitability hearings in 2015, and BPH granted parole to only 906 inmates, a rate of about 17%.

Second, and importantly, the initiative gives CDCR authority to award credits for good behavior and rehabilitative or educational achievements. In addition to reducing the prison population, the incentive of early release based on completion of programs aimed at reducing the likelihood of reoffending is also likely to increase inmate demand for approved rehabilitative or educational programming.

The proposition’s advocates hope that more effective programming combined with incentives to participate will better prepare inmates for reentry into the community. They also hope it will lower the state’s high recidivism rates—we recently reported that about two-thirds of inmates released from prison are rearrested within two years and about two-fifths are re-convicted of a new crime.

It will be up to the CDCR secretary to determine which programs are credit-eligible and the size of the credit inmates would receive for participating. It is unclear whether CDCR will have the capacity to meet new demand for these programs—this will be crucial to implementing Proposition 57.

A key question to be answered in the years to come is whether Proposition 57 will affect crime rates. To answer it, we need to know how many inmates are released early, who they are, and to what extent they complete effective programming.

For all of the unknowns, one aspect of Proposition 57 is clear: it does push the state to focus on evaluating, implementing, and meeting the demand for evidence-based programs that help inmates prepare for successful reentry into the community.

Women in Jail

Women are the fastest growing segment of America’s jail population, yet the characteristics of female inmates are not well documented. Nationally, their numbers have increased 14-fold from 1970 to 2014. In California, the women’s jail population has risen 6-fold—from 1,725 in 1970 to 12,054 in 2014—twice as much as the male jail population over the same period.

PPIC’s work on jail populations shows that female jail inmates differ in lots of ways from their male counterparts, most notably in the types of offenses they are held on. This work is based on detailed records provided by 11 counties—which contain two-thirds of the state’s jail population—as part of a long term project PPIC has undertaken in collaboration with the California Board of State and Community Corrections to improve outcomes for correctional populations in California.

In the participating counties, women are more likely than men to be booked into jail for misdemeanors (54% of women to 48% of men). They are also more likely than men to be booked for property and drug offenses (46% to 36%). Women also serve less time for drug, property and all other crimes at both misdemeanor and felony levels.

Because of the different offending patterns between men and women, California’s recent corrections reforms have affected them differently. Public safety realignment, which took effect in 2011, transferred authority for thousands of lower-level felons from the state prison system to county correctional systems. Today, many lower-level felons now serve their sentences in jail rather than prison. These offenders have committed crimes considered non-serious, non-violent, and non-sexual—the type women are more likely to commit.

Both male and female offenders charged with these crimes increased in the first three years after realignment. However, a higher proportion of women who would have been sent to state prison before realignment were held in jails after realignment. By September 2014, three years after realignment began, 37% of the female jail population and 30% of the male jail population were charged with lower-level felony offenses.

In 2014, Proposition 47 reclassified several property and drug crimes from felonies to misdemeanors. These offenses are also committed by a greater share of women than men. As with realignment, Proposition 47 had a greater impact on women than men, and women appear to have more greatly benefited. One year after the proposition passed, the percentage of women in custody for Proposition 47 offenses dropped from 32% to 16%. The percentage of men in custody for Proposition 47 offenses dropped from 22% to 12%. In other words, a greater proportion of Proposition 47 offenders were women, and the share of women in jail dropped by a greater percentage after the proposition. The racial and ethnic composition of female offenders did not change across the reforms.

More broadly, research suggests that the reasons for and consequences of female offending are different. Treatment and intervention that will be most effective for women—called “gender responsive” strategies—need to be at the forefront of policy discussions about how to manage female offenders. Moreover, because of the short time most women actually spend in custody, those strategies should not focus solely on jail, but must extend to women’s reentry into the community.

Acting Locally to Address Sea Level Rise

The author is a member of the PPIC Water Policy Center research network.

October brought a preview of some of the climate risks that coastal regions face. Hurricane Matthew wreaked havoc from Haiti to the eastern seaboard and the West Coast’s first “atmospheric river” storm brought flood warnings in some areas. The risk of coastal flooding is growing as a warming climate causes more intense precipitation and a gradual rise in sea level from Earth’s melting ice sheets. Both worsen the effect of high tides and large storms.

