Tag: prisons

Realignment: Progress and Challenges

Expectations were high when California rolled out public safety realignment in October 2011; many expressed optimism that the reform would significantly address prison overcrowding and reduce the state’s high recidivism rate.

Now that realignment is approaching the three-year mark, has the reform delivered? In some important ways, yes, it has. But a fundamental issue remains: the state still relies heavily on costly incarceration with limited crime preventive effects.

Realignment shifted responsibility for most lower-level felons from the state to the counties and reduced the state prison population by an impressive 27,000. Although most newly sentenced lower-level felons are serving their sentences in county jail instead of state prison, the majority of the prison population drawdown has been accomplished by essentially halting the practice of sending parole violators back to state prison. The one-year return-to-prison rate for released offenders has dropped by about 33 percentage points (from around 41% to about 8%).

Clearly some parole violators are serving time in county jails (there is no currently available statewide data on county sanctioning of parole or probation violations), but the reform’s stricter limit on how violations can be punished means that offenders now have more “street time.” Also contributing, counties now pay for sanctioning and many have limited jail space.

Importantly, our recent recidivism report shows that decreased reliance on incarceration as a sanction has not been accompanied by an increase in re-offending. In fact one-year re-arrest rates have come down by about 2 percentage points (from 61% to around 59%). In other words, significant reduction in the prison population and halting the use of prison as a sanction for parole violations and minor criminal offenses has moved corrections practices in the right direction in a very meaningful way.

However, the prison population is still above the federal limit, and it has recently started to increase. Furthermore, the reduction in the state prison population has been partially offset by an increase in the county jail population. The shift has put pressure on county jails, where the population has increased by about 11,000 since the October 2011 reform rollout and is continuing to grow.

In other words, the state prison system is still under pressure and now county jails face new challenges. Addressing these challenges solely by building more jails will be fiscally painful and is not likely to be a cost-effective way to prevent crime. Instead, the state needs to identify and implement alternative effective crime prevention strategies. This includes, as intended by the reform, targeted efforts guided by evidence-based practices to reduce re-offending. Among other things, this will require the state to support efforts to gather the data necessary to identify what works in California. But even if these efforts are successful, basic forces like population growth and fiscal stress are likely to force the state to consider sentencing reform and take a closer look at who we incarcerate and for how long.

Big Policy Shift Leads to Small Change in Recidivism

A recent briefing in Sacramento focused on PPIC’s new report on recidivism rates since public safety realignment policy began. This policy—which took effect in 2011—shifted responsibility for more than 30,000 offenders from the state to the local level.

The report—Is Public Safety Realignment Reducing Recidivism in California?—found a mixed result. Arrest rates overall are down slightly from the period before realignment. But the proportion of offenders who are convicted after arrest is up about 3 percent. The proportion of those arrested multiple times is up noticeably, probably reflecting the increased time released offenders spend on the streets because of county jails’ limited capacity.

The number of released offenders who return to prison was down more than 30 percent. PPIC research fellow Magnus Lofstrom presented the findings. He was joined on the dais by his two co-authors—PPIC research fellow Ryken Grattet and UC Berkeley policy professor Steven Raphael—for audience questions.

Evaluating Corrections Reforms

Three years into California’s dramatic experiment in decentralizing the adult criminal justice system, we still have very limited knowledge of which correctional programs and services are most effective at reducing recidivism and which counties are achieving success under realignment. Even more troubling, this is not the first time the state has made a major corrections policy change without putting in place the tools to evaluate it. Nearly 20 years ago, California initiated a similar experiment with the juvenile justice system, and we still lack the necessary data to evaluate its success. This time, the stakes are even higher.

To understand whether and how well corrections reforms work, we need individual-level data, records that allow us to follow people as they move through the corrections system. Unfortunately, neither reform effort mandated this type of data collection. Neither charged a single state entity with devising a means of collecting, standardizing, and integrating data across the myriad components of the criminal justice system—police, courts, jails, prisons, and parole and probation departments. In fact, in both cases realignment magnified data integration problems. It transferred responsibility for certain offenders from the state to the counties, further decentralizing authority over offender management and data collection.

Troubled state correctional facilities were an impetus for both juvenile and adult reform. In each case populations in youth and adult state facilities declined—as intended—after lower-level offenders were transferred from state to county authority. In the case of juvenile justice, the youth population in state facilities dropped by 69 percent between 2007 and 2013; in the adult system, the state prison population dropped by 17 percent between 2011 and 2013.

But the impact at the county level differed for juveniles and adults. Adult county jail populations have increased by 14 percent since reform of the adult system began. By contrast, juvenile populations—held in county juvenile halls, camps, and ranches— have dropped by 37 percent. This decline occurred even though the reform gave counties the incentive—and later the obligation—to retain lower-level offenders.

The juvenile justice reforms coincided with a steady drop in juvenile felony arrest rates. This decline undoubtedly played a role in the dwindling number of youths in county confinement. But what remains unknown is the role of county corrections programs in rehabilitating juveniles and, in turn, driving arrest rates down. Good data would help us to make those assessments.

Any sense of urgency to create an integrated data system may have been diminished by the decline in juvenile crime rates that followed the 2007 reform. These rates are still near historic lows. Similarly, adult crime rates are also near historic lows. Realignment of that system has resulted in only a modest rise in crime so far. If these historically low crime rates are the new normal, California may choose the same path it followed after juvenile justice realignment.

However, before choosing this path we should consider the stakes. About 200,000 adults, most of whom will return to their communities at some point, are incarcerated in California’s jails and prisons. This is 26 times larger than the number of youth confined in all state juvenile facilities, county juvenile halls, ranches, and camps. Californians should ask themselves if they want to forego a greater understanding of what will be most effective in helping to rehabilitate these offenders—now and in the future.