ON THE ISSUES
Franky will become the first-ever formerly incarcerated exoneree elected official in California, where he will put the people first.
His top legislative priorities include public safety via justice system reform and gun control, reinvesting in education and our regional workforce, expanding healthcare and reproductive healthcare access, and environmental protection.
Legal Reform and Safety
There is no candidate with more lived experience navigating the justice system. Franky recognizes he can utilize that experience to mend broken systems through effective and transformative policies. Despite spending 20 years wrongfully convicted in prison, Franky never lost hope in himself, the judicial system, or his unwavering faith in humanity. In 2011, his conviction was overturned due to his unwavering claims of innocence and belief that justice would prevail.
Since his release, Franky’s experience includes co-chairing Los Angeles’ successful Measure A campaign for sheriff’s department accountability, founding the Restorative Project (a holistic reentry initiative), working as a Senior Policy Advisor for the Los Angeles Innocence Project, sitting on the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s advisory board and serves as an appointee to the Los Angeles County Probation Commission, overseeing the same probation department that once confined him as a youth.
His commitment to righting the indignities and injustice in the system, providing opportunities for second chances, and youth prevention measures increase public safety and opportunities for “justice for all.”
In the Assembly, Franky will work to:
- Preventatively shift mental health, traffic, and substance abuse intervention responsibilities from armed police officers towards alternative responders to save lives and provide services to those in need. The current punitive approach often leads to increased criminalization of people of color and underserved communities.
- Take punitive and prevention measures to address serious misconduct by those sworn to serve and protect with policies that address officer misconduct.
- Eliminate ineffective sentencing enhancements and mandatory minimums. Franky believes the current extreme sentencing measures do not increase public safety and have led to overcrowded prisons/industrial prison complex.
- Champion reforms that focus on women and children impacted by the criminal justice system.
- Expand programs that have utilized a credible messenger approach, ensuring more rehabilitative opportunities are available.
- Balance comprehensive opportunities for second-look sentencing with public safety.
- Support survivors who are due to restitution while creating economic opportunities that allow formerly incarcerated individuals to meet the restitution responsibilities.
- Reform youth incarceration systems with a focus on rehabilitation and mental health.
- Increase safety nets for youth to prevent a systemic pipeline into the mass incarceration system by ensuring they are receiving the age and culturally-appropriate programs and services they need.
- Invest in legislation reform that removes barriers to employment training and placement services, healthcare, transitional housing, and wraparound social services for people with criminal histories so they may transition out of incarceration and grow into contributing members of the community.
Housing Justice
For Franky, homelessness – and the conditions that lead up to it– are deeply personal. As an exoneree in 2011, Franky was left to rebuild his life without stable housing, a situation faced by many men and women upon reentry. Due to his firsthand experience, Franky understands that tackling homelessness involves more than just offering temporary housing; it requires establishing an inclusive economy and providing housing opportunities for everyone.
He believes the existing bureaucracy – splintered between cities, counties and the State – has become a life-threatening hurdle to progress and will work to cut red tape to get our unhoused a roof over their heads, faster. Franky believes at the heart of the current housing affordability problem is the lack of low-income housing at the scale necessary to make significant progress in addressing our housing needs.
In the Assembly, Franky would work to:
- Fund new housing development, streamline approval processes for affordable housing, establish low-barrier navigation centers, create supportive housing and create more local accountability to build new housing and increase homeownership
- Bolster resources to deal with homelessness and mental health in addition to recently passed Prop 1
- Work with federal partners to increase the value of Section 8 vouchers and funding for wraparound services
- Direct state funding to more efficiently provide mental health and substance abuse recovery services to our unhoused
- Rather than simply hiring more armed officers in dealing with mental health calls, Franky will work with law enforcement entities to assign mental health professionals to law enforcement divisions
Healthcare Justice
Franky, having experienced firsthand the dire consequences of limited access to proper healthcare, recognizes it as a potential death sentence, as seen with his father. During Franky’s wrongful imprisonment, his father suffered from inadequate care by unlicensed providers, ultimately succumbing without the benefit of proper healthcare.
Franky knows how detrimental lack of healthcare can be. Give the millions of uninsured Californians, Franky is committed to:
- Universal quality care, to be achieved through cutting detrimental factors that inflate costs for a creation of a single-payer health care system.
