Detailing backstories around effort to roll back key criminal justice reform aspects of California's Prop 47

The New York Times has this new extended article providing a lot of context (but not a lot of legal details) for the ballot measure coming before California voters to revise significantly a criminal justice reform proposition from a decade ago.  The full headline of the article details its themes: "Frustrated Californians May Be Ready for a Tougher Approach to Crime: Shoplifting and fentanyl use have tested the patience of California voters, who will decide in November whether to impose stricter laws that would lead to more incarceration."  I recommend the piece in full, and here are snippets:

Californians of all political stripes have become fed up with the problems plaguing supermarkets and retail stores, not to mention car break-ins and open-air drug use.  Some top Democrats, including Mayor London Breed of San Francisco, have joined conservatives in denouncing a cascade of smaller crimes that have contributed to a sense of lawlessness in major cities. Now the state’s lawmakers and voters are weighing what to do.

With public sentiment in the state shifting toward stiffer punishment, California finds itself debating whether to roll back decade-old changes that sharply reduced the state’s inmate count and made it a leader in reducing mass incarceration.

A coalition of law enforcement figures, business owners and relatives of fentanyl addicts want to reverse the 2014 ballot measure known as Proposition 47, which reduced penalties for shoplifting and drug possession.  That measure has been blamed so often for the state’s crime woes that it is among the few past initiatives that residents can identify by number.... With financial help from the giant retailers Target, Home Depot and Walmart, the coalition has gotten a ballot measure qualified for the November election that would impose harsher punishments for crimes that result in lighter charges or no prosecution today.

Proposition 47 reduced most drug-possession crimes to misdemeanors, and raised the threshold for thefts to be charged as felonies, to $950 in property or more.  The measure allowed people to get out of prison early if they were incarcerated under the old laws, and it reduced the number of people sent to prison.  It also funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to services for people returning home from prison, helping to reduce the rate of recidivism, according to a study by a state regulator....

The fate of Proposition 47 will be decided by California’s nearly 27 million eligible voters in November. Nearly a million people signed a petition to amend Proposition 47 by imposing tougher sentences for shoplifting and drug possession.