We have a few decades and perhaps up to a century to adjust to sea levels that are at least three feet higher than they are today. Coastal communities can expect a host of costly and dangerous problems from storms, including flooded wastewater treatment plants, shoreline erosion, industrial facilities spilling chemicals into waterways, and water supply systems inundated by seawater. The effects of floods are projected to be the most costly part of climate change. Some estimates put the global losses at $1 trillion a year by 2050, or roughly two percent of global GDP.

Although seas are rising relatively slowly, change will not be gradual at the community level. A series of strong winter storms that combine high tides, large waves, and intense rainfall can radically reshape a community in a matter of days.

For California to adapt, every coastal community will need a plan that envisions a future with higher sea levels and greater risk of coastal erosion and flooding. The plans will need to outline specific projects needed to weather changing conditions over coming decades. Communities will need to figure out how to raise roads, buildings, and critical infrastructure, and ways to enhance natural protective systems, such as beaches. Some combination of building codes and assistance programs is likely to be necessary. So far, most California communities are in the early stages of planning to adapt to rising seas.

Research shows that increasing awareness and knowledge of hazards is not enough to head off losses from disaster. A complicating factor in adaptation planning is how to make the scientific information actionable at the local level.

One new approach shows promise. A UC Irvine program called FloodRISE is bringing together experts in flood disasters, engineering, and the social sciences with local experts and community members in a number of Southern California communities and Tijuana, Mexico. As part of that program, we’re working with decision makers, community groups, NGOs, and personnel from key departments such as public works, city planning, emergency management, and environmental resources. The teams work together to create advanced visualizations of flooding. Using the latest climate science and data, local knowledge and flood modeling technology, they focus on addressing specific issues that communities care about the most.

How well we manage the problem of rising seas will to some degree depend on funding choices we make now. My FloodRISE collaborator Richard Matthew, a political scientist and disaster expert at UCI’s Blum Center for Poverty Alleviation, notes that funding for planning and preventing disaster risks is dwarfed by the resources that pour into communities after disaster strikes. In the chaos of emergency management, decisions must be made quickly and with very limited information, which too often leads to wasteful spending. Allocating more funds to climate-risk planning efforts would not only help local communities prepare for a rising sea and coastal flooding—it could help reduce wasteful spending later.

Learn more

Read California’s Water: Preparing for Floods (from California’s Water briefing kit, October 2016)
Read “Floods in California” (PPIC Water Policy Center fact sheet, February 2016)
Visit the PPIC Water Policy Center’s floods resource page

Testimony: California’s Future Need for Bachelor’s Degrees

Patrick Murphy, PPIC research director, testified before the Senate Budget Subcommittee Number 1 on Education at San Diego City College in San Diego today (November 1, 2016). Here are his prepared remarks.

The Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) projects that between now and 2030 California will fall 1.1 million bachelor’s degrees short of workforce demand. Closing this gap will require substantial improvements in access to four-year colleges, transfer rates from community colleges, and completion rates among college students. This testimony describes specific targets for California’s public and private colleges and universities to help ensure that the state will have a sufficient number of highly educated workers in the future. It also briefly describes a recent pilot program in California that offers bachelor’s degrees at community colleges and similar efforts in other states in the context of closing the workforce skills gap.

PPIC senior fellow Hans Johnson, in testimony before the Assembly Budget Subcommittee Number 2, has offered a scenario for how the state might close the workforce skills gap relative to its current baseline. Assuming that college enrollment rates, completion rates, and transfer rates remain at current levels, the state will produce 3.1 million bachelor’s degrees over the next 15 years. Our closing-the-gap scenario charts a course to producing 4.2 million bachelor’s degrees by 2030—a 36% increase over the baseline for the entire projection period. It should be emphasized that this goal cannot be realized unless the state substantially improves the attainment of degrees by currently underrepresented groups, including first-generation college students, low-income students, Latinos, and African Americans.

