San Francisco’s jail population is shrinking after the Realignment program passed by the California Legislature in 2011, the sheriff’s office reports.
The reduction is attributed to programs that help prisoners return to their communities. That includes housing, education, social services and drug rehabilitation, jail officials report. Policies are aimed at treating jail or prison as a last resort.
The result: San Francisco’s daily jail population declined from 1,954 in 2009 to 1,281 in February 2014, Chief Adult Probation Officer Wendy Still told Ryan Holeywell in an article on the governing.com website.
“San Francisco was ahead of the game before Realignment ever began (in 2011),” says Linda Penner, chair of the state’s Board of State and Community Corrections, which oversees county jails. This long-standing approach predated the state’s crisis.
“They had a community that embraced treatment. They had the capacity. And they had the political will. With Realignment, they’ve just accelerated and stepped on the gas,” says Penner.
Realignment was a result of court orders to reduce prison overcrowding. Its main feature is keeping low-level offenders in county jails, rather than sending them to a state prison.
If long prison sentences were a criminal deterrent, crime would have been nearly eliminated in California long ago, and repeat offenders would be almost non-existent. That, of course, isn’t the case at all, and it’s why federal judges have ordered California to drastically reduce the number of inmates in state custody, said Paul Henderson, deputy chief of staff and public safety director for San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee.
“People do bad things, and they absolutely should be arrested, and there absolutely should be justice,” Henderson added. “But what that justice can look like has to be a broader discussion than ‘more jail end of discussion.’”
So, how well is that working? Henderson says, “I get a lot of flak from my community, from prosecutors and from law enforcement.” But he believes that rehabilitation costs less than imprisonment, and that his critics’ approach has done little other than create a state prison system so overcrowded that federal courts have ruled it unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment.
“Where do you think these people go when they’re released?” he asked. “Do you think they end up in Australia? Do they enroll in MIT and become professors on the East Coast? No. The average prison term is two to three years.
“They have been separated from all their friends and family, they don’t have a job, they were presumably uneducated and are still under-educated. And they’re coming back to the same community – your community – without a foundation and without the support because they’ve been gone. What do you think they’re going to do? It’s a disservice to act like we don’t know this process is going on and not intervene.”
Criminal justice victory should be more than just obtaining convictions, he believes. It should be helping to turn an offender into a productive member of society.
California was ordered to reduce its prison population in 2009 because of poor health care that one judge said caused one inmate death a week. In 2006 the population was 170,000. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld that decision requiring reduction to around 110,000.
California criminologist Joan Petersilia said more than 100,000 prisoners have come under county control since Realignment became law.
The speed at which the change happened is “…historically the biggest shift in criminal justice done anywhere in the country in a very short period of time,” Penner said.
Counties are receiving around $1 billion annually to deal with their new responsibilities under realignment. Building new jails or focusing on more services to prevent recidivism are choices they can make.
“Everything we know from the most rigorous research suggests if you want to reduce recidivism rates, you have to address housing security, availability of jobs and social connections,” says Barry Krisberg, senior fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. “The state was never able to do that.”
San Francisco had a head start in dealing with Realignment. They had an overcrowding situation in the 1980s that resulted in litigation, forcing the city to adjust.
“Other counties have taken Realignment money and invested it in more jails. We haven’t done that,” said Jeff Adachi, San Francisco’s elected public defender. Alternative sentencing and re-entry programs that hook up prisoners with drug treatment, education and employment services are the city’s focus.
“San Francisco is…a road map for how to get organized and do it well,” says Krisberg.
But not all counties follow the city’s lead. “Some counties are making the same mistakes the state made, which was to try to build their way out of the problem,” says Don Specter, an attorney for inmates who sued the state over prison conditions.
Jails in about 37 of the 58 counties have reached population caps imposed locally or by courts or other oversight bodies. The result? In some cases, early releases of prisoners locally.
Stephen Manley, a Superior Court judge in Santa Clara County, is supportive of Realignment. He added counties don’t all have the resources to adopt re-entry programs, even with state aid, which have been proven to reduce recidivism.
“We have over 150 people sitting in jail, right now, who have been released by judges to treatment, and they can’t get out of jail because there’s not treatment for them.” Manley says. “We don’t have enough alternatives.”
