Can We Downsize Our Prisons and Jails Without Compromising Public Safety?

• Author: Charis E. Kubrin,Bradley J. Bartos
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12378
• Date: 01 August 2018
• Published date: 01 August 2018

RESEARCH ARTICLE

DOWNSIZING OUR PRISONS AND JAILS

Can We Downsize Our Prisons and Jails

Without Compromising Public Safety?

Findings from California’s Prop 47

Bradley J. Bartos

Charis E. Kubrin

University of California Irvine

Research Summary

Our study represents the first effort to evaluate systematically Proposition 47’s (Prop

47’s) impact on California’scrime rates. With a state-level panel containing violent and

property offenses from 1970 through 2015, we employ a synthetic control group design

to approximate California’s crime rates had Prop 47 not been enacted. Our findings

suggest that Prop 47 had no effect on homicide, rape, aggravated assault, robbery, or

burglary. Larceny and motor vehicle thefts, however, seem to have increased moderately

after Prop 47, but these results were both sensitive to alternative specifications of

our synthetic control group and small enough that placebo testing cannot rule out

spuriousness.

Policy Implications

As the United States engages in renewed debates regarding the scale and cost of its

incarcerated population, California stands at the forefront of criminal justice reform.

Although California reduced its prison population by 13,000 through Prop 47, critics

argue anecdotally that the measure is responsible for recent crime upticks across the

state. We find little empirical support for these claims. Thus, our findings suggest that

California can downsize its prisons and jails without compromising public safety.

Keywords

criminal justice reform, crime, prison downsizing, decarceration, California

Direct correspondence to Charis E. Kubrin, Department of Criminology, Law and Society, University of

California, Irvine, Social Ecology II, Room 3379, Irvine, CA 92697, USA (e-mail: ckubrin@uci.edu).

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12378 C2018 American Society of Criminology 693

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 17 rIssue 3

Research Article Downsizing our Prisons and Jails

Speaking on the promise of downsizing prisons, Joan Petersilia (2016) recently dis-

tinguished between symbolic speechmaking, which is easy,and actual reform, which

“is about as easy as bending granite” (p. 9; see also Petersilia and Cullen, 2015).

Indeed, scholars have long made the distinction between “policy talk” and “policy action”

(Tyackand Cuban, 1995), especially in the context of criminal justice reform in the United

States. Yet in recent years, policy action, in fact, may be a good way to characterize many

of the changes that have occurred in America’s criminal justice system. Indeed, Petersilia

(2016: 8) also noted:

We are very likely at a transformative moment in criminal justice reform.

There is great optimism that the United States is making a decisive move away

from the harsh punishment policies that characterized the last 30 years. Prison

growth has largely stopped, some states are closing prisons, and Congress and

most legislatures are enacting policies that reduce prison sentences for drug

crimes and other nonviolent offenses.

California has been at the epicenter of these changes. Perhaps morethan any other state,

California is immersed in a period of fundamental reform to its criminal justice system. In

just a few short years, the state has passed a series of senate bills and propositions, most

of which are intended to reduce its massive prison population. So far, they seem to be

working. A recent report published by the Public Policy Institute of California, California’s

Historic Corrections Reforms, concluded: “Since reaching a peak in 2006 of almost 256,000

inmates, the total population incarcerated in California’s state prisons and county jails has

dropped by roughly 55,000. The incarceration rate has fallen from 702 to 515 per 100,000

residents—a level not seen since the early 1990s” (Lofstrom, Bird, and Martin, 2016: 3).

One of the most recent of these reforms that has garnered significant attention is

Proposition 47 (Prop 47), which requiresthat certain drug and property offenses be charged

as misdemeanors rather than as felonies, as had previously been the case. Since the enactment

of Prop 47 on November 14, 2014, the number of people incarcerated in California’s

prisons and jails has decreased by approximately 13,000 inmates, helping alleviate crowding

conditions in those institutions (Romano, 2015). Proponents of Prop 47 hail it a success,

yet critics charge that the measure is mainly responsible for recent upticks in the state’s

crime rates.

Despite these contradictory claims, to date there has been no systematic analysis of Prop

47’s impact on crime rates throughout the state, leaving Californians in the dark about the

policy’seffectiveness. We address this research lacuna in this study. With a synthetic control

group design, we conduct the first evaluation of Prop 47’s impact on violent and property

crime rates in the year after its implementation. By using a state-level panel containing

UCR index 1 offense frequencies from 1970 through 2015, we employ a synthetic control

group design to approximate California’s crime rates had Prop 47 not been enacted. We

perform this analysis for each offense category and interpret the gap between California’s

694 Criminology & Public Policy