California Prison Downsizing and Its Impact on Local Criminal Justice Systems

California has embarked on a prison downsizing experiment of historical significance. Facing a U.S. Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Plata, which ordered the state to reduce its prison population by 25% within two years, Governor Jerry Brown signed the Public Safety Realignment Act (AB 109). Realignment transferred authority for large numbers of convicted felons from the state prison and parole system to the state’s fifty-eight counties. Counties were given state funding to deal with the increased number of offenders, and each county was given nearly unbridled discretion to develop its own custodial and post-custody plan. The hope is that Realignment, with its focus on locally designed rehabilitative services, will not only reduce prison overcrowding but also the state’s 64% recidivism rate—meaning that six out of ten people who left a California prison returned to a California prison within three years of release.1 At the time of the Plata ruling on May 23, 2011, California’s in-state prison population was approximately 162,000, down from an all-time high of 173,614 or 200% of design capacity in 2007.2 By upholding the threejudge panel’s population cap of 137.5%, the Supreme Court was ordering the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR, the state’s prison system) to reduce its prison population to 109,805, a reduction of about 35,000 prisoners or 25% of all prisoners housed at the time.3 The task was not only daunting; it also represented the largest court-ordered reduction in prison populations ever in the United States. As the editor of Prison Legal News wrote, “Without doubt this is the most significant prisoner rights ruling of the 21st century, and it will no doubt keep that distinction for a long while.”4 Laws are seldom self-executing, and research has consistently shown that practitioners—those responsible for translating “law-on-the-books” to