NEW STANFORD STUDY HAS 4 RECOMMENDED FIXES FOR REALIGNMENT
The passage of California’s Public Safety Realignment Act—AB 109—triggered what criminal justice experts describe as the most sweeping correctional experiment in recent history. Put into place just over two years ago, realignment transferred responsibility for the majority of our lower-level offenders from the state to California’s 58 counties.
By and large, realignment is a good and necessary idea. The previous system was costly, inefficient, and staggeringly ineffective when it came to fulfilling the task of returning people back to their communities better able to be law abiding residents.
Plus there was the matter of the federal court mandate to reduce the population of the state’s drastically overcrowded prisons by roughly 25% within two years.
However—and this is a big however—when the law was passed, it was, to a great degree, rushed into being in reaction to pressure from those federal judges. This meant that some parts of AB 109 were designed a lot better and more thoughtfully than other parts.
In other words, it is a system that is need of some improvement.
Regrettably, the state legislature has been unable to stop its political posturing along enough agree on what those improvements should look like.
That is why many were glad to see the newly released study examining the “intended and unintended effects” of realignment, conducted by the Stanford Criminal Justice Center, the research team led by the exceptionally smart Dr. Joan Petersilia.
In the course of the study—called Voices From the Field: How California Stakeholders View Public Safety Realignment— researchers interviewed police, sheriffs, judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, probation and parole agents, victim advocates, offenders and social service representatives.
And then they used that information to formulate 4 very sensible recommendations that will go a long way in fixing the most obvious problems that have surfaced in the realignment system.
The recommendations are as follows:
1. Allow criminal history to be considered when determining if the county or the state will supervise a parolee.
This is a no brainer. As it is, for state parolees leaving prison, only their current conviction offense is considered when determining if they will be placed in supervision with county probation, or whether they will stay with state parole. This means that certain people have been classified as non-serious, non-violent, non-sexual offenders—the N3’s, as they are called—and thus handed over to the various counties for supervision, even when they have convictions for serious violent crimes in their past.
We need a law that allows for more accurate triage.
2. County jail sentences should be capped at a maximum of three years.
County jails were constructed to house inmates for a maximum stay of one year. Putting people in jail with sentences of five, six, seven years is inappropriate and helps nobody.
It overcrowds jails, and it means that the inmates don’t have access to programming that prisons typically provide and jails, in general, do not—things like job training, exercise yard, classes, drug rehab and the like. In short, it defeats one of primary purposes of realignment—namely rehabilitation.
3. Certain repeated, technical violations should warrant a prison sentence.
We agree, within reason. However we emphatically do not want the state to return to the bad old days when most people returning to prison were being sent back for penny ante technical violations of their parole. That’s one of the things that got us into into the overpopulation mess in the first place.
However, sex offenders who merrily snip off their electronic monitors and abscond from supervision need to know that actions have consequences. They should go back to prison, not be given a few days in jail.
4. Create a statewide tracking database for offenders under supervision in the community.
This is a practical matter. It used to be that people released from state prison into the oversight of parole were all tracked by the same state database. Now all the realignment folks released into the care of country probation are no longer tracked by the state but are, instead, tracked by the various counties—which leads to a general mess.
Bottom line, all in all these are good recommendations if done correctly (and not regressively)—particularly the first three.
But they are only part of the picture. What the report also emphasizes is the necessity for each county to step up right now and use realignment as an opportunity to put into operation smart rehabilitative programs that can help lower the state’s awful recidivism rates:
The Legislature is giving California’s 58 counties more than $1 billion annually to support Realignment, and encouraging them to invest in locally run, evidence-based rehabilitation programs. Given California’s recent inability to control recidivism despite its enormous investment in imprisonment, policymakers are banking on counties to do a better job.
For a nation seeking new correctional approaches after the costly and arguably unproductive era of mass incarceration, California represents a high-stakes test kitchen. Realignment is anchored in the theory that by managing lower-level offenders in locally run, community-based programs using evidence-based practices, the state will achieve improved public safety outcomes by helping more former felons lead crime-free lives. Will Realignment help the state reduce its 67% recidivism rate, nearly twice the national average?
This is a critical question that has yet to be answered.
NOTE: This study is one in a series by Petersilia and her researchers. We’ll have a report on a second Stanford study later this week.)