For as long as Los Angeles has existed, it has had jails that are perpetually overcrowded and dangerous. LA operates the largest and deadliest jail system in the world–an unconscionable sixty-nine people have died in our jails since the start of 2023. At any given time, thousands of people are incarcerated in our jail system who have not been convicted of a crime and are in desperate need of mental health or drug treatment that they can’t adequately receive in our deadly jails that are at least partially controlled by deputy gangs. Kari Blakinger recently wrote an incredible history of our jail system for the LA Times, in which she argues that we should really think of LA as a prison town–a brutal and vast carceral machine that has always been integral to how Los Angeles has created itself up to this point. This city has always been defined by its contradictions, the endless opportunities to achieve wealth and fame crashing up against ruthless segregation and the harsh disciplining of working class Black and brown people who serve as the labor pool to generate said wealth.

There has always been resistance to the choice to use jails as the primary means of maintaining Los Angeles’ racial and economic hierarchies. This is a city with a rich tradition of fierce civil rights organizing. We arguably live in an era where the organizing against our carceral systems in LA has never been stronger. At the county level, two essential reform ballot measures, Measure R and Measure J have been passed by a substantial portion of voters, clearly indicating that Angelenos have wanted to divest from jails as our only means of responding to social problems and to invest in forms of community care proven to reduce recidivism. Our county board of supervisors have steadily come around to supporting a “care first, jails last” policy after years of relentless, consistent community organizing, and have been trying to figure out how to finally close down the expensive and shockingly inhumane Men’s central jail for three years now. On the city level, we have elected Kenneth Mejia, who explicitly ran on a platform of reigning in the unconscionable LAPD budget, city councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, who ran on an abolitionist platform of investing in alternatives to policing and jails, and 50,000 of us voted for community organizer and proud abolitionist Gina Viola for mayor in 2022. Angelenos have been steadfast in our commitments to building a world where we do not allow the police to murder hundreds of people a year and we no longer have the largest prison population on earth by several orders of magnitude.

However, any movement for social change constantly has to fight against the reactionary forces attempting to reaffirm the violent status quo, and this election cycle is a particularly precarious moment in the struggle to maintain the gains that have been made in the last four years. Two particularly essential races are the state-wide proposition 36 and the re-election campaign of LA county district attorney George Gascon.

Proposition 36 is a state-wide ballot measure that is an insidious attempt to bring back the war on drugs, guaranteeing that our prison population will explode once again. It is backed by retail giants like Wal-Mart and Home Depot and the police and prison lobbies. In essence, it aims to bring back the failed “three strikes” method of incarcerating people for three or more minor drug possession or petty theft offenses. It strips vital state funding from drug treatment, housing, and school-based programs, all policies that are scientifically proven to reduce social problems like public drug use and retail theft. California has made tremendous strides in the last decade dramatically reducing its prison population, it has saved us money and studies show it has overall made us safer. Proposition 36’s advocates are very plainly hoping to use it as a means of cycling homeless people into the prison system and out of sight, rather than doing the actually cost effective and humane thing of building and providing housing. Just as the war on drugs was an attempt to silo Black and brown people into prisons when deindustrialization took away factory jobs, Proposition 36 attempts to claw back the gains made by progressive reforms by utilizing punishment mechanisms against poor people experiencing homelessness that are both deadly and ineffective. If we want people to stop shoplifting and stop using drugs in public, we need to force employers to pay livable wages, build social housing, and fund programs to help people break addiction cycles.

Closely tied to prop 36 is the attempt to unseat George Gascon. If the right-wing echo chamber and ghouls like Traci Park are to be believed, George Gascon has personally turned all of Los Angeles into a lawless nightmare city where all murderers are instantly released and open looting is a daily occurrence. Friends, as you walk around our city, you know this is simply ludicrous. Yes, all around us is evidence of state neglect and poverty. You can walk a mile in any direction in this city and find dozens of people who have been failed by society living on the streets, but you cannot blame every tent and every needle in a gutter on one elected official. Gascon’s emphasis in the last four years on mental and drug rehabilitation programs and diversion programs for young people is something to be celebrated. Gascon’s opponent is a career prosecutor who is lightly paying lip service to continuing some of these programs, but judging from his website, he’s primarily focused on punishing the homeless and bringing back the death penalty in LA.

Now, it would be irresponsible not to mention the critiques of Gascon from the left. His most egregious misstep has been his refusal to prosecute many of the cops who have murdered people since he came into office. Additionally, there have been moments of frustration in which Gascon has announced good policies, but struggled to get attorneys in his office to actually comply with them. Gascon’s many opponents routinely criticize him for being too rigidly committed to criminal justice reforms pushed by Black Lives Matter and adjacent social movements, but at the end of the day he is a former cop and a seasoned prosecutor, and his background frankly means he will always be a moderate in how far he’s willing to go to support truly bold and transformative policies.

But let’s zoom out for a moment and consider the national implications of these races. Since 2020, the calls to defund the police have been met instead by president Biden adamantly insisting that we fund the police despite the fact that police keep killing more people year after year. In Atlanta, a massive training center for the police dubbed “cop city” has been vehemently opposed by the community, and the mayor is currently blocking democracy by refusing to allow a ballot referendum to stop the construction of the facility. In San Francisco, reformer District Attorney Chesea Boudin was forced out of office after a very shady recall election heavily influenced by Republicans. (Interestingly, Boudin’s ouster from office has coincided with San Francisco becoming more violent, suggesting that removing Gascon from office would have the same effect.) And to put things very bluntly, America is most likely about to elect a career prosecutor as president. In many ways, the national outlook on criminal legal reform is very, very bleak.

If you are a person who was moved into the streets and transformed after the murder of George Floyd, now is not the time to relent in the struggle against mass incarceration and police murder. The ballot is just one terrain of many in the fight to upend the domination of racial capitalism embodied in our carceral system, but it is an essential front that the forces of reaction will bludgeon us with if we don’t meet them there. Los Angeles has a tragic history of leading the way on innovations in brutal policing and mass incarceration, embodied in the tenure of LAPD chief Daryl Gates. But as I’ve hopefully made clear now, we also are arguably leading the path towards turning that tide. George Gascon is currently down considerably in the polls, and proposition 36 is likely to pass. These can be stopped if progressives of conscience in LA continue to vote as they have on the numerous criminal legal reforms I’ve outlined above. We can continue to be a beacon of hope, a counter to the narrative that policing reform has failed nationwide and that the time has come to restore law and order carceral politics.