Not really, Imakeholesinu. I agree with Sine. A lot of this is the result of silent-majority Republicans who love nothing better than to see anyone who's been accused of petty crimes locked up and hurt badly. Those silent-majority types literally have the cruelty of Morgan le Fay when it comes to this crap...they repeatedly call for throwing the book at anybody who dares to contradict the (still largely Republican, after the last seventy years) law of the land. Those folks want to HURT people - more so, in my experience, than the majority of these prisoners who might be released. The incarcerations involved are often not really that dangerous, if you're not a vicious, judgemental, cowardly stay-at-home mom who thinks that smoking pot once makes somebody a drug abuser and criminal and please for the love of God arrest this person before they rape me and my husband and children. Look at Sine's graph, this stuff really started spiking under Reagan (and his War on Inner Cities, more or less) on its way to a five-times rise in our prison population.
My guess is that the vast majority of people being let go are pot dealers, dumbass wannabe pot dealers, young minority kids who got caught doing crack, etc., etc. I know some folks like that down in the rougher neighborhood I lived in for awhile. They're not particularly upstanding, and they're not stone cold violent inhuman child molesting cocaine freebasing murderers either. They're just..kind of...fuckups.
Personally, I don't feel particularly frightened by it much. I just think it's going to be harder to go to jail in California over some really stupid bullshit. There are going to be some dangerous people who get let out, but - I hate to break it to people - there are already PLENTY of incredibly dangerous people all over California anyway. This is what happens when you have a political party whose unsustainable incarceration policies, at their core, are more about making silent-majority folks who can't manage their fears well feel safe at night rather than actually making people safer at night.
I will admit to a certain amount of Schaedenfraude at thinking about the number of entitled, selfish silent-majority folks who I'm sure are losing sleep at night over the whole thing.