Jury Still Out on Realignment's Goal of Recidivism Reduction

This month, California quietly shed an unwanted title, going from the largest prison system in the country to the second-largest after the state of Texas.

The change comes amid a significant drop in the number of prisoners held in state facilities nine months into California's realignment plan, which aims to transfer low-level inmates to county jails and rehabilitation programs. The state's prison population has fallen from roughly 160,000 to 135,000 since last October, according to reports by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Some inmates have been released on parole while others are entered into post-release community supervision.

Critics of the department welcomed the precipitous drop but many say they remain unconvinced that the reduction signifies a shift in correctional philosophy rather than just a transfer from state buildings to local ones.

"What is the long-term plan for reaching an appropriate level of spending on incarceration in the state?" said Allen Hopper, criminal justice and drug policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. "We have the second highest recidivism rate in the country. We can't simply shift the problem to the counties and expect to have a different outcome. We have to figure out an alternative to incarceration."

Critics like Hopper point to recent signs that county jail populations are swelling and that they could continue to grow as signs that reducing the incarcerated population through rehabilitation programs like drug courts and job training seminars is not a main goal of realignment.

During the same period that the estimated 25,000 prisoners were removed from the state's ledgers, an estimated 12,200 county jail beds have opened or soon will open, according to analysis by the ACLU.

And just this week, the Legislature made a last-minute change to the state budget that would further increase the number of jail beds. Lawmakers on Monday earmarked an additional $500 million in Assembly Bill 1482, the state's budget bill, to go toward jail constructions bonds, Hopper said.

Law enforcement representatives dispute the ACLU study's estimated number of jail beds as too high but acknowledge that additional jail space is a high priority.

"There's no question we need more beds," said Nick Warner, the legislative director for the California State Sheriffs' Association. "We have to take into account that inmates are going to be here longer and have serious mental health and medical issues that we're not currently equipped to deal with.

Both sides need to take a more nuanced look at the problem, said Stanford Law School professor Joan Petersilia, who is the co-director of the school's Criminal Justice Center and a former adviser to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

"It's clearly not the intent of the law or the Legislature to basically downscale the prison population on the back of county jails," she said. "But if this is the way it has to be, we're still better off in the long run, even if former prison inmates are doing the same amount of time in jail" because inmates are closer to their home communities and the resources there.

The long-term development of county jail systems will be key, Petersilia said. If programmatic changes can be instituted along with an increase in beds, jails can become a springboard for inmates' successful re-entry into society, she added.

Central to the hybrid plans she worked on was Assembly Bill 900, a jail and prison construction finance bill passed in 2007. Initially, much of the funds were allocated for transitional facilities for offenders coming off a state prison sentence, but they have since been appropriated to build jails, according to Petersilia.

"The AB 900 money was to be used to help inmates exit out of prison," she said. "They would have been moved [from prison] in the last year of their sentence to these re-entry hubs where you can reconnect them to family and services in the community. Now [the state] has sort of repurposed that money for regular jails, but it's still possible to get the benefits of local programming."

The challenge of merging the often punitive culture of jails with more rehabilitative programs is compounded by several factors.

First, the state is not allocating to the counties an amount equivalent to what it used to house offenders, and even with shifting budget plans, it's all but impossible that they'd do so. The math simply will not work, according to Hopper.

"The Legislative Analyst's Office and the governor's office have both acknowledged that the amount of money they are sending to the counties isn't enough to keep locking up people up in the same way we have at the state level," he said.

Second, the same problem that sparked the state's prison litigation-overcrowding-is or will soon be affecting county jails like it did state lockups. In fact, 31 of the state's 58 counties are already under some sort of jail population cap, be it local, state or federal, according to Warner, the sheriffs' association representative.

That's put many sheriff's departments in a position where they have sole determination over who remains behind bars and who is released early. In many cases, only a fraction of the court's sentence is carried out under realignment.

"I have veteran deputies, guys who have been on the force for years, telling me they are releasing inmates who they shouldn't be," Warner said.

Despite the wrangling over realignment, there is some sense that a balance can be reached. Most observers agree nine months is hardly an adequate period from which to draw final conclusions about the vast array of changes that have been set in motion.

"Realignment is such a shift of people and responsibilities that we don't know how this will play out," Warner said. "But I suspect that we're going to be OK."

By Henry Meier, Staff Writer (The Daily Journal).