On June 24, 2025, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors diverted the vast majority of unspent funds from the Care First Community Investment (CFCI), a grant program serving justice-impacted communities.
This contradicts the spirit of Measure J, a voter-approved initiative specifically designed to support anti-incarceration programs. The measure was created in 2020, in the wake of the police killings of George Floyd and LA resident Dijon Kizzee and the ensuing global civil rights protests.
The Justice Care and Opportunities Department (JCOD) the administrator for the annual CFCI fund, performed an audit in February 2025 with support from County CEO Fesia Davenport and found a total of $219 million in unspent funds. Then — without public comment or the consent of the CFCI advisory committee — the board approved Davenport’s proposal to reallocate approximately $150 million.
Measure J has received renewed attention since it was discovered that it had been inadvertently eliminated by Measure G due to a “clerical error” — as reported by multiple outlets, including Politico. Measure G, which passed in 2024, allows for the expansion of the Board of Supervisors from five to nine members, and includes other ethics initiatives.
La Defensa, a community-based advocacy organization dedicated to “decarcerating the largest jail population in the US,” was incensed by the board’s decision to reallocate the funds without public comment. In April, they demanded the immediate protection “of Measure J & CFCI funds” to “support mental health services, workforce development, and violence prevention.”
Supervisor Holly Mitchell’s office did not respond to multiple requests by phone and email. However, in an Instagram post on June 24, she said the CFCI Fund is a “public mandate” based on Measure J intended to “ensure that portions of the County’s dollars go directly to community organizations that further alternatives to incarceration.” While she admitted that “LA County is home to the largest jail system in the world,” she still voted to divert the funds for “a wide range of critical services like Right to Counsel, eviction defense, and job training.”
Supervisor Mitchell went on to explain that the public and CFCI advisory committee, “comprised of residents and advocates,” should “weigh-in on how our County budgets” invest in “Care First Jails Last strategies.” Yet, this essential part of the process did not take place at all prior to the board’s decision on June 24.
LA is in the midst of a budget crisis, due in part to federal cuts and to a record $4 billion sexual abuse lawsuit. But, according to Derek Steele, chair of the CFCI advisory committee, there is no “causal connection” between the budget crisis and the board’s reallocation of unspent funds. Instead, he told Knock LA, it was a confluence of these two emergencies, along with the unprecedented January wildfires, ICE raids, and other “impending community issues” that caused a fervor to find funds for “different motions … prioritized by the board.”
Steele continued, “So, when the CEO’s budget team looked for places to find funding, the only place that had resources available was the unspent CFCI office.”
Since the June 24 vote, Steele said, the CFCI has been forced to construct two separate tiers for community proposals. Tier I is based on the full $219 million and Tier II is based on a shrunken $50 million pot.
One such proposal came from the LA County Department of Public Health (DPH) Nutrition & Physical Activity Program, which sought $10 million. This would fund a whopping three quarters of their annual program, which was completely defunded by the Republican passage of the “Big Beautiful Bill” on July 4.
After multiple requests for an interview with the director of nutrition, Dipa Shah-Patel, the DPH Media team refused for reasons that are unclear, instead opting to respond to sample questions emailed to them. This followed a confusing pattern of message control from the communications department: when interview requests were submitted in June regarding the impending SNAP-Ed cuts, the department diverted all questions to the director of social services before eventually responding to a list of sample e-mail questions. However, their own webpage details instructions for students to conduct interviews.
Steven Trapasso — executive director for Seeds of Hope, a funded county partner that distributes millions of pounds of produce annually — told Knock LA, at first, CFCI was not planning on hearing any proposal regarding food insecurity. This was due to the fact that they believed it was not relevant to the five categories for anti-incarceration programs: 1) diversion, behavioral health, and wellness; 2) economic opportunity and sustainability; 3) education access andyouth development; 4) housing stability; and 5) re-entry and community reintegration.
Perhaps food is not the first thing that comes to mind when someone hears the phrase “anti-incarceration.” However, there is increased scholarship linking malnutrition and misconduct. For instance, Nourish California, a nonprofit organization based in Oakland, found that more than four out of five people who have been incarcerated or have a household member who has experienced incarceration had “worried about running out of food in the past year.”
Furthermore, the American Economic Journal published an article in 2019 concluding that food-stamp bans increase recidivism among “drug traffickers … suggesting that the cut in benefits causes ex-convicts to return to crime to make up for the lost transfer income.”
Since public comment commenced, CFCI has reconsidered DPH’s proposal and is now slated to fund them at $5.8 million (per Tier I) or $1.9 million (per Tier II), both well below the needs of the department.
According to Steele, food insecurity was not initially considered by the CFCI team because the DPH proposal did not score high with regards to the “priority areas” for “alternatives to incarceration” and the “different populations we serve.” He explained that part of the reason might have been due to the overworked nature of their judges, who had to adjudicate 259 proposals in three weeks.
For Trapasso, the CFCI process felt “undemocratic” — in that it was all based on whether a proposal was handed to a lenient or a critical judge, rather than on a fair assessment of the proposal itself.
While Steele believes this is an unfair critique, he highlighted the importance of public comment in steering a political ship toward better policy.
“A community open process [forces] decision makers to be aware this is a priority [which needs to be uplifted].”
Noting that additional proposals scored low and were later elevated via public comment, Steele pivoted the conversation back to the controversy around the Board of Supervisors decision on June 24.
“It was a set of, maybe four or five people in a room, who made the decision about how the [unspent, one-time] funds were going to be allocated,” he said. “Yeah, you may have read a few of the reports on what previous things we were trying to fund, and made some decisions based off that, but having an open process is the spirit of Measure J. So, the community made their point and when we read through the comments and heard from people, [we thought] let’s reassess here [in regards to the DPH proposal and others].”
That type of reassessment has yet to occur for the Board of Supervisors.
Steele said that Angelenos interested in adding comments regarding the total funding allocation to justice-impacted communities can contact the offices of the Board of Supervisors by phone or by email. You can also call in to the cluster meeting on September 18, or the Board of Supervisors meeting on September 30.
