A recent report by the state’s chief probation officers suggests that county probation departments are doing a better job of supervising released felons than the state’s parole department.
A report by the Chief Probation Officers of California looked at the first six months of the state’s realignment of prisoners, which included statistics from all 58 counties.
Between October 2011 and March of this year, just 4 percent of felons released from state prisons and placed under county probation lost contact with their probation officers, requiring an arrest warrant to be issued, according to the report. During the same period 14 percent of those released from prison on parole and supervised by California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation parole agents lost contact.
The realignment program implemented by CDCR and created by Gov. Jerry Brown shifts the responsibilities for housing and supervising low-level offenders from CDCR to the inmate’s county of commitment.
Both county probation chiefs and state officials stress that it is still too early to proclaim Realignment a total success, but they admit the early results are encouraging.
“The data suggests that realignment is clearly not endangering public safety,” Barry Krisberg, a criminal justice expert at UC Berkeley agreed. “It looks to me that the program is working as designed.”
Both probation officials and Krisberg state that the program’s success may be due to probation departments being an integral part of the communities they serve. They are not focused on simply punishing the felon, but more on assisting them. Officials think probation agencies view their job in a different light than the state’s parole department does.
Wendy Still, Chief Probation Officer for the County of San Francisco, said her county has a better absconding rate than the state average, with just 2 percent of felons under her supervision going missing.
“Progressive counties are investing in services and making sure (probation officers) have lower caseloads and are using evidence-based practices rather than jail beds, which is what works,” she says. “We see them as clients, and it’s our obligation to provide services.” According to Still, the state parole department, where she worked for years, has never invested the same amount of resources into helping former inmates succeed once released as San Francisco and some other counties have done.
There are some, however, who don’t agree with the report. State Assemblyman Jim Nielsen (R-Gerber) in Tehama County, who is also a very vocal critic of the realignment plan, believes that both property and violent crime are actually rising in the state. He states that just because a person is reporting as required doesn’t mean they aren’t still committing more crimes.
“People are checking in, well, fine, that’s really good. But, checking in and being rehabilitated are different things,” he said. “No one, by some statistics, is going to convince me that realignment is a good thing.”
However, according to Krisberg, the crime rate is lower “in almost every community besides Oakland.”
Krisberg said, “They [crime rates] are down in Compton and Richmond. Some of the highest crime-rate areas in the state of California continue to track downward, even six months into realignment.”
