Gov. Jerry Brown met with sheriffs and probation and county administrators at a conference in Sacramento in January to get their thoughts about California’s three-year-old Realignment plan.
There was criticism from local sheriffs because their jails would be overcrowded, which would cause them to release inmates early, a report by Lonnie Wong of Fox 40 News noted.
The report also said that the shift from supervising ex-cons went from state parole to county probation departments. Sacramento County added nearly 2,000 probationers to the department’s work load.
Realignment shifted the responsibility for housing and supervising certain low-level criminals from the state corrections department to county governments,
Over the last three years, the counties, through trial and error, have used programs to supervise and rehabilitate released inmates and to keep them out of the jails and prisons.
Matthew Cate, executive director of the California Association of Counties, said that criminal justice science has helped counties cope. “We know more about risk, we know a little bit more about treatment, so we’re making smarter decisions about who should be in and who can be trusted in the community,” said Cate, the former head of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
Brown said that “People do not want to get hit over the head, they don’t want their cars stolen and they don’t want their houses broken into, so we have to do something, but we ought to do it smart,” the report said.
Brown’s recently released 2015-16 budget proposal would allocate $125 million for county probation departments to be used to supervise released inmates and provide job training, drug treatment and counseling, Fox reported.
Brown also said, “People will do bad things and the only question is do we make it worse by compounding the problem.”
