Tag: prison

Video: The Impact of Realignment on Recidivism

California embarked on a major public safety reform in 2011, when it shifted responsibility for lower-level felony offenders from the state to the counties. Prompted by a federal court order to reduce prison overcrowding, this realignment resulted in a dramatic drop in the prison population and a decline in overall incarceration levels. A related goal was to reduce the state’s persistently high recidivism rates. Has it worked it out that way?

A new PPIC report looking at the first two years of realignment finds that it has had a modest effect on recidivism, which has varied across counties and groups of offenders. The report is based on data from 12 counties that are representative of the state. It examines recidivism through two measures—rearrest and reconviction rates—for offenders affected by the change. Mia Bird, report coauthor presented the results at a Sacramento briefing last week.

Bird outlined several key findings, including:

  • Slightly higher recidivism rates among individuals on post-release community supervision (PRCS). These offenders were released from state prison after serving time for certain low-level felonies and then supervised by county probation agencies. Higher rates of recidivism in some counties—notably Los Angeles County, the largest—are a major factor.
  • No consistent effect on recidivism among individuals sentenced under section 1170(h) of the California Penal Code. These offenders were sentenced for a specific set of lower-level felonies and, under realignment, served time in county jail rather than state prison.
  • Lower recidivism among 1170(h) offenders who received “straight sentences”—but mixed results among those with “split sentences.” The group serving “straight sentences”—jail time only—had the best outcomes: the same two-year rearrest rates and two-year reconviction rates that are lower. Those who got “split sentences”—jail time followed by probation supervision—had higher rates of rearrest but lower rates of reconviction compared with similar individuals before realignment.

Bird said she expects these results to vary over time as the composition of offenders changes and counties gain experience with evidence-based practices to reduce recidivism. In addition, further study is needed of the higher recidivism rates for groups that are supervised after their release. It could be that more individuals are reoffending—or it could be that their misconduct is more likely to be detected because they are being monitored more closely under probation supervision, Bird said.

New Laws Expand Criminal Justice Reforms

Governor Jerry Brown recently signed a number of bills that extend the state’s efforts to reform California’s adult and juvenile criminal justice system. This legislative package supplements previous reforms; several of the new laws could further reduce the state’s prison population, which remains subject to a court-ordered population target. The bills cover issues at all levels, including arrest, conviction, incarceration, and parole.

Arrest and conviction

  • SB 395 strengthens protections for arrested minors under the age of 16 by requiring that they confer with an attorney prior to waiving their Miranda rights and being interrogated by police. AB 529 allows juveniles to have their records sealed if they are not convicted. SB 312 allows juvenile offenders convicted of serious or violent offenses committed after the age of 14 to have their records sealed.
  • SB 393 allows adults to request that the court seal their records if they are arrested but not convicted.

Sentence enhancements

  • Sentence enhancements allow prosecutors to seek additional prison time in certain circumstances—such as the use of a firearm or gang involvement. The number of enhancements has increased dramatically over the past 30 years. SB 180 eliminates the three-year sentence enhancement for certain circumstances related to selling drugs, though it leaves in place the enhancement for using minors in the sale of illegal drugs. SB 620 allows judges the discretion to dismiss or strike sentence enhancements for offenders who are in possession of a firearm while committing a crime.

Parole

  • AB 1308 and SB 394 raise the age limit for youth parole from 23 to 25, and grant the possibility of parole for juvenile offenders serving life sentences after they serve at least 25 years.
  • AB 1448 allows certain offenders older than 60 who have been incarcerated for more than 25 years to be released to parole. It is worth noting that AB 1448 codifies a practice that has been helping the state reduce overcrowding: a total of 557 offenders were released under this program between February 2014 and August 2017.

Impact of supervision on juveniles and families

  • SB 625 reinstates honorable discharges for juvenile offenders who have “proven their ability to desist from criminal behavior.” An honorable discharge removes long-term penalties, such as the ban on juvenile offenders working as police officers.
  • SB 190 limits the financial liability of families for the housing, transport, or supervision of juvenile offenders.

The goal of these laws is to improve offender outcomes by emphasizing rehabilitation and reentry to the community—and possibly reducing pressure on the state budget. State lawmakers believe these bills are grounded in evidence-based practices. For example, the reduction of long-term penalties for juveniles and young adults is grounded in neuroscientific evidence that decision-making ability does not mature fully until the mid-20s.

