San Diego County has implemented new strategies to accommodate the influx of prisoners created by the state Realignment plan. Assembly Bill 109, Realignment, shifts non-serious, non-violent, non-sexual offenders from doing time in state prison to county jails.
In 2011, Gov. Jerry Brown signed Realignment into law after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the state’s overcrowded prisons could not deliver adequate healthcare to inmates, and ordered the inmate prison population to be capped at 137.5 percent of designed capacity, or about 112,000 inmates. The state has until February 2016 to meet the cap.
Since Realignment came into effect, about 2,500 offenders have been shifted to San Diego County jails. Officials in San Diego county say they expect another 5,500 offenders, the Fallbrook Bonsall Village News reported.
San Diego County Sheriff, Bill Gore said that his department has modernized the way it handles realigned offenders, the Village News reported. The changes include building more housing for lower-level prisoners, installing GPS monitoring systems and adding supervised work furlough programs.
The county is being proactive, said Mack Jenkins, chief probation officer of the San Diego county probation department, to the Village News.
“Currently, 80 percent of inmates have substance-abuse problems,” Jenkins said. “We are making sure we have drug treatment, rehab, and work-readiness programs to try and address these problems.”
“If a probationer meets certain criteria, they may be able to get off probation a little earlier than the usual three-year term,” said Jenkins. “They would have to demonstrate a history of clean drug tests, no violations, have achieved their case plan goals and be employed or enrolled in school.”
