Ten Years After Prop 47, California Goes Full Circle And Starts Fighting Retail Crime It's called blowback: several years after California passed Proposition 47, which reclassified felony theft offenses as misdemeanors and effectively greenlit shoplifting of items below $950, the retail industry had had enough, and the same state that idiotically tried to give minorities a back-handed reparation by encouraging their petty theft (with the tongue-in-cheek promise of not prosecuting it), the state has seen countless retailers flee, social cohesion collapse, crime explode and after a decade of Prop 47, the circle is complete as California just enacted a package of bills to fight the very same retail crime it initially encouraged.