I'm Steve Raphael,
Professor at School of Public Policy.
I'll be teaching you economics in the fall.
A lot of the research I do is on
the criminal justice system and
quite a bit on the criminal justice system in California.
What we're going to do
today is we're going to talk a little
bit about what has happened in this state,
in California in the last 9 or 10 years
in terms of criminal justice reform and how it's
impacted public safety and how it's impacted
racial and ethnic disparities involvement
with the criminal justice system.
At this picture that you're seeing right here,
the blue line is the US incarceration rates,
which is the number of people in prison per 100,000.
Then the red line is the same rate for California.
What you can see is that from the '80s,
this is mass incarceration right here,
right between '80 and 2000.
You can see the huge increase in incarceration in
the country, in California was
going lock-step with the United States.
Then things start to change in the 2000s
where incarceration is still growing in the States,
but it's growing at a slower rate
or holding stable in California.
Then in 2011, basically,
what you see are these sharp declines right to
the point where we're at a point now
where our incarceration rate is where it was in 1990,
and this is up 2017.
Right here at the end of this time series,
we had about 134,000 people in prison.
It's estimated that after the governor goes through
the next set of releases in response to COVID,
we'll have fewer than 100,000
people in prison in California.
That's a big drop from this peak.
At the peak, there were 172,000 people
in prison in California and that's changed quite a bit.
What I want to do is I want to talk
about this, this big change.
Behind this is, in
the same way that this huge increase is driven by policy,
this decline is driven by policy.
I want to talk about the policies that
are causing those declines.
In part, it was policy that was forced upon the state,
but also in part, it was
policy that was chosen by the voters.
What we'll do is talk about essentially what drove that.
There are basically two broad forces that are driving
reforms in California and why
California is deviating from the rest of the nation.
Part of it is that there's
this long history of litigation
on behalf of prison inmates where
inmates are essentially the plaintiff and
there's a very activist office actually in Berkeley that
has often taken on their case and has sought
legal remedy for some
of the consequences of overcrowding.
Secondly, there's been this profound shift in
public opinion where the country
used to be very punitive,
and California moved in that punitive direction too,
and I think it's clear now that we've
shifted gears and that the public
seems to think that it's gone too
far and you can see that
in voting, and in particular, in referendums.
In terms of the first bit,
there were two key lawsuits
that were brought on behalf of
inmates; Coleman V. Brown, and Plata V. Brown.
Now, it should say Coleman V. Newsom, Plata V. Newsom
because as the governor shifts, the defendant shifts.
But what these two lawsuits basically
argued is that overcrowding in California's prisons,
which has been a problem for many years,
was the key reason why
people or inmates in the system we're
not receiving adequate healthcare
and adequate mental healthcare.
The constitutional argument was
that denying healthcare and
mental healthcare was a violation of
the constitutional prohibition against
cruel and unusual punishment.
These two lawsuits have been litigating for many years.
In 2006, a federal three-judge panel established
authority over these two lawsuits
and actually joined them into one lawsuit.
In 2009, they ordered the state to basically either build
more prisons or reduce the population such that
the prison population was 137.5 percent of capacity.
The State appealed to Supreme Court.
This is when then
Attorney General Brown was the governor.
Then in 2011 when our new vice presidential candidate,
AG Harris, was the Attorney General,
the Supreme Court upheld
the population limit and basically
ordered the state to comply with the three-judge panel.
This debate went all the way to Supreme Court
and it was started by a small law office in Berkeley.
It's amazing story.
What did the state do?
Well, there were efforts underway before
the Supreme Court decision that were
meant to alleviate overcrowding.
There was some minor reforms
to parole that tried to make it hard
for parole officers to
revoke relatively low-risk inmates based on a risk score.
But the big change was correction realignment,
which we're going to talk about in a few minutes.
But aside from corrections realignment,
there were also a series of
voter initiatives that have been passed where in
California, we can place
initiatives on the ballot and essentially,
the voters can pass the initiative and can
actually change law on the state.
For example, in 2012, California's passed proposition 36,
which revise our three-strikes law
and made it less punitive.
