California has seen drastic drops in the rates of youth and adult incarceration in the past decades, accompanied by declines in the youth and adult crime rates, says Mike Males of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice.
The state’s rate of youth incarceration has dropped 60 percent compared to that in 1996, and its rate of adult incarceration is 24 percent compared to 1999, according to Males.
“California has all but abolished state imprisonment and has sharply reduced local incarceration of youths to the lowest levels ever recorded – by far,” Males said in a March report.
Males reported that there was “a 60 percent drop in the rate of youth incarceration in 17 years, along with a huge shift toward local and shorter terms” and that the current rate “probably (stood) at an all-time low.”
In 1996, 20,793 California youths were locked up – 10,115 in state-run youth facilities and 10,678 in local juvenile halls and camps – in a total youth population (ages 10 to 17) of 3.7 million, he said.
As of Dec. 31, 2013, California held only 9,336 youths behind bars – just 683 in state-run youth facilities and 8,653 in local juvenile halls and camps. This is in spite of the fact that the teenaged youth population has grown to 4.1 million since 1996, he added.
Males also reported “an unprecedented reduction in adult incarceration” in the state – adult prisoners decreased by 30,000 since 1999.
About 240,000 adults were held in California state prisons and local jails on an average day in 1999 in an adult population (ages 18 to 69) of 21.7 million, according to Males. In 2013, only 217,000 were incarcerated in an adult population of 25.8 million. “That’s a decline in the adult incarceration rate of 24 percent in 14 years, back to the level of 1993,” he said.
Such decline in incarcerations “was largely forced on the state by court mandates and budget constraints,” Males concluded. Yet California’s youth crime rate plummeted to its lowest level since 1957, and adult violent crime declined since 1999 through the first half of 2013, he said.
“While large-scale de-incarceration of youth and low-level adult offenders in favor of alternative strategies may contribute to long-term benefits, the size of California’s crime decrease, especially among youth, suggests much larger forces are at work.” He commented that “locking up lots of younger and lesser offenders is not vital to public safety today and opens up discussion beyond the simplistic debates of the past surrounding get-tough measures and sentencing reform.”
