Sacramento Police Department (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
A little over a year ago Gov. Jerry Brown’s AB-109 began the process of reducing the state’s prison population by 33,000 before June of 2014.
Under the bill, triple-non — non-violent, non-serious, non-sexual — offenders would become the responsibility of the counties, not the state, with a large number of them returning to the streets of California.
In that time crime has been rising, and many fingers are pointed at AB-109 as the cause. Unfortunately there was no language in the legislation dictating how to asses the results. While the counties that have accepted assistance of a technical nature from the state are required to report, there are no standards of procedures for that reporting: a truly stunning oversight.
Heather Gilligan of The Sacramento Bee is one of the few journalists sharing police data on the subject. This excerpt provides the numbers she came up with.
“It’s diminishing public safety,” said Lynne Brown, director of Advocates for Public Safety, a group that represents law enforcement officers who want to repeal AB109.
Republican legislators agree, and they have called for a special session of the Legislature to change or kill the law. They say that crime has increased in Sacramento, Stockton, Oakland and Los Angeles, according to preliminary numbers from police departments.
There have been many incidents in the news involving crime perpetrated by released inmates. One particularly violent example is that of parolee Raoul Leyva. Raoul allegedly beat 20-year-old Brandy Marie Arreola into a coma last April. The beating occurred not long after he had been sentenced to jail for 100 days for parole violations but had been released after two days due to overcrowding. In light of the numerous incidents it behooves us to take a look at the situation in greater detail.
Ms. Gilligan continues:
But police data actually show a mixed picture.
In Sacramento, Part I crimes, those that are reported to the FBI and eventually become the uniform crime rate for a city, are up by 8.1 percent this year compared with the same period in 2011. Homicides, however, decreased by 18.5 percent, according to Sacramento Police Department crime data.
Violent crime is currently down in Los Angeles by 7 percent and property crime is the same year-to-date. In Oakland, Part I crimes have increased by 20 percent, according to the Oakland Police Department. Some increases – like those for rape (up 21 percent) and robbery (up 20 percent) – are striking. Part II crimes – including minor assault, drug possession, vandalism and fraud – have decreased by 10 percent.
In Stockton, there have been 51 reported homicides this year – six more than in the same period last year, according to Stockton police spokesman Joseph Silva.
“Clearly, what’s happened with (AB109) is that criminals learn there are no consequences,” said Assemblyman Bill Berryhill, a Republican whose San Joaquin County district includes Stockton and Modesto.
But determining the effect of a single policy on crime rates is difficult, said Joan Petersilia, professor of law at Stanford University and co-director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center.
No matter how you slice it, the issue is a complex one. The lack of any procedure for collecting data on how this influx of former inmates will impact the communities involved is troubling, to say the least. The fuzziness on details also means that most communities are forging their own paths when it comes to their methodology in handling the realignment.
Los Angeles and San Francisco are great examples of this in action. In LA, the jail population is increasing, while in San Francisco they are reducing theirs by keeping the focus where it should be: on rehabilitation.
We need more hard data, and we should have had a plan in place before releasing these inmates. Without proper support – therapy, drug rehab, job training, etc. – the chances are that many will offend again.
Related articles
- “Effects of change in California criminal justice system difficult to discern” (sentencing.typepad.com)
- Stockton, Oakland on “Most Dangerous Cities” List (fox40.com)
- UOP Safety Remains a Priority in Stockton (fox40.com)
- Sacramento police try a new focus on downtown (sacbee.com)