A big one that we're going to spend a lot of time
talking about today is in 2014,
California passed Prop 47,
which basically redefined a series
of low-level felonies to misdemeanors.
Then there's also another notable ballot issued in 2016
called Prop 57 that provided
incentives for prison inmates to program,
refrain from institution misconduct,
and then they could earn
good time credits of their time.
Essentially, what we had is
a response to the Supreme Court in
this corrections realignment the content
in which we'll talk about in a minute,
and then we have a whole series of
voter initiatives that are chipping away at
the prison population with the 2011 and
the 2014 actions being
the most substantive and the most consequential.
In terms of corrections realignment,
what did corrections realignment do?
Well, basically, what it did is it defined
a class of inmates that were called triple nons;
people who were convicted of non-sexual, non-violent,
non-serious offenses,
and that we're serving time in state prison.
What the bill said is that from now on,
anybody who falls in
this category can't be sent to state prison.
They have to be sent to county jail.
Of course, when you send someone to
county jail, the county has to pay for
it rather than sending
someone to state prison where the state pays for it,
and so you could imagine
that that's going to alter the way
counties treat people in these offense categories.
The other thing that
the bill did was it made it much more
difficult to revoke people back
to prison for a technical parole violation.
They created something called
Post Release Community Supervision
where basically people coming out of
prison would be in the community correction system of
their county rather than being
monitored by parole agents.
That alone lead to a drop in revocations.
Also, when they were getting revocations, basically,
they were being revoked to a short-term in
a county jail rather than being sent back to prison.
That's pretty much what
these two small changes in a state
where the criminal justice system
had become accustomed to violating
people's parole as a way to
fast-track them back to prison,
all of a sudden, we took that tool away.
What happened? I'm going to
show you a couple of graphs and we'll go over a
little bit of operations research
to think about what they mean.
Prop 47 was an initiative passed by voters,
it's passed by 60 percent of California voters.
Basically, what it did
is it reclassified a bunch of drug offenses,
and then also some property crimes from wobblers which
could be charged as either a felony
or a misdemeanor to straight misdemeanors.
It raised the dollar value of what
the difference is between felony,
larceny, and misdemeanor larceny,
which is basically theft without contact,
and it raised the amount to 950 bucks.
Then it also had this provision to re-sentence
people and reclassify them for prior convictions.
Let's think about what the
cumulative effects of these things are.
Here's the prison population and these
are weekly estimates of the population.
This first red line here is October,
2011 when realignment goes into effect,
and we already saw that admissions dropped
and releases drop by less automatically.
What you see is the prison population drops from about
165,000 people to around 135,000.
The second red line is when Prop 47 goes into effect,
and you can see the second impact of Prop 47 on
the prison population associated with
those that decline in felony drug arrests.
What happens to jail populations in the state?
Just to give you the scale,
at our highest, we had about
170,000 people in prison on any given day.
In the county jails, we have
between 75 and 80,000 with some variation.
Prior to realignment, this is what it looks like,
given that realignment prescribed
that people be punished with
short jail sentences for
a parole violation that
created new pressure in the jail system.
Then when Prop 47 went into effect,
we had a relief of the pressure on the prison system.
If we combine the two,
which is an interesting thing to do
because in most countries,
when they talk about their incarcerated population,
they don't distinguish between whether
your pre-trial or whether your post trial,
whether you're in prison or jail, or just how many people
behind bars, denied their liberty.
That's what this graph is doing.
It's combining jail and prisons.
You can see basically that at our peak we had about
250,000 and now we're down below 100,000.
Or down at around 200,000,
and this has shrunk since as well.
We have these two very big policy changes,
and the state has shrunk
its correctional systems combined by about a quarter.
It's a pretty big change over
a relatively short period of time.
What you can see is that crime was very low in '60s,
increased in the '70s and '80s,
peaks in the early 1990s,
and then it declines quite drastically.
The first red line here is realignment,
when we have that big decline in the prison population.
The second red line is Prop 47 passing,
when we have further declined prison population,
big decline in jail population.
