California lawmaker revives effort to end forced prison labor
A new California bill seeks to prohibit the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation from forcing inmates to work. A similar measure, Proposition 6, would have banned the practice as well, but voters rejected it during the 2024 election.
Introduced by Assemblymember Lori Wilson (D-Suisun City), AB 475 also calls on CDCR to develop a voluntary work program with regulations on assignments and wages.
If the bill becomes law, starting Jan. 1, 2027, it will prohibit CDCR from requiring incarcerated individuals to work, with some exceptions. It would also require local governments to establish wages for county and city jail work programs through local ordinances, creating a state-mandated local program.
Californians can receive up to $137 off their April utility bills. Here's how
So far, the bill passed out of the public safety committee with a 6-1 vote. Two lawmakers, Assemblymembers James Ramos (D-San Bernardino) and Juan Alanis (R-Modesto), didn't vote.
One lawmaker who opposed the bill, Assemblymember Tom Lackey (R-Palmdale), said during the hearing that he took issue with associating the prison workforce with slavery. He also said he couldn't support a bill the public has already voted against, according to the Sacramento Bee.
Wilson addressed those claims, saying that history would prove Lackey wrong regarding his assessment of the association between involuntary servitude in prisons and slavery.
She also said that the language around Prop. 6 was confusing and recognized that there wasn't an overwhelming response of 'no.' About 53.3% of voters voted no on Prop. 6, while 46.6% voted yes.
The bill will now face another committee review.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
San Francisco Chronicle
a day ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
California will do anything to protect immigrants — except build them housing
Over the past several weeks, hundreds of thousands of Californians have taken to the streets to protest the Trump administration's increasingly authoritarian efforts to deport the state's undocumented population. There's a moral imperative behind these protests; the vast majority of the people being targeted by federal agents are law-abiding workers with no criminal records. There's a practical one, too: This state cannot function without its migrant workers, particularly our agricultural sector. It isn't just that undocumented workers will accept lower wages than their American counterparts. Farming is hard, skilled labor. Absent changes to federal immigration policy that would allow and incentivize more migrants to come here legally, California doesn't have the trained workforce it needs to feed itself and the nation. (We accounted for 41% of the country's vegetable sales in 2022.) And so, Californians and our politicians have rightly gone to battle with President Donald Trump. Yet as supportive as this editorial board is of these efforts, we'd be remiss if we didn't call something out: This state needs to become as passionate about housing our essential workers as it is about fighting Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It's been just over two and a half years since the deadly shootings in Half Moon Bay put the Dickensian living conditions of California's farmworkers — the vast majority of whom are undocumented — on the national radar. For decades, California had allowed its migrant workers to live in overcrowded, mold-filled housing with bacteria-ridden drinking water. That's if it housed them at all. What's changed? Not nearly enough, according to San Mateo County Supervisor Ray Mueller, whose district includes the site of the 2023 massacre. Building housing on farmland in his district has proven to be a logistical challenge amid drainage issues, sewage concerns and access to drinkable water. Yet trying to build worker housing off-site hits an even more intractable roadblock. 'The coastal community is, by a large majority, supportive of farmworkers,' he said. 'The opposition you run into is around density.' San Mateo County is hardly unique in this regard. In Marin County, for instance, an effort to build housing for the workers, many undocumented, being displaced by the closure of ranches in the Point Reyes National Seashore has been met with a lawsuit by NIMBY groups. This is, of course, unacceptable. And yet, state and local rules still too often empower obstructionism. Mueller said the arduous progress San Mateo County has made in building farmworker housing was mostly achieved using emergency powers that streamlined the usual permitting processes. 'The state was wonderful in getting our project moving,' Mueller said. 