The former head of California’s prison system says shifting responsibility for certain low-level prisoners from state to county custody “has overall worked even better than expected.”
“When I talk to people about how realignment is going, I like to remind folks that it’s not fair to compare realignment with what was. You have to also compare it to what would have been without it,” said Matthew Cate, former secretary of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Cate made the comments in an interview reported in the April issue of Comstock’s magazine.
Cate headed California’s prison system through the state’s historic budget cuts and implementation of Gov. Jerry Brown’s controversial 2011 realignment (AB 109) plan. The plan shifted tens of thousands of felony offenders to local jails and parole supervision.
“It’s not fair to compare realignment with what was”
“The prisons were at one point crowded to almost 200 percent of their design capacity, with recidivism rates at 65 to 70 percent. We were spending $10 billion a year on prisons, and we had a court order that required a reduction in the prison population,” Cate explained. “We would certainly have been facing massive prisoner release orders from the federal courts, along with massive increases in the percentage of the state budget that prisons were going to take up.”
Cate is now the Executive Director of the California State Association of Counties.
Violent crime rates in the state have not changed since realignment, Cate pointed out, although he acknowledged that there was a spike in auto thefts statewide that might be attributable to realignment. According to Cate, property crime rates went up after realignment at about the same rate as the rest of the country.
Cate also agreed with some criticism that the counties have not been spending the money that the state allocated to them on rehabilitative programs and instead have been spending it on law enforcement.
“I think we’ll see it shift starting this year. You’ll see less money going toward law enforcement and more and more going to rehabilitative programs,” Cate said.