Two bills that aim to reform the state’s bail system, AB 42 and SB 10, did not reach the governor’s desk this legislative year. However, the debate over bail reform will most likely continue in 2018. Advocates for reform believe that evidence-based practices that base pre-trial release decisions on an offender’s likelihood of appearing in court or reoffending—not his or her financial means—could significantly reduce the number of pre-trial offenders held in county jails. Opponents believe that the current bail system is the best way to make pre-trial release decisions while protecting public safety.

Next Steps for Proposition 57

The passage of Proposition 57 brings significant changes to California’s criminal justice system. At the same time, the initiative lacks specificity and there is great uncertainty about what its impact might be.

The measure increases the chances for parole of felons in state prison who are convicted of nonviolent crimes and expand inmates’ opportunities to earn credits for good behavior. This loosening of parole rules will ease prison overcrowding through the early release of thousands of inmates. Less controversially, it will also allow judges, rather than prosecutors, to decide if juvenile defendants over age 14 can be tried in adult court.

Proposition 57’s impact will depend on which inmates will be eligible for parole, how early they are released, and the effectiveness of the new credits—which will depend, in part, on whether the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) has the capacity to immediately provide effective rehabilitative programs.

The initiative is the latest of a number of reforms adopted since 2009, when a federal court issued a mandate to reduce overcrowding in the state’s prison system to improve inmate health care. Over the past several years, the total prison population has declined by about 41,000. At 113,700, the institutional population is now almost 2,200 below the court-mandated target of 137.5% of design capacity. Early in 2016, however, the prison population began to increase, and is now about 1,900 higher than it was at the end of January. If this average monthly increase of more than 200 inmates continues, the prison population could be above the mandated target within a year.

Proposition 57 gives CDCR two tools to address this population pressure. First, it makes prison inmates serving time for “non-violent” felonies eligible for parole consideration after serving the full sentence for their primary offenses, without having to serve time for additional crimes or enhancements, such as gang affiliation or prior felonies. But it is not clear which specific crimes will make inmates ineligible for early parole. The list of 23 violent felonies in the state penal code does not include crimes such as assault with a deadly weapon, certain rapes, and some gang crimes.

If eligibility is extended to those who have not been convicted of these 23 violent offenses, the Legislative Analyst Office (LAO) estimates that about 30,000 inmates currently in state prison would be eligible for early parole, as would an additional 7,500 inmates admitted in each year thereafter. However, the number of inmates who will be granted early release will almost certainly be lower than 30,000. The CDCR has the discretion to determine eligibility, and eligible inmates will be granted parole based on their assessed risk to public safety by the Board of Parole Hearings (BPH). There were 5,300 parole suitability hearings in 2015, and BPH granted parole to only 906 inmates, a rate of about 17%.

Second, and importantly, the initiative gives CDCR authority to award credits for good behavior and rehabilitative or educational achievements. In addition to reducing the prison population, the incentive of early release based on completion of programs aimed at reducing the likelihood of reoffending is also likely to increase inmate demand for approved rehabilitative or educational programming.

The proposition’s advocates hope that more effective programming combined with incentives to participate will better prepare inmates for reentry into the community. They also hope it will lower the state’s high recidivism rates—we recently reported that about two-thirds of inmates released from prison are rearrested within two years and about two-fifths are re-convicted of a new crime.

It will be up to the CDCR secretary to determine which programs are credit-eligible and the size of the credit inmates would receive for participating. It is unclear whether CDCR will have the capacity to meet new demand for these programs—this will be crucial to implementing Proposition 57.

A key question to be answered in the years to come is whether Proposition 57 will affect crime rates. To answer it, we need to know how many inmates are released early, who they are, and to what extent they complete effective programming.

For all of the unknowns, one aspect of Proposition 57 is clear: it does push the state to focus on evaluating, implementing, and meeting the demand for evidence-based programs that help inmates prepare for successful reentry into the community.