There are two important issues to note regarding our closing-the-gap scenario. First, successfully reaching this goal requires contributions from all three of the state’s higher education systems as well as private colleges. Our scenario sets the following targets:

Access to four-year public institutions will increase, with eligibility increasing 5 percentage points over current levels at UC (the top 17.5% of high school graduates will be eligible for UC, up from the 12.5% set by California’s Master Plan for Higher Education) and 6.7 percentage points at CSU (the top 40% will be eligible for CSU, up from the top third). These new eligibility levels will be phased in over an eight-year period.

The number of transfer students from community colleges will grow incrementally to 35% above baseline levels over a five-year period.

Completion rates will increase 9 percentage points at UC and 17 percentage points at CSU. At UC, completion rates for students who enroll as freshmen will increase incrementally from 83% in 2016 to 92% by 2026. Completion rates for freshmen at CSU will increase incrementally from 57% in 2016 to 74% by 2030.

Private nonprofit colleges, which produce about one-third of all bachelor’s degrees annually, will keep pace with the relative rate of growth, increasing their production of degrees by 26% over baseline levels.

The second notable point is that there is no single solution to closing this gap. Our scenario represents only one path toward reaching the number of bachelor’s-degree holders the state needs. Based on the structure and performance of the current system, our scenario estimates the relative contribution that higher education segments could make in the future. Other combinations are conceivable. For example, a smaller expansion in eligibility and greater improvements in completion rates could also close the gap.

The assumptions underpinning our closing-the-gap scenario are clearly ambitious. Are the assumptions realistic? Is it possible to, for example, raise the completion rate at CSUs by 17 percentage points? Based on recent improvements, we think so. In another PPIC report, my colleagues Jacob Jackson and Kevin Cook observed that, from 2009 to 2015, the CSU system increased its six-year graduation rate 6 percentage points, from 51% to 57%. These increases came at a time when the system was focused on improving completion as part of its 2015 Graduation Initiative. This past September, Chancellor White announced that CSU seeks even greater improvements as part of its 2025 Graduation Initiative. The recently announced goals, including achieving a six-year graduation rate of 70% by 2025, are consistent with our closing-the-gap scenario.

We did not include in our scenario any assumptions regarding the potential for California’s community colleges to produce bachelor’s degrees. Beginning in 2015, the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office granted approval to 15 colleges to offer bachelor’s degrees in specific majors as a pilot program under Senate Bill 850. At this time, these programs are quite small and it is difficult to predict what impact they may have on the long-term production of bachelor’s degrees. A brief review of the experiences of two other states provides examples of different trajectories this pilot program could take.

Community colleges in Washington State began a pilot program offering applied bachelor’s degrees following legislation passed in 2005. The program, which focuses on fields currently not addressed by the state’s four-year public institutions, became part of the state’s regular programming in 2010. Community colleges currently offer bachelor’s degrees in 30 fields but produced only about 300 (less than 1%) of the more than 33,000 bachelor’s degrees conferred in the state in 2015.

In Florida, legislation authorizing community colleges to begin offering bachelor’s degrees passed in 2001. Florida has been quite aggressive in expanding the programs and schools offering bachelor’s degrees, with 24 of the state’s 28 colleges offering a total of 170 such programs. In 2015, these colleges produced 6,900 (about 7%) of the state’s 100,500 bachelor’s degrees.

As it is currently configured, California’s pilot program resembles the Washington approach. It has the potential to supply applied degrees in specific fields, making a contribution to the demand for skilled labor in some professions. But, due to its small scale, it is unlikely to have a significant impact on the overall workforce skills gap in the near term.

This is not to suggest that community colleges do not play a role in meeting the growing demand for bachelor’s degrees. In fact, about 103,000 community college students in California transfer to four-year institutions each year. Our closing-the-gap scenario assumes an increase in the number of transfers of 35% over five years—which would mean an additional 36,000 students moving on to four-year institutions. Should those students complete their bachelor’s degrees at rates similar to today’s transfer students, this would lead to tens of thousands of additional bachelor’s-degree holders by 2025.

Community colleges, UC, CSU, and private colleges must all play a role in the state’s efforts to meet the demands of a changing economy. Closing the workforce skills gap will lead to better economic outcomes for all Californians, increased state revenues, and reduced social service demands.

