Study: Crime down, costs up since prison realignment

California’s 4-year-old program to reduce the state prison population by sending lowlevel felons to county jails hasn’t increased crime — except for auto thefts — but also hasn’t yet achieved the intended savings in the costs of incarceration, a new study concluded Monday.

Since the Legislature approved Gov. Jerry Brown’s realignment plan in 2011, the number of inmates has declined by 40,000 in the state prison system and 18,000 overall, even including those who are now in local jails, said the Public Policy Institute of California. Part of that decline was due to passage of two voter initiatives, exempting some nonviolent felons from life terms under the state’s threestrikes law in 2012 and reducing sentences for some drug and property crimes in 2014, the report said.

Despite predictions by law enforcement groups that realignment would endanger the public, rates of violent crime and property crime have fallen since 2011 and are at “historic lows” in California, the report said. It did not cite realignment or any other factor as the cause of the decline, which also has occurred in other states.

The sole exception was auto theft, which has increased since 2011 and is about 17 percent higher than it would have been without realignment, the study said. But it said the findings — that crime is down overall, even though 18,000 ex-convicts are on the streets rather than behind bars — suggests that locking up more people is not a cost-effective way to fight crime.

“An additional dollar spent on incarceration generates only 23 cents in crime savings,” the institute said. “The state would benefit from alternative crime-prevention strategies,” ranging from added policing to more earlychildhood education and “targeted intervention” programs for high-risk youth.

The projected cost savings from realignment, however, have not materialized, the report said.

California’s 2015-16 budget for state prisons and related programs is $10.07 billion, compared with $9.65 billion in 2010-11, when the state prison population was 40,000 higher, the report said. The state sends counties an additional $1 billion to pay for housing and supervising convicts who previously would have been in prison or on parole. Counties are also receiving $2.2 billion in voter-approved state bond funds for jail construction.

One reason for the higher prison costs, the report said, is increased spending on inmate health care, which federal courts found to be so poor in 2009 that it violated the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The courts also ordered the reduction in prison population that led to realignment, finding that overcrowding was the primary cause of substandard health care.

Another goal of realignment — reducing California’s high rate of recidivism, the commission of new crimes by recently released inmates — hasn’t been accomplished yet, the report said.

The rate of released prisoners returning to state confinement within a year has plunged from more than 40 percent, the highest in the nation, to about 7 percent, which is below the national average, the report said. But many re-offenders are now sent to jail instead of prison, and the overall rate of new convictions has increased slightly.

That does not mean realignment has failed, the report said. It said counties had little time to prepare for the abrupt changes and need time to identify effective methods of reducing crimes by ex-inmates. The evidence suggests better results for counties that give a high priority to “re-entry services” rather than merely emphasizing tough law enforcement, the report said.

Brown’s office and prison officials did not respond to requests for comment.