Video: Assessing Corrections Reforms

California leads the nation in correctional reforms. It has dramatically reduced incarceration and done so without a major increase in crime rates, a new PPIC report concludes. But the state and counties still faces major challenges. A panel of state and local experts discussed them in Sacramento last week. Among some of the challenges:

  • Preventing the prison population from increasing. Under federal court order to reduce prison overcrowding, California enacted public safety realignment and quickly reduced the prison population to about 200,000 inmates. But Scott Kernan, secretary of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said it may be a challenge to keep the number of inmates below the court-mandated target. Based on population projections, the prisons will run out of available beds soon, he said.

  • Continuing to improve prison health care. California continues to operate under a court-ordered federal receivership. Although the state has invested significantly to improve inmate health services, the receiver has turned over management of health care to the state at only 7 of the state’s 34 prisons. Kernan said the state is on a path toward full control.

  • Adapting to changing jail populations. The counties—sheriffs, probation departments, and the courts—have had to quickly adjust, first to an increase in their populations under realignment, then to an decrease under Proposition 47, which reduced penalties on some drug and property crimes. Today, jails built for short stays now house more serious offenders for longer periods. Probation departments had to quickly build relationships with community organizations to develop reentry services, said Wendy Still, Alameda County’s chief probation officer. “What I think is amazing,” she said, “Is just how fast the counties were able to make this shift and to be able to create the partnerships, to break down the barriers and begin to create these systems of care—and also to retrain their staffs.”

  • Understanding the impact of Proposition 47 on crime rates. The PPIC report says the impact of Proposition 47 on crime is not yet clear. Geoff Dean, Ventura County sheriff, argued that it has been significant and that it has clogged courts. He and Still both said that by reducing some felony drug offenses to misdemeanors, Proposition 47 removed incentives for offenders with substance abuse problems to get treatment. Before Proposition 47, certain offenders convicted of felonies went to drug court as an alternative to traditional prosecution, and they were required to get treatment. Misdemeanor offenders don’t face the same sanctions. “There’s a whole segment of that population that’s not getting treatment,” he said. “And the cycle continues.”

Panelists echoed the conclusions of PPIC report coauthor Magnus Lofstrom. The state and counties need to identify and implement cost-effective strategies to reduce re-offending—to reduce pressures on prisons and jails, improve public safety, reduce spending, and improve the lives of those in the corrections system and their families.

Video: Realignment and Crime

Since 2011, when California shifted responsibility for tens of thousands of lower-level felons from the state to the local level, there is evidence that property crime remains higher than it would have been without the realignment policy. But there has been no observable impact on violent crime.

The findings of the report, Realignment, Incarceration and Crime Trends in California, were presented in Sacramento last week by the authors, Magnus Lofstrom, PPIC senior research fellow, and Steve Raphael, PPIC adjunct fellow. Among the issues that emerged in discussion with the audience, were the causes of the property crime increase and additional research that indicates higher staffing for police departments is an effective deterrent for crime.

How California Reduced Its Prison Population

After years of struggling with a 2009 federal court order to reduce the population in the state’s overcrowded prisons, the inmate population has reached the target of 113,700 (based on current capacity), roughly a year ahead of schedule. A look at historic prison and jail data reveals that this milestone has been achieved to a significant extent by adding capacity and simply shifting inmates to institutions not subject to the court order. As a result, cost savings from the various efforts appear lacking so far. The state’s spending on corrections is now at a historic high.

Since reaching its peak in 2006 of about 163,000, the institutional prison population has dropped dramatically, by slightly more than 49,000. The court order mandated that inmate population be reduced to 137.5 percent of design capacity, or the number of inmates the facilities were intended to house.

Realignment, the state’s biggest correction reform, was a response to the court. It shifted incarceration of many lower-level felons and parole violators from state prison to county jails, beginning in 2011. However, a significant share of the prison population—about 18,000 inmates—declined before realignment. Most of this drop happened between 2009 and 2011 and was driven by policy changes such as SB 678, which created financial incentives for counties to lower the number of felony probationers they sent to state prison. Realignment then led to the largest decline, about 28,000, in the state’s institutional prison population. The post-realignment drop occurred in the first year of the reform.

The prison population did not start to decline further until November 2014, when voters passed Proposition 47, which classifies a number of drug and property offenses as misdemeanors instead of felonies. Since then, the institutional prison population has dropped an additional 3,000, which pushed the number of inmates below 137.5 percent of design capacity.

The state has met the crucial federally mandated target, but not—as reform proponents hoped—by a major reduction in costly prison incarceration. Here’s a rough breakdown of how this was achieved.

