After Prop. 47, jail population dropped, more defendants missed court.

Jacqueline Mireles was 15 when she first tried methamphetamine. Soon after that, she was hooked.

Her addiction snowballed into a series of events that led her to leave home and live under a bridge in Moss Landing. By the time she was 19, she had been in and out of Monterey County Jail more than eight times, and continuously arrested for possessing methamphetamine.

“I eventually got clean in jail,” Mireles says, “and then I chose to go into the drug court program, which really helped because they were checking on me three times a week, and I had to report back.”

Mireles, now 20, graduated from the drug court program June 24. She is sober, and thanks to a ballot measure approved by California voters in November 2014, her felony nonviolent drug crimes were reduced to misdemeanors, then cleared from her record upon graduation.

Mireles is one in a sea of nonviolent criminals statewide who have benefitted from court programs and Prop. 47. But a year and a half after the measure took effect, prosecutors are worried that locally, a wave of drug-addicted defendants are ditching court and facing no punishment for their actions.

“There should be a mechanism to get them rehabilitated in court.”

“A lot of these folks are not being held accountable for their actions whether it be treatment, incarceration, or whatever it is they need,” Chief Assistant District Attorney Berkley Brannon says.

Since Prop. 47 passed, there were 6,517 people in Monterey County facing misdemeanor charges who failed to show up at court hearings last year – 2,085 more than in 2014. While Brannon cannot directly attribute this trend to Prop. 47, he believes that no other policy change can explain such a significant uptick.

Interim Public Defender Frank Dice says it’s too soon to know if Prop. 47 has influenced those statistics.

One area that Prop 47 has directly impacted has been at the historically overcroweded county jail, which has seen a significant reduction in its inmate population now that more defendants are cited instead of booked into jail.

Currently, the jail is housing an estimated 100 inmates for misdemeanor charges, mostly for violent offenses like domestic violence, assault or battery. People arrested for misdemeanor property and drug crimes are less likely to be booked now than they were before Prop. 47 took effect. The jail will only keep them in custody if they have three or more warrants on their record.

Mireles’ defense attorney, Geoffrey Buckles, says that while he is in favor of Prop. 47 because harsh prison sentences for drug offenses now have more appropriate punishments, he thinks the language in the law doesn’t facilitate treatment for those who need it without the threat of incarceration.

“Sometimes [defendants have] a laissez faire attitude about their own life and people need that push to get them into the treatment that they need,” Buckles says. “If they pick up a second or third offense, there should be a mechanism to get them rehabilitated in court.”

Mireles is someone who benefitted from that push, and says that she needed a supervised program to meet her halfway in order to successfully leave her drug-addicted life behind.