California’s prison Realignment has surged early releases from overcrowded county jails, according to a Los Angeles Times report.
“It changes criminal justice in California,” the Times reported, quoting Monterey County Chief Deputy Edward Laverone. “The ‘lock them up and throw away the key’ is gone,” says Laverone, who supervises the jail.
Realignment shifted responsibility for low-level offenders from prisons to county jails, beginning in 2011. It was in response to federal court orders to reduce prison overcrowding. Overcrowding stems from more than four decades of increasing harsh sentencing passed during the war on drugs and three strikes law.
A Times investigation showed a large shift in who is being released out of jails. The change has increased from an average of 9,700 a month in 2011 to 13,500 this year, according to state jail commission figures. Records show 17,000 released from county jails last October.
Los Angeles, which has 25 percent of California’s jail population, often releases male prisoners after serving just 10 percent of their sentences; women are often freed after serving 5 percent of their sentence, the Aug. 18 story reported.
To make sure there is very little danger to the public, both state and local officials are letting out the ones they believed to be the least risky inmates, such as parole violators and those convicted of misdemeanors, said the Times.
Sidney DeAvila, a convicted sex offender, was jailed 11 times between 2012 and 2013 and freed nearly every time within 24 hours. Days after he got out in February 2013, he raped and killed his 76-year-old grandmother, chopped her body into pieces and was found later that day wearing her jewelry around his neck. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
“Leopoldo Arellano, 39, was in and out of custody at least 18 times from 2012 to 2014 for violating parole, criminal threats and at least four incidents of domestic battery, according to Los Angeles County jail logs,” the newspaper reported.
“It’s justice by Nerf ball. We designed a system that doesn’t work,” said Assemblywoman Susan Talamantes Eggman, D-Stockton.
“Shifting the location of incarceration” from prisons to jails doesn’t change much, said Barry Krisberg, a University of California at Berkeley law professor.
An independent state policy agency, the Little Hoover Commission, recommended last year that California reform its complex sentencing laws, which have overwhelmed prisons with many long-term inmates, said the Times.
“We actually have a de facto sentencing commission in our sheriffs,” said Carle D’Elia, the acting executive director of the Little Hoover Commission. “You have a crazy system of ‘Is the jail full today?’”
Superior Court Judge Richard A. Viavianos of San Joaquin County said allowing jailers to override judges “does nothing but undercut integrity … it loses public confidence. You lose integrity with the defendants. All the way around, it is a bad thing,” he told the Times.