RESEARCH ARTICLE
D O W N S I Z I N G P R I S O N S
Is Downsizing Prisons Dangerous?
The Effect of California’s Realignment Act on Public Safety
JodySundt
I n d i a n a U n i v e r s i t y — P u r d u e U n i v e r s i t y , I n d i a n a p o l i s
EmilyJ.Salisbury
U n i v e r s i t y o f N e v a d a — L a s V e g a s
MarkG.Harmon
P o r t l a n d S t a t e U n i v e r s i t y
ResearchSummary
Recent declines in imprisonment raise a critical question: Can prison populations be reduced without endangering the public? This question is examined by testing the effect of California’s dramatic efforts to comply with court-mandated targets to reduce prison overcrowding using a pretest-posttest design. The results showed that California’s Realignment Act had no effect on violent or property crime rates in 2012, 2013, or 2014. When crime types were disaggregated, a moderately large, statistically significant association between Realignment and auto theft rates was observed in 2012. By 2014,however,thiseffecthaddecayedandautotheftratesreturnedtopre-Realignmentlevels.
PolicyImplications
Significantreductionsinthesizeofprisonpopulationsarepossiblewithoutendangering public safety. Within just 15 months of its passage, Realignment reduced the size of the total prison population by 27,527 inmates, prison crowding declined from 181%to 150% of design capacity, approximately
$
453 million was saved, and there was noadverseeffectontheoverallsafetyofCalifornians.Withamixtureofjailuse,community
A version of this article was presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology, Nov.2014. Direct correspondence to Jody Sundt, School of Public and Environmental Affairs, IndianaUniversity—Purdue University Indianapolis, 801 W. Michigan St., BS 3025, Indianapolis, IN 46202 (e-mail: jsundt@iupui.edu).
DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12199
C
2016 American Society of Criminology
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Criminology & Public Policy
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Research Article Downsizing Prisons
corrections, law enforcement and other preventive efforts, California counties have provided a comparable level of public safety to that previously achieved by state prisons.Nevertheless, sustaining these policy objectives will require greater attention to local implementation, targeted crime prevention, and sentencing reform.
Keywords
CaliforniaPublicSafetyRealignmentAct,prisondownsizing,regressionpointdisplace-ment design, prison population,
Brown v. Plata
I
n the mid 1970s, the United States prison population began a steady climb thatcontinued until 2010 when, for the first time in 30 years, the number of inmatesdeclined (Guerino, Harrison, and Sabol, 2011). The prison buildup was based on thepremise that incarceration improves public safety. This argument was succinctly voiced in1992 by U.S. Attorney General William Barr who said the nation had a “clear choice”—build more prisons or tolerate higher rates of violent crime (Fletcher, 2000). Confidence inthe utility of incarceration was so great that policies to increase sentence lengths and punisha broader range of crimes with imprisonment were pursued with vigor over several decadesby every jurisdiction in the United States (Clear, 1994; Travis, Western, and Redburn,2014). Thus, the recent decline in the size of the prison population raises a critical question.Can prison populations be reduced without endangering the public?This question is examined by testing the effect of California’s dramatic efforts to lowerits prison population and comply with court-mandated targets to reduce prison overcrowd-ing (
Brown v. Plata,
2011
)
. California exemplifies the confluence of fiscal, political, andsocial changes that are reopening the debate about the value of incarceration. Most impor-tant for our purpose, the implementation of the California Public Safety Realignment Act isa natural experiment that allows us to test one of the most important crime policy questionsof our time.
TheCaliforniaExperience
Perhaps more than any other state, California exemplifies the fiscal and social consequencesof policies that exponentially increased the prison population by 572% in the 30 yearsbetween 1980 and 2010 (Lawrence, 2012). California’s embrace of “total incapacitation”led Simon (2014) to argue that, “California is to incarceration what Mississippi was to seg-regation” (p. 17). Although California’s incarceration and crime rates have largely mirroredthose of the nation, the sheer size of the California prison population and a managementstrategy of “hyper-overcrowding” and neglect are exceptional manifestations of the excessesof mass incarceration (Simon, 2014). Atitspeakin2006,closeto175,000inmateswereincarceratedinCalifornia’s33prisons(West and Sabol, 2008) and in 2008 California was ranked 2nd nationally in per capita
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Sundt, Salisbury, and Harmon
spending on corrections (Lawrence, 2012). Like other states, the growth of California’sprison population was primarily driven by policies that increased sentence lengths andbroadened the range of offenses punishable by imprisonment (Simon, 2014). California’sparole system also contributed significantly to the size of the prison population. Between1980 and 2010, the parole population in California increased by 708% (the U.S. parolepopulation increased 204% during this time period) (Lawrence, 2012). Expansive use of parole combined with minimal provision of reentry and rehabilitative programs led to oneof the highest revocation and recidivism rates in the United States (Pew Charitable Trusts,2011).California has invested heavily in corrections and prison construction. Nevertheless,California’s prisons are notoriously overcrowded, surpassing 200% of capacity at varioustimes with some facilities at a shocking 300% of capacity (Simon, 2014). Simon argues thatovercrowding was an intentional governance strategy characterized by crisis managementand indifference to the provision of basic health services and the conditions of confinement.By the end of the 1990s, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation(CDCR) was in a “permanent state of chaos” (Simon, 2014: 113).On October 4, 2006, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger proclaimed a “Prison Over-crowding State of Emergency” outlining numerous safety and health hazards. For instance,29 prisons were so overcrowded that more wastewater was produced than could be treated,resulting in water and sewage system failures. Indeed, “thousands of gallons of sewage spillsand environmental contamination,” occurred, putting the general public’s drinking watersupply in jeopardy across the state (Office of the Governor of the State of California, 2006:paragraph 10).Over 15,000 inmates in the 29 severely overcrowded prisons were kept in “bad beds,”double and triple bunks placed in areas not designed for housing (i.e., gymnasiums, day-rooms, and program rooms). The extent of crowding substantially increased the likelihoodof violence and made the provision of medical and mental health care nearly impossible.Conditions inside the prisons became so harmful, and in fact deadly, that approximately one inmate per week committed suicide and countless more died of preventable causes(Simon, 2014). These conditions and the failure to remedy them lead a three-judge courtto rule that inmates had been subjected to cruel and unusual punishment, a violation of the Eighth Amendment. Although the state appealed, on May 23, 2011 the U.S. SupremeCourt in
Brown v. Plata
affirmed the lower court’s decree to reduce the prison populationto 137% of capacity, or by approximately 33,000 inmates at the time.
The California Public Safety Realignment Act
In response to the
Plata
decision, Governor Jerry Brown signed into law Assembly Bill109, otherwise known as the California Public Safety Realignment Act. In order to achievethe mandated reduction in the state prison population, three core policy changes wereprospectively implemented beginning October 1, 2011. First, AB 109, or “Realignment,”
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