Proposition 36, with campaign funding from George Soros, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and others, revised the state’s Three Strikes initiative to impose a life sentence only when the new felony conviction was considered “serious or violent.” Significantly, it allowed inmates already in prison to be re-sentenced if their third strike was not serious or violent and if a judge determined they did not pose a risk to public safety. The initiative passed with almost 70% of the vote in 2012.
And Proposition 47, approved by voters in 2014, converted many nonviolent offenses, such as shoplifting, writing bad checks and drug possession, from felonies to misdemeanors. The campaign to pass the measure was funded in part by the American Civil Liberties Union and supported by Newt Gingrich and Jay-Z, who told a crowd at the Rose Bowl to support the initiative and then launched into “Hard Knock Life.”
It’s unclear if Jay-Z tipped the balance on the initiative, which passed with 59.6% of the vote.
Realignment and Local Crime
In his first year in office, Brown and the Legislature faced a huge task. In response to the court’s order, the state came up with its own radical transformation, which came with the typically bureaucratic, slightly Orwellian moniker of “realignment.” In short, the state decided to shift thousands of offenders convicted of nonviolent, non-serious and non-sex-related offenses from the overcrowded prisons to the state’s county jails.
The new law, AB 109, reclassified the way the state looked at about 500 crimes to effectively eliminate the possibility of prison time. It applied to anyone convicted of a crime after Oct. 1, 2011, and changed the statutes throughout California law, from the penal to the motor vehicle codes.
Before and after it was signed by Brown, some lawmakers and local law enforcement predicted the law would lead to an increase in crime at a local level because thousands of inmates would now be housed, and released on probation, in their towns and cities. One scenario predicted that prison gangs would be able to “establish deeper ties at the local level.” In early 2013, William Lansdowne, then the San Diego police chief, said he saw an increase in gang activity after realignment because the state had shifted probation monitoring to the counties.
So did changing the sentencing laws and realignment really cause a spike in crime? The most comprehensive study was conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California and the University of California, Berkeley, and it took up an entire issue of The Annals of the American Academy of Political & Social Science.
Their answer: No, with one exception:
“The only crime increase attributable to realignment is a modest rise in property crime, driven entirely by auto theft. [The researchers] estimate that realignment raised the auto theft rate by slightly more than 70 per 100,000 residents. All else equal, California’s auto theft rate is about 17 percent higher than it would have been without realignment.”
Breaking the Jails
Over the past few years, California has faced what realignment really means. For many local jails, the state’s transformation has caused a host of problems, including a spike in inmate violence and a new, difficult population that is staying longer and longer in lockups designed for short-term stays. In February 2013, for example, a survey conducted by the California State Sheriffs’ Association found that 1,109 prisoners in county jails were serving 5- to 10-year sentences. They found 44 were serving terms of more than 10 years.
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ProPublica and The Sacramento Bee are spending the year reporting on resources, safety and crowding in California county jails.
As reporters Jason Pohl of The Sacramento Bee and Ryan Gabrielson of ProPublica have shown, the state has fixed one problem and created another. In the seven years before the 2011 realignment, 23 inmates died in jail custody. That figure more than doubled to 47 deaths during the seven years after the state shifted more responsibility to the county jails, Pohl and Gabrielson reported.
The state handed the county sheriffs a huge problem and shifted billions of dollars to help them fix it. But some have viewed the changes as a burden, not an opportunity. They aren’t separating violent mentally ill patients from the general population. Their jails lack adequate health care.
The indifference in some jails has come partly because sheriffs hold a unique place in law enforcement: elected to their own fiefdoms, they cannot be fired except by the voters. California is home to 56 counties with jails, and almost all of them are run by sheriffs who have little oversight beyond the next election.
In Fresno, Sheriff Margaret Mims said she views jail deaths as almost inevitable: there is violence on the outside and violence on the inside. “If you wanted absolutely no assaults on inmates, no assaults on staff, no murders, no suicides you would almost have to have a [guard] assigned to every single inmate or continually have eyes on those inmates,” she told Pohl and Gabrielson.
Fixing the California prisons has been an exhausting fight for decades. The Supreme Court decision and the realignment law seemed to set the stage for serious changes. But now, the question is whether the new governor, attorney general and Legislature are ready to jump back into the debate or just let the sheriffs pick up the pieces.
Reporters Jason Pohl of the Sacramento Bee and Ryan Gabrielson of ProPublica will be investigating that question over the coming months; sign up for the Overcorrection newsletter for updates.