First, the decline of about 18,000 inmates in the institutional population prior to realignment was partly accomplished by housing about 9,000 offenders in private prison facilities out of state—a practice that continues on about the same order of magnitude. Second, since the implementation of realignment, the state has also incarcerated an additional 3,900 inmates in public and private facilities in the state. California has also opened up a new state prison health care facility in Stockton with a capacity of almost 3,000 inmates. Third, since realignment shifted responsibilities of many lower-level felons and parole violator to the counties, the county jail population has increased by about 11,500, as of June 2014 (the numbers may have come down some since then because of Proposition 47). In sum, roughly one half of the reduction of the institutional prison population since its 2006 peak was achieved by increasing capacity and simply shifting inmates to other facilities.

California has indeed seen a significant decrease in the reliance on incarceration over the last decade through policies like SB 678 and realignment, as well as initiatives like 2012 Proposition 36 (which revised California’s “Three Strikes” law) and Proposition 47. Our total incarceration rate has dropped from about 702 per 100,000 residents in 2006 to about 568. Unfortunately this is not reflected in the state’s expenditures. In fact, spending on corrections is now at a historic high. A look at corrections spending going back to the 1970s shows a long-term increase. In the current budget year, the state is spending more than $12 billion on corrections. In other words, meeting the federally mandated target does not mean that California has solved its incarceration problem.

Research shows that incarceration at current levels is not a cost-effective way to prevent crime. Clearly we need to refine our crime prevention strategy and look more closely for effective alternative approaches to manage public safety.

Will Proposition 47 Save Money?

Earlier this month California voters passed Proposition 47, which classifies a number of drug and property offenses as misdemeanors instead of felonies or “wobblers” (wobblers may be charged as misdemeanors or felonies at the discretion of the prosecutor). Moreover, the new law—which went into effect November 5—permits offenders to file for resentencing, meaning that those who are resentenced could be released from jail or prison.

Based on limited data, the Legislative Analyst Office estimates that roughly 40,000 offenders per year will be affected by Proposition 47 and that total county and state savings associated with the reform may be in the “high hundreds of millions of dollars annually.” The bulk of the state savings will be aimed at reducing re-offending by providing funding for mental health and substance abuse treatment.

A clear short-term benefit of this reform is that it is likely to help the state meet the federally mandated reductions in the prison population by February 2016. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation estimates that around 4,700 inmates are eligible to petition for release from prison under Proposition 47.

The greatest impact, however, might be at the county jails. Because of the 2011 corrections realignment reform, most of the lower-level offenders now covered under Proposition 47 are serving their sentences in county jail instead of state prison. Recent reports that focused on the proposition’s expected jail savings, using the LAO’s estimate of 40,000 affected offenders per year, put the local savings from the proposition somewhere between $400 and $700 million.

While substantial savings may very well occur from housing fewer inmates affected by Proposition 47 in county jails, a closer look suggests expectations may be too optimistic.

First, the data used to generate the LAO estimate of the number of affected offenders also show that about 30 percent of the convictions in 2012 did not result in jail time, but rather in a straight probation term. The largest share of convictions, about 41 percent, led to a jail term followed by probation. Only 11 percent of convictions resulted in a straight jail sentence. In other words, even though the data suggest that the estimated number of affected offenders is 40,000 annually, the potential number of convictions directly affecting the jail population would be roughly half that number.

Second, the estimated local savings from Proposition 47 are based on the assumption that newly freed jail beds will remain empty. Given that jail overcrowding in California compelled the early release of 71,000 sentenced offenders for the period between April 2013 and March 2014, this assumption may not hold. A likely response to the newly freed jail beds will be to refill them with inmates, who absent the proposition, would have been released early due to overcrowding. While using freed beds to reduce early releases may limit savings, it may also bring a new degree of integrity to sentencing and alleviate the public safety concerns associated with these early releases.

In the end, the Proposition 47 budget savings may fall short of projections—but the proposition may well bring other benefits, including fewer releases due to overcrowding. Furthermore, the passage of Proposition 47 means that offenders convicted of these lower-level offenses—who otherwise have a clean record—will be spared the stigma of a felony record. In this way, the proposition may ultimately lead to less re-offending because those charged under its new sentencing standards will have greater access to jobs and housing than they would if they had become convicted felons.