Dude, crime is a symptom. As long as we refuse to address the underlying causes - poverty, racism, mental illness, addiction, gun proliferation- we are going to just have to learn to live with it.
First, people are being arrested for theft, they just aren't being prosecuted and imprisoned, because THERE IS NO MORE ROOM IN THE PRISONS.
Since we are talking about California in particular, a CONSERVATIVE Supreme Court ruled that California housing prisons at 200%+ of capacity in Brown v. Plata constitutes cruel and unusual punishment and must go down to a mere 137% capacity has kind of forced California's hand.
In a 48-page opinion, Kennedy laid out some of the facts of the case. Prisoners are not only doubled and tripled up in 6-by-9 cells but are stacked in bunks in areas meant to be gymnasiums, classrooms and even clinics. As many as 54 prisoners use one toilet, breeding disease, and medical care is so deficient that one prisoner dies needlessly every six to seven days. On the mental health side, prisoners awaiting care are often housed in "tiny, phone-booth sized cages," with some inmates falling into hallucinations and catatonic states, and suicides well above national norms.
Justice Kennedy pointed out that the state had repeatedly agreed to fix these conditions by building more prisons, but the Legislature didn't provide the money, and the overcrowding just grew worse. Given California's ongoing budgetary crisis, Kennedy observed, there is no possibility the state can "build itself out of" its overcrowding problem, so the state will have to choose a combination of other methods, even perhaps release of nonviolent prisoners to reduce the state prison population.
So now realizing you can't overcrowd the prisons, and you aren't building any new cells, what are your options? You have to make a decision on who gets locked up because he is truly dangerous, and who gets let go because his crime, while a pain in the ass, was non-violent.