Video: The Mood Before Election Day

The final PPIC Statewide Survey before the November election found Hillary Clinton leading Donald Trump by 26 points among California likely voters and Kamala Harris leading Loretta Sanchez by 22 points. It also found that majorities support measures to extend a tax increase on high incomes, increase cigarette taxes, and legalize marijuana. Research associate David Kordus presented these and other key findings at a briefing in Sacramento last week.

The survey also examined issues that are likely to linger past Election Day. It finds that Californians are divided on the direction of the state. Majorities say the nation is going in the wrong direction, and they express low levels of trust in the federal government. And most Californians say the two major political parties do such a poor job that a third major party is needed.

Learn more

Read the October PPIC Statewide Survey: Californians and Their Government
Visit the PPIC Statewide Survey website

Computer Science in California’s K–12 Schools

Assembly Bill 2329—just signed by the governor—requires the state superintendent of public instruction to convene an advisory panel to develop computer science standards for California’s public schools. A look at the current state of computer science education reveals that this effort will entail a number of challenges and opportunities.

More Students Than Ever Are Taking AP Computer Science Exams

In 2015, a record-high 7,254 students from California’s public schools took the AP computer science exam, an eightfold increase from 2004. Test participation has grown across major demographic groups. After adjusting for fluctuations in student enrollment, particularly in grades 11 and 12 when students typically take the exam, white and Asian students made the most progress, with participation rate up by 800% or more. Growth has been slower among African American (690%) and Latino students (550%).

Test Performance Has Improved for Most Racial/Ethnic Groups

Although increasing numbers of Latino students are taking the exam, passage rates for this group have declined. In May 2004, 44% of Latino exam takers passed, compared to 34% percent in 2015. Performance has improved modestly among Asian and white students. The trend for African American students is less meaningful, because very few of them took the exam (fewer than 50 African Americans took the test before 2013).

More Girls Are Taking Computer Science Exams

In 2015, 26% of AP Computer Science exam takers were female, up from 19% in 2004. Over time both girls and boys have seen an improvement in performance. The gender gap, after some fluctuations, has largely remained unchanged.

Few Schools Offer Computer Science Courses, and Quality Varies

Few schools statewide are offering computer science courses and many of the courses that are offered—popular classes such as computer literacy and computer lab—are not rigorous enough to prepare students for college and beyond. In addition, finding teachers, especially for rigorous computer science courses, remains a challenge. For instance, out of 1,601 high and K–12 schools in California, only 142 offered computer programming courses, half of which are not meeting UC/CSU entrance requirements (author calculation using 2014–15 data from the California Department of Education).

California’s new law is an important first step to expand computer science education across the state. A recently introduced K–12 computer science framework developed by a national coalition of states, districts, and computer science organizations may be helpful as California develops its own standards. At the same time, continuing gaps in performance and variation in course access and quality represent an ongoing challenge.

Learn more

Read the report Upgrading Technology Infrastructure in California’s Schools and the fact sheet “Digital Learning in California’s K–12 Schools”

Community College Placement: Lessons from North Carolina

This post is part of an occasional series examining how California can learn from policies in other states.

Every year, California’s community colleges identify the vast majority of entering students as not ready for college-level courses in math and English. Since these courses are required to earn a degree or transfer to a four-year college, students deemed underprepared are placed in developmental (also known as remedial or basic-skills) courses to prepare for college work. Placement has a profound effect on students’ college trajectory: most developmental education students never earn a degree or transfer.

Concerns about poor outcomes have led California’s community colleges to reexamine their assessment and placement policies. How do colleges currently assess and place students? Are too many students placed into developmental courses? At PPIC, we will examine this topic in the months ahead. Reforms in other states can also help inform upcoming changes in California.

Policy: Uniform Assessment Test and Cut Scores in North Carolina

Prior to 2013, the North Carolina Community College System (NCCCS) allowed a great deal of local autonomy in assessment and placement policies—similar to California’s community colleges today. NCCCS provided a list of permitted assessments, but each of the 58 colleges decided on the specific tests (e.g., Accuplacer, Compass, or Asset tests) and cut-off scores that determined students’ math and English placement. Local policymaking lets colleges take into account their course offerings—which can differ a great deal, especially at the developmental or pre-collegiate level—and the needs of the specific populations being served. But allowing individual colleges to determine placement rules inevitably leads to varying definitions of what it means to be college ready.

