Realignment and Recidivism

Abstract

California's 2011 Public Safety Realignment created an unprecedented policy experiment by transferring the authority over lower-level felony offenders from the state correctional system to fifty-eight county jail and probation systems. While centered in California, these changes are reflective of an ongoing national conversation about the appropriate level of government at which to focus crime control efforts. In this article, we first situate Realignment in criminological and sociolegal literatures, showing how the reform offers opportunities to further inquiry as to the effectiveness of a wide variety of correctional strategies, implementation, and local variation in correctional law and policy. We then review early research focused on the statewide effect of Realignment on recidivism, which has produced mixed findings depending on the measure of recidivism applied. We then examine variation in recidivism outcomes across county sites and present findings that indicate there is an important relationship between local Realignment implementation strategies and recidivism outcomes. throughout, we focus on two overarching themes. the first is the challenge of disentangling the roles of offender behavior from justice system response in meaningfully interpreting changes in recidivism outcomes. the second is the challenge of evaluating the effects of policy or practice changes under limited data. Although the need for better and more expansive data is a common theme, we highlight it here in the context of a larger data collection that we have under way.

Can We Downsize Our Prisons and Jails Without Compromising Public Safety?

“…In particular, it is worth determining whether Prop 47's impact on crime (and recidivism for that matter) varies across California's 58 counties, each with different socioeconomic, demographic, and criminal justice profiles. Prior research findings on Realignment reveal that, in fact, its impact on crime and recidivism varies significantly by county (Bird and Grattet, ; Lofstrom and Raphael, 2016) so future research should be aimed at both documenting and attempting to explain this variation. A critical challenge here involves evaluating the effects of policy or practice changes across California counties under conditions of limited data (see Bird and Grattet, ).…”

“…And Prop 47's reallocation of resources to prevention efforts, they further argue, should significantly improve public safety in the longer term. As evidence in support for some of these claims, proponents turn to scientific evaluations of Realignment, which found that it had no impact on violent crime rates and only a small impact on property crime rates, mainly auto‐theft (Lofstrom and Raphael, 2016; Sundt et al., ; see also Bird and Grattet, , for findings related to Realignment's impact on recidivism).…”

Impact of defelonizing drug possession on recidivism

“…Grattet and Bird (2016) discussed the challenges to interpreting recidivism statistics along these lines. As a further example, Bird, Grattet, and Nguyen () found that because Realignment mandated that revocations be served locally, it appears to have incentivized officials to seek reconvictions in cases that prior to Realignment they may have relied on revocation. Their research also found that prior to Realignment, some parolees who violated their supervision were taken directly to a prison reception center without a formal arrest being entered into the system.…”

“…Thus, an analysis of changing recidivism patterns must explore evidence of “charge swapping” by examining increases in other kinds of offenses that are similar to drug possession. Prior research also shows that policy changes are often accompanied by changes in population characteristics, and as a result, it is critically important to employ strategies to ensure that apples‐to‐apples comparisons before and after reforms and thus isolate the causal effect of the reform as much as possible (Bird et al., ).…”

The Criminal Justice System and More Lenient Drug Policy: Three Case Studies on California's Changes to How Its Criminal Justice System Addresses Drug Use

“…In another study tracking parolees during calendar years 2003 and 2004, the authors found that those that were released from prison with a primary offense that fit AB 109 criteria 54 were actually more likely, compared to those convicted of more serious offenses, to acquire new parole violations (Grattet et al, 2009). Finally, a recent recidivism study that created a proxy PRCS control group from a cohort of pre-Realignment prison releases estimates that the average number previous arrests for this group is 18.1 and past convictions is 7.1 (higher than the averages for all prison releases in the same time period) (Bird, Grattet, & Nguyen, 2017).…”