It’s not being soft on crime if you want the prisons not to be overcrowded and corrections officials not to be overworked. It’s good policy. I don’t believe in most mandatory sentencing laws, and I don’t believe in most limitations on judicial discretion. Each case a judge hears is different, and each defendant is an individual. I hate the “three strikes” law because it has unnecessarily choked the courts and prisons.

There. Go ahead and call me soft on crime. I’m voting an enthusiastic “yes” on Proposition 66 on the California ballot, because it would redefine the felonies that are considered serious enough to warrant “three strikes” sentencing.

I didn’t even have to read the ballot arguments in the voter pamphlet to come to this decision. All I had to read was the measure itself. If anything, it doesn’t go far enough in restoring the kind of compassionate, effective court system we tossed into the cement mixer when the “three strikes” law was passed ten years ago.

That law has given us ten years of people getting harsher sentence than their crimes merit. The monetary cost alone is staggering, and the cost in human productivity is just as damaging. Even without these considerations, though, the fact that it’s an ineffective deterrent is reason enough to vote yes on 66.

Let me tell you what I like about Proposition 67. It does something that needs to be done, reimbursing medical providers for mandatory emergency care. The state already has a fund to do this, from tobacco taxes, but it’s apparently not enough to compensate for the level of demand from uninsured patients. This measure would impose a telephone surcharge (that is, a tax) to increase that fund.

And I don’t believe the phone tax is much of an imposition, if Proposition 67 does what it says it will do. The trouble is, I’m not so sure it does. I don’t see where there’s any provision to account for how the funds are spent. I’d hate to see this lack of oversight turn into a windfall for health care providers, for the simple reason that there’s not a chance in a dust storm that any savings they realize will be passed on to patients.

So, because I think this measure is a bit of a mess and because I’m not convinced it was written as carefully as a new law ought to be written, I’m reluctantly voting no on 67.