In 2012, research by the Community College Research Center at Columbia University found that placement tests were only weakly predictive of success in college courses at NCCCS and that high school records were as useful or better at predicting college-level course success. Beginning in 2013, NCCCS implemented several reforms that transformed its assessment and placement system: multiple measures, a customized diagnostic math assessment, and uniform placement rules. In addition, students achieving a minimum high school GPA or SAT/ACT score could enroll in college-level courses without having to take a placement test.

Policy Impact

There are a number of arguments for uniform assessment and placement policies: they can set a common definition of college readiness, align high school and college expectations, allow states to measure performance across colleges, and facilitate transfer between colleges in the same system.

Early evidence from Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte, North Carolina, also suggests that systemwide assessment and placement reform can significantly increase the number of students directly enrolling in college-level math and English. At Central Piedmont, 54% of students enrolled directly into these courses in fall 2015, up from 36% in fall 2012. It also appears that more students were able to complete college courses with no significant changes in pass rates. As more data is collected and analyzed, it will be important to see if these promising findings hold for colleges across the system and for different student groups.

Lessons for California

As California’s community colleges plan to implement a common assessment, the system must balance centralized decision making and local autonomy as well as rigorous standards and broader access. There is mounting evidence that more consistent and broader access to college-level courses contributes to improved student progress and more equitable outcomes. But some research does suggest that these reforms could result in lower course pass rates. For this reason, broader access to college-level courses should be complemented by increased support for faculty and academic supports for struggling students.

Learn more

Read Higher Education in California: Improving College Completion
Visit the PPIC Higher Education Center

Video: Policy Priorities for California’s Water

Five years into this drought—with the possibility of a sixth on the way—what have we learned about addressing the diverse challenges of scarce water supplies? A PPIC Water Policy Center event in Sacramento last week brought together experts to discuss four of the state’s key policy challenges: strengthening urban drought resilience, managing groundwater in rural areas, addressing declining ecosystem health, and ensuring safe drinking water in disadvantaged communities.

The far-ranging conversations took the audience on a virtual tour of California’s drought hot spots. It included Central Valley towns subsisting on bottled water after local wells dried up, stressed rivers and streams with numerous fish species on the brink of extinction, and farmers anticipating big changes to rural economies as a law to maintain sustainable groundwater levels is implemented.

Ellen Hanak, director of the PPIC Water Policy Center, gave an overview of how California is managing the complex and interrelated challenges of this persistent drought. The experience can help us better prepare for future droughts and a warming climate, she said.

Cities have weathered the drought fairly well. But many urban water systems—which supply about 90 percent of California’s population—struggled to implement the statewide water conservation mandate issued by Governor Brown in April 2015, panelists noted. Now that the mandate is no longer in force, the focus is on encouraging long term water efficiency—especially for outdoor landscape water use.

A panel on the complex challenges of implementing the state’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act raised the need for better data to inform decision making. Karen Ross, secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture, said a big challenge for the law is “how do we create trust so that everyone will be engaged,” especially given the many challenges facing farming communities right now.

Managing water for the environment during drought was the focus of the third panel. Jeff Mount, senior fellow at the PPIC Water Policy Center, noted that California’s aquatic ecosystems “are in perpetual drought … because of how we manage water.” He argued that we must focus on managing ecosystems rather than trying to save individual species on the brink.

Water shortages and poor water quality have also made life difficult in a number of disadvantaged rural communities—the focus of the last panel. Hundreds of communities have experienced drying wells, nitrate pollution, and other problems that threaten their water supplies.

Laurel Firestone, co-director of the Community Water Center, noted that while addressing this crisis has become a growing priority in California, more needs to be done locally and nationally to address inequities in access to safe drinking water. “Our lack of action is costing vastly more … than if we got ahead of the problem and solved it,” she said.