'We just need to do that at scale across the state.' We're nowhere close. In 2024, California lawmakers passed a measure to exempt farmworker housing up to 150 units from review under the California Environmental Quality Act. However, this streamlining applied to only two counties: Santa Clara and Santa Cruz. A bill in the state Legislature, AB457 from Assembly Member Esmerelda Soria, D-Merced, would expand those streamlining measures to Fresno, Madera and Merced counties. Over 40% of the state's land is used for agriculture. We're never going to get anywhere with a drip-drop of county-by-county CEQA carve-outs. Assembly Member Damon Connolly, D-San Rafael, told the editorial board he'd be supportive of an effort to expand CEQA streamlining to his district and perhaps even statewide. But even that wouldn't be enough, Mueller said. For many Bay Area farming communities, the California Coastal Commission has its own separate and arduous permitting process. Without streamlining bills to cover this and CEQA, little progress will be made. And now an even greater challenge comes from the Trump administration. Farmworker-specific housing makes easy pickings for federal raids. Mueller says he fears his efforts to build new farmworker housing may have inadvertently 'put a target on the back' of the people he's spent years trying to help. This fear isn't theoretical. Gov. Gavin Newsom's office recently issued a press release saying that federal deportation authorities requested and received the addresses and immigration status of Medi-Cal recipients after the state expanded health insurance benefits to low-income undocumented workers. Tailored government efforts for the undocumented risk creating a paper trail that puts them in danger. 'It is clear that we must reassess our programs to ensure we are doing all we can to protect the personal information of our community,' incoming state Senate President Pro Tem Monique Limón, D-Santa Barbara, told the editorial board. We don't have the answer to this quandary on the health care front. But California can do something for migrant workers as it relates to housing — something Limón and too many other California politicians have been reluctant to do. Make it easier to build. AB457 is an admission from legislators that CEQA creates onerous and unnecessary impediments to development. Yet housing streamlining bills such as SB79 from San Francisco state Sen. Scott Wiener, which would exempt developments near transit from CEQA review, provided they comply with local affordable housing mandates and other criteria, are receiving immense political pushback. Undocumented renters in California have virtually the same rights as everyone else in the private rental market under the Immigrant Tenant Protection Act. And landlords are prohibited from disclosing, or typically even asking about, immigration status. But without an adequate housing supply, those protections go to waste. Can most undocumented workers afford to buy a shiny new condo? Almost certainly not. But they could potentially move into older units that open up when other renters decide to buy. And they certainly could benefit from the development of new mother-in-law units — such as those that might have been built had cities like San Diego not just rolled back their accessory dwelling unit laws in the face of community opposition. If California is willing to fight the federal government to keep its undocumented residents here, it should also be willing to fight to ensure they don't live in squalor.
New York Post
2 days ago
- New York Post
What will it take for Gavin Newsom to focus on his day job?
President Donald Trump rightly took the ruling upholding his National Guard deployment to Los Angeles as a 'BIG WIN,' but it can be a winner for Californians, too — if it inspires their governor to focus on the job they elected him to. Gov. Gavin Newsom vows to litigate on, but if necessary the Supreme Court will slap him down, too. What will get him to quit his near-nonstop posturing to set himself up for a 2028 presidential run, and get his nose to the gubernatorial grindstone? It's bad enough that he sided with LA Mayor Karen Bass in obstructing ICE efforts to deport child predators, murderers and other worst-of-the-worst 'asylum seekers' — posturing that all but invited the riots that Trump deployed the Guard to shut down. Worse that this rush to the left came after Newsom's fake to the right with a series of podcasts where he pretended sympathy to centrist criticisms of the far-left agenda. That follows his haplessness during the Los Angeles fires — a disaster Trump credibly tied to Newsom's green obsessions. Other Gavin grotesquerie included rushing to meet the president on Trump's LA visit bare weeks after prepping for all-out legal #resistance to the new prez. California is plagued with soaring homelessness, elevated crime rates and brutally high costs of living: Even its welcome to illegal immigrants hasn't prevented a historic switch from growth to decline. That is: On Newsom's watch, Cali is for the first time ever losing seats in the House of Representatives because so many residents are fleeing to less-toxic jurisdictions. The Golden State is a natural near-paradise, but Newsom & co. are destroying it. That governor is still devoting his time and energy to a years-off national run is damning proof that he doesn't care a whit for the people of California.
