The U-T Editorial Board welcomes the landslide victory of Proposition 36 — the most significant result as of Tuesday nights deadline for the completion of Wednesdays Opinion page — as a triumph of sanity on public safety. It will no doubt be seen in some quarters as a revival of Californias lock-them-up-and-throw-away-the-key era. But the circumstances are different now than in 1994, when 72 percent of voters approved harsh three strikes and youre out sentencing rules. In 2014, 60 percent of voters backed Proposition 47, the measure that Proposition 36 will fix, despite strong warnings that it went too far in reducing criminal penalties. This big majority of voters believed in 47s humane, thoughtful selling point: The criminal justice system was too punitive and ruined the lives of many salvageable people.

Unfortunately, the 2014 initiative was ineptly crafted. It made the real-life penalties for retail theft so trivial that it immediately produced a revolving door system of justice in which the same individuals could be arrested dozens of times in a short order without ever changing their patterns of behavior. This is why polls indicated that a majority even of people who consider themselves progressive backed Proposition 36 — not because they yearn for a return to mass incarceration but because they realize reformers blew it with Proposition 47.

So where does California go from here? Thankfully, one of the states sharpest legal scholars points out an obvious reform that is built on the oldest sustained finding of criminologists: Crime is mostly a young mans game.

As University of San Francisco law professor Lara Bazelon recently detailed on X, there are 94,000 people in California prisons, and 40 percent were convicted of violent felonies; 16 percent are now over 50. Many have served decades after committing these crimes when they were quite young; they no longer remotely resemble their teenage/20-something selves. Continuing to lock them up — at the cost of a Yale tuition plus a Tesla per year — makes no sense from a public safety or a financial perspective. An FBI study found that 18-year-old males are nearly 10 times as likely to be as arrested as males aged 45-49 and more than 20 times as likely to be arrested as men aged 55-59. Yet as NPR reported in March, The proportion of state and federal prisoners who are 55 or older is about five times what it was three decades ago.

Reforms that respond to these maddening basic facts are what one would expect from Gavin Newsom, based on his carefully cultivated image as a policy deep thinker. Heres what would help both Californians and Newsoms frayed reputation: his working with Bazelon and other experts to shape proposals that advance Proposition 47s worthy goals. This effort should start with state leaders finally accepting that it is costly, unproductive and damaging to society to warehouse so many older inmates when there is no sound reason to do so.