- Investment in community clinics and healthcare centers to serve the underserved facing harsh realities of health disparity.
- Work with healthcare partners to address safe staffing levels and an increase in retention of healthcare workers, build our equipment reserves, and improve patient safety regardless of immigration status or housing status.
- Easing in prescription costs. No one should choose between medicine and other basic human needs.
- Reframe the conversation of healthcare in communities of color, including: mandated public reporting data to identify and solve systematic disparities in care and prevention; and investing in the expansion of linguistically and culturally appropriate care in underserved communities.
- Improve reimbursement rates and streamline administrative procedures to increase the number of therapists willing to take patients whose care is paid for by HMOs and insurers.
Economic Justice
Job security is an increasing concern for all professions, from mechanical advancements to Artificial Intelligence and is key to anti-recidivism efforts. It is increasingly essential we prepare, adapt, and protect our workforce.
Franky recognizes secure employment is an essential need and right, and he will fight to:
- Ensuring resources are available for job retraining in the community to protect the under-represented who have faced and continue to face challenges in a changing job market, so they are not left behind.
- Secure workers’ rights and work with unions to not fear retaliation and unsafe conditions.
- Push for local communities, schools, hospitals, and small businesses to see the benefit of investment in job training. The opportunity for workers to earn a living wage, regardless of background, is an investment in the community.
Gun Reform
Guns hurt people every day; we must continue to get guns off our streets and increase awareness of the harm they cause to our communities with their accessibility.
In the Assembly, Franky would work to:
- Extend the efforts to remove guns off our streets, including the amplification of red flag measures and rigorous background checks for those under domestic violence and stalking restraining orders and mental health considerations.
- Legislatively advocate for the removal of military-style weapons and ammunition from our streets, as we have seen an increase in their deadly use in mass shootings.
Franky Carrillo is a recipient of the Moms Demand Action Gun Sense Candidate Designation
Education
Education is a determining factor in whether a person can access quality healthcare, find employment that pays a living wage, and live in a safe environment — all factors that affect the well-being of our youth.
Franky has witnessed how the educational system plays a major determinant in both the future of children and the region in which they live. In a district made up largely of children from low income families of color, he believes they have a right to equitable educational opportunity, regardless of race or economic status. That is why Franky will fight to improve our schools and work to address the inequality gap in our schools by:
- Fighting for increased per-pupil spending, to access additional school resources. After adjusting for differences in labor costs across states, California is underfunded in its public school per pupil spending, hurting our most vulnerable students disproportionately.
- Advocating for competitive salaries for our children’s teachers
- Reinvesting in our youth via high quality after-school programming to address the needs of our diverse community.
- Reducing the class size while partnering to increase teacher and education staff retention with additional training opportunities for a committed workforce.
Reproductive Justice
Franky is an advocate for reproductive justice and will continue to support and protect a woman’s right to safe, accessible, and legal abortions. The right-wing Republicans want to remove any means of safe abortions from grasp, including abortion pills. Franky believes the decision is between a woman and her healthcare providers. He is committed to fighting to ensure it remains a right in California.
Environmental Justice
The environmental repercussions of past policy decisions are evident in what we see, drink, and eat. Urgent legislative action is necessary to address climate change promptly while safeguarding our water and air.
In the Assembly, Franky will work to:
- Bring resources from the Inflation Reduction Act, a Green New Deal and state legislation into the community for increased clean air and water quality. Our communities of color are disproportionately impacted by environmental racism and lack of remediation to fix the ecological mistakes of the past. Franky is that champion of environmental change.
- Fight to create, expand and protect open space and parks for our underserved area.
- Strengthen regulations and enforcement of toxic and hazardous waste pollution – holding polluters accountable for the damage and health risks they cause in our communities.
- Ensure a truly JUST transition to green jobs including significant resources for retraining.
Donate to help Franky win!
JOIN THE MOVEMENT
Paid for by Franky Carrillo for Assembly 2024 (FPPC ID #1463543)
P.O. Box 26933 Los Angeles, CA 90026
© All Rights Reserved
Support Franky Carrillo
Download our Social Media graphics and share! #FrankyCarrilloForAD52