Los Angeles Times
2 days ago
- Los Angeles Times
California to examine its Amazon oil ties following pleas from Indigenous leaders from Ecuador
RICHMOND, California — An oil tanker sat docked at Chevron's sprawling refinery in Richmond on Thursday — a visible link between California's appetite for Amazon crude and the remote rainforest territories where it's extracted. Just offshore, bundled in puffy jackets against the Bay wind, Indigenous leaders from Ecuador's Amazon paddled kayaks through choppy waters, calling attention to the oil expansion threatening their lands. Their visit to California helped prompt the state Senate to introduce a landmark resolution urging officials to examine the state's role in importing crude from the Amazon. The move comes as Ecuador's government prepares to auction off 14 new oil blocks — covering more than 2 million hectares of rainforest, much of it Indigenous territory — in a 2026 bidding round known as 'Sur Oriente.' The Indigenous leaders say the move goes against the spirit of a national referendum in which Ecuadorians voted to leave crude oil permanently underground in Yasuni National Park. The preservation push in Ecuador comes as another South American country that includes part of the Amazon rainforest, Brazil, is moving ahead with plans to further develop oil resources. On Tuesday, Brazil auctioned off several land and offshore potential oil sites near the Amazon River as it aims to expand production in untapped regions despite protests from environmental and Indigenous groups. Juan Bay, president of the Waorani people of Ecuador, said that his delegation's coming to California was 'important so that our voices, our stance, and our struggle can be elevated' and urged Californians to reexamine the source of their crude from the Amazon — 'from Waorani Indigenous territory.' On Thursday, the Indigenous delegation joined local Californians in Richmond for a kayaking trip near a Chevron refinery, sharing stories about the Amazon and perspectives on climate threats. For Nadino Calapucha, a spokesperson for the Kichwa Pakkiru people, the visit to California's Bay Area was deeply moving. Spotting seals in the water and a bird's nest nearby felt ¨like a gesture of solidarity from nature itself,' he told The Associated Press on a kayak. 'It was as if the animals were welcoming us,' he said. The connection between the Amazon and California — both facing environmental threats — was palpable, Calapucha said. 'Being here with our brothers and sisters, with the local communities also fighting — in the end, we feel that the struggle is the same,' he said. California is the largest global consumer of Amazon oil, with much of it refined and used in the state as fuel. Ecuador is the region's top producer of onshore crude. Bay highlighted a March 2025 ruling by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which found that Ecuador had violated the rights of the area's Indigenous groups by allowing oil operations in and around a site known as Block 43. The court ordered the government to halt extraction in protected areas and uphold the 2023 referendum banning drilling in Yasuni National Park, where the country's largest crude reserve lies, estimated at around 1.7 billion barrels. Bay appealed to the California government to reconsider if it 'should continue receiving crude from the Amazon' — or continue to be 'complicit in the violation of rights' happening on Indigenous territory. State Senator Josh Becker, who introduced the new resolution, praised the visiting leaders for defending both their land and the global climate. 'Their communities are on the front lines asserting their rights and resisting oil extraction,' Becker said on the Senate floor on Monday. 'They are defenders of a living rainforest that stores carbon, regulates the global climate, and sustains life.' Long criticized by environmental justice advocates, the refinery has processed millions of barrels of Amazon crude, fueling concerns over pollution, public health, and the state's role in rainforest destruction. The delegation also helped launch a new report by Amazon Watch, an Oakland-based non-profit dedicated to the protection of the Amazon Basin, which outlines the climate, legal and financial risks of operating in Indigenous territories without consent. Kevin Koenig, Amazon Watch's director for climate, energy and extraction industry, said the impacts of Amazon crude extend far beyond Ecuador. He joined the Ecuadorian delegation on the kayaking trip on Thursday. 'The Golden State, if it wants to be a climate leader, needs to take action,' he told AP. 'California has an addiction to Amazon crude.' Californians need to 'recognize their responsibility and their complicity in driving demand for Amazon crude and the impact that that is having on Indigenous people, on their rights, on the biodiversity and the climate,' he added. California's future is closely tied to the Amazon's — the state relies on the rainforest's role in climate regulation and rainfall, Koenig said, warning that continued Amazon crude imports contribute to the very destruction increasing California's vulnerability to drought and wildfires. He said environmental and public health damage tied to oil drilling is not confined to South America. 'We're seeing the same impacts from the oil well to the wheel here in California, where communities are suffering from contamination, health impacts, dirty water,' he said. 'It's time that California lead an energy transition.' California, one of the world's largest economies and a major importer of Amazon crude, must take stronger climate action, Koenig added and called on the state to phase out its reliance on oil linked to deforestation, human rights abuses, pollution, and climate damage. The resolution commends the Indigenous communities of Ecuador for their struggle in defending the rainforest and Indigenous rights. It also marks the first time California would examine how its energy consumption may contribute to the region's deforestation and cultural loss. The resolution is expected to be up for a vote within a few weeks, according to Koenig. Grattan and Vasquez write for the Associated Press.
