After more than two years of searching for facts and holding public hearings, the California Reparations Task Force Report is complete. No proposals will be made to make monetary compensation to any descendants of African slaves.
Economists and public policy analysts have determined that reparations payments to individuals could potentially cost California more than $800 billion — more than 2.5 times the state’s $300 billion annual budget — although that cost was reduced to $500 billion in a later report without explanation, according to the Associated Press.
Economists recommended that elder descendants, for example, receive nearly $1 million for a 71-year-old Black person who has lived all their life in California — or $13,600 per year — for health disparities that have shortened their average life span, according to AP.
Black people subjected to aggressive policing and prosecution in the “war on drugs” from 1971 to 2020 could each receive $115,000 if they lived in California throughout that period, more than $2,300 for each year they lived in the state during that period.
Some descendants of African slaves could potentially get upward of $1.2 million dollars. But it’s up to the California Legislature to decide what it considers appropriate payment to individuals, because none will be proposed by the Task Force.
Jovan Scott Lewis, Ph.D., member of the reparations task force, explained that the recommendation for compensation is not just giving people money, but rather returning monies that were taken, stolen or denied to those who were disenfranchised or dispossessed.
What the more than 1,100-page report does propose, among over 100 other things, is a formal apology to the descendants of enslaved people and financial compensation to those descendants for the resulting harms caused to them, e.g., overpolicing and housing discrimination.
California was never a slave holding state. However, more than 4,000 slaves were imported to California to work in the mines. Their descendants never left and built lives for themselves within the Golden State.
The report reveals that slave descendants faced housing discrimination, education and employment discrimination, property devaluation and dispossession, racial profiling by police, over-policing and mass incarceration. Black businesses were devalued.
The report also details the physical and psychological harms caused by slavery and the monetary deficits suffered from the lowering of the life expectancy of Blacks in the United States. For all these harms and more, policy proposals have been made to fix the problems.
But many of these proposals will affect the lives of more than just the descendants of slavery if implemented by the California Legislature.
For example, to fix the problems of structural racism, the task force proposed deleting language from the California constitution that permits involuntary servitude as punishment for crime.
The task force has also proposed repealing section 2700 of the California Penal Code requiring “every able-bodied prisoner to work.”
They proposed every incarcerated person receive fair-market pay for their labor.
There are proposals to pass legislation that makes education, substance abuse and mental health treatment and rehabilitation programs the first priority for incarcerated people. In addition, they propose allowing incarcerated people to make decisions regarding how they will spend their time and which programs and jobs they will do while incarcerated.
The report proposes prohibiting for-profit prison companies from operating within the system (i.e., companies that control phone calls, emails, and other communications). It calls for requiring that any goods and services available for purchase by incarcerated people and their families be provided at the same cost as those goods and services outside of prison.
It calls for allowing people who are incarcerated to continue to exercise their right to vote.
Some other proposals include eliminating the racial disparities and discrimination against African Americans in the parole hearing process (including in the criminal risk assessments used to determine suitability for parole).
Proposals call for eliminating both implicit and explicit bias in the criminal justice system, reducing the scope of law enforcement jurisdiction within the public safety system and shifting more funding to prevention and mental health care.
It also proposes eliminating and reversing the effects of discrimination within the criminal justice system, including reviewing the cases of incarcerated African Americans in order to determine whether they have been wrongfully convicted or have received longer or harsher sentences than White people convicted of the same or similar crimes.
California lawmakers will review the recommendations of the task force and will ultimately decide to take up some, all, or none of those proposals and create policies that must pass both chambers and be signed into law by the governor.
