For over a year, a seven-man California commission has been quietly spearheading an enormous work to redesign the brush of criminal laws that make up the state penal code.
Its ideas for 2022 are ambitious, including an inevitable finish to the state’s questionable “three strikes” law and changes to lifetime jail sentences without the chance of parole.
“I think there are an extraordinary number of shameful acts,” said Michael Romano, the chairman of the state Committee on Revision of the Penal Code and a Stanford Law School teacher. “Furthermore I figure we can make our state considerably more secure and all the more reasonable by looking at some of the details.”
The committee — involving lawmakers, criminal law scholars and previous government and state judges selected by the lead representative and legislative leaders — was framed in 2020 to intently analyze California’s incarceration rates and make policy recommendations to lower them.