We invite you to watch the videos from this event, and hope you find the discussions illuminating and useful:

Learn more

Read California’s Water (PPIC Briefing Kit, October 2016)
Visit the Policy Priorities for California’s Water YouTube page
Visit the PPIC Water Policy Center

Comparing College Readiness across States

How does California compare to other states in preparing students for college? This isn’t necessarily a straightforward question to answer, because most cross-state metrics, such as Advanced Placement or SAT performance, only capture the subset of students who are thinking seriously about college. However, California’s new 11th-grade assessments are aligned to college-readiness standards and administered in many other states—allowing us see how California compares to other states in preparing all students for college.

These new Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) tests are aligned with the Common Core curriculum standards. The 2015–16 school year was the second year of statewide administration of these tests for students in grades 3–8 and grade 11 in California.

A high enough score on the 11th-grade test is an early guarantee that students can take college-level courses, rather than remedial courses, upon enrolling at any California State University (CSU) and most community colleges in the state. As part of California’s Early Assessment Program, students who score in the highest level (“standard exceeded”) in English language arts (ELA) or math are exempt from remediation at participating colleges. Students who score in the second highest level (“standard met”) are considered conditionally ready for college coursework and may become exempt from remediation upon successfully completing a specified course in the 12th grade. Ten other states also participate in the exam, and while the test scores don’t affect college remediation for all colleges in every state, over 200 colleges across most of the states accept the scores.

In California, 13% of 11th graders were ready for college courses in math and 20% were conditionally ready. In English, 26% were ready and an additional 33% were conditionally ready. California ranks about in the middle of all other states taking the exams, a surprising result considering previous standardized tests such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress have consistently placed California students as among the lowest-performing in the nation. Moreover, of the states using the exams, California has the largest share of students in the federal free or reduced-lunch program (a proxy for low-income status) and by far the largest share of English Learners. Students from both groups are about half as likely to be prepared for college compared with their peers. In other words, the California scores are perhaps more impressive in light of the barriers to college readiness that more California students face.

Does this mean that California is doing a good job preparing students for college? This 11th-grade test is meant to be an early signal to students of their college readiness. Students also have their senior year to prepare for college, and the readiness levels of 59% in English and 33% in math will likely improve by the end of 12th grade. However, for students who do go to college, remediation rates are still high at CSU (40%) and community colleges (80%), and haven’t changed much since the new assessments began. These results and cross-state comparisons show us that California has room for improvement and may face more challenges than other states moving forward.

Learn more
Visit the PPIC Higher Education Center

Changing Attitudes toward Marijuana Legalization

Six years ago, a California ballot initiative to legalize marijuana for recreational use fell short of a majority—46.5% voted yes. This November, Californians will vote on Proposition 64, another marijuana legalization initiative. Since the 2010 election, four other states and the District of Columbia have legalized marijuana for recreational use, and, in California, the PPIC Statewide Survey series has found increased support for legalization among likely voters and within some key groups.

In our September survey, after hearing the Proposition 64 ballot title and label, 60% of California likely voters said they would vote yes. That includes strong majorities of Democrats and independents and nearly half of Republicans.

Support has increased among likely voters. In response to a separate, more general question, a similar share (61%) of likely voters said that they think marijuana use should be legal. That’s a 10 point increase in support for legalization in general since September 2010, when about half of likely voters said they were in favor.

The partisan divide has narrowed. We have consistently found support for legalization in general to be lower among Republican likely voters than among Democrats or independents, but the gap is somewhat narrower today than it was in 2010. Then as now, at least 60% of Democratic and independent likely voters supported legalization. Among Republicans, though, support has increased from 32% in September 2010 to 45% in September of this year.

Support has grown among older Californians. Today, nearly three-fourths of California likely voters under age 35 favor legalization, and they are more likely than older Californians to do so—a pattern that has held since 2010. But support for marijuana legalization has increased among older Californians over the past six years. Today, nearly two-thirds of likely voters age 35 to 54 support legalization, compared to about half in 2010. A slight majority of likely voters age 55 and over are in favor today, while fewer than half favored it in 2010.

As with any election outcome, much will depend on who turns out to vote. Based on past election cycles, we can expect a larger—and younger—electorate in this presidential election year than we saw in the midterm election year of 2010. It remains to be seen, though, if Californians’ changing attitudes toward marijuana legalization will be reflected in the vote on Proposition 64.

Learn more

Read the September PPIC Statewide Survey
Visit the PPIC Statewide Survey website