This red line here is basically
the year when our incarceration rate in 2016,
the last time we had an incarceration rate that low.
Basically, what we did is we
rolled the incarceration rate back
to 1993 levels when our crime rate was really high,
and our crime rates have remained relatively low.
Some of the more alarmist predictions
that were made by people just didn't come to pass.
We didn't see a huge violent crime wave,
and we didn't see a huge property crime wave.
What we're going to do when we talk about
the research is we're going to focus on what's
happening in this range around
these two policy and then
these little wiggles that happened in the end,
so we do find some evidence,
at least for some offenses that there was an impact.
But we rolled back roughly 20 years of
incarceration growth and we didn't
roll back crime to what it was in 1990.
I think that that was an important thing
that emerged from this.
A lot of the research that the sky didn't fall.
Let's think about some of the effects on
racial disproportionality in criminal justice involvement.
Many have written about how the growth in
correctional populations from 1970s to
the mid-2000s has had racial disparate impacts.
A few of us have been interested
in what happens when you reverse course.
In the same way, you can have
adverse racially disparate impacts
of a race-neutral policy.
You can have racially disparate impacts
of reversing course.
We wanted to see whether that was true.
This picture is basically showing what happened to
overall incarceration in California
between 2007 and 2015.
This is bracketing Prop 47 and corrections realignments.
Here's the pre period.
This is 2000 as way pre 2010,
just before realignment goes into effect,
and then 2015 is after realignment and Prop 47.
What you can see on any given day in
these earlier years about 10 percent
of prime age black males,
and that's people between 18 and 55 are
institutionalized on any given day
in a jail or prison in California.
It's higher than it is in other states.
In other states, it's about eight percent.
Then what we see is that after all is said and done,
you've reduced the black incarceration rate
by a full 2.2 percentage points,
which doesn't sound like a lot.
But given the trends in recent years,
it's actually a pretty dramatic change.
In the rest of the country,
we also saw a slight decline,
but it was no way near as big.
Now, if we look at Latinos and others,
there's a smaller decline among Latino men.
There's relative stability among Latino women.
Among other people who are
non Latino, non-black, non-white,
you have relative stability,
and among white people, there's
a slight decline among men.
Basically, if you look at this graph,
what you're seeing is that
race disparities are still there,
so we still have 7.5 percent of
black men as opposed to 1.3 percent of black men.
But they've narrowed from what they were
by a couple of percentage points.
Now, actually wait, this is non California males.
I'm sorry. Here's for women.
For women, just again,
if you look at the scale here,
so for African-American men,
you have a tenth, for African-American women,
it's about one percentage point
that's incarcerated in any given day.
You don't see as much narrowing in
California relative to what's happening in other states.
In terms of the intersection of race and gender,
what we're seeing is that this reform seem to have
the biggest impact on African-American males.
A lot of the work
that you see here was a continuation of
a decade of studying prison populations,
trying to understand what it's doing to us
and our correctional system,
and then California just presented itself as
this grand natural experiment because there's
all this activity happening here.
I've tried to some degree to remain somewhat neutral
because we pre-specify what it is we're going to do,
and we analyze the data and we report what we find.
It recorded what we found.
I didn't expect there to be huge impacts on crime,
and I did expect it to narrow race disparities,
and I think both of those things are good.
In terms of my opinion
of the attempt to roll back Prop 47,
I think that's a bad idea.
On the other hand, in terms of being engaged in policy,
I think you can already imagine that
in the current situation
where we have hot spots in Saint Quentin,
and we have hot spots and county jails,
and we have hot spots in prisons around the country,
and prisoners for the most part tend to
be less healthy than everybody else.
They're older, they have all co-morbidities that increase
their likelihood of a bad outcome
if they become infected.
Like there's pressure at
the moment to think about how can
we reduce populations in
a way that is not going to impact public safety.
But that will also reduce
the likelihood that people are dying behind bars
simply because they're at
an increased likelihood of capturing COVID-19.
I'm actually involved in a couple of efforts around that.
That's pretty much the extent of
my policy work in this arena.