by Tremayne Carroll Sr.
(The following is excerpted from a longer piece.)
With all due respect to the authors of Proposition 36 and the voters who passed it in November 2012, the law fails to provide equal protection to all Californians. For fear of exposing the biases of the system and the justices’ injustices, there hasn’t been a case study (yet). Not only does the application of Prop. 36 show blatant prejudices based on race, age, religion, education, sexuality, social class, and geographics … but any particular judge can apply the law differently in the afternoon simply because they are 
a morning person.
Prop. 36 is a law that has to be amended for it to clearly be the law. There is no other law in the land that gives judges the discretion to interpret an individual’s liberties based on feelings and/or emotion. There’s too much contradictory language in Prop. 36, namely: qualify/disqualify, eligibility/suitability, dangerousness. The law states that nothing that wasn’t proven in a court of law can “disqualify” anyone from being eligible for resentencing; but things that weren’t proven in court can “disqualify” anyone from being suitable for resentencing. That’s tricky and contradictory in itself. What’s worse, what disqualifies me from being suitable may not disqualify someone else from being found suitable and that can be based on how the judge is feeling on any given day, or what my race is, what education I have, if my family is well-off, my sexuality, what city I’m from, what city or county I’m paroling to, and far too many other things.
On top of all that, in a case where the defendant is indigent, as in my case, I can’t afford a paid attorney, which translates into not being able to afford equal protection of the law.
Republished from “Perspectives from the Cell Block: An Anthology of Prisoner Writings” – edited by Joan Parkin in collaboration with incarcerated people from Mule Creek State Prison.
