Can We Shrink the Prisons Without Growing Crime?

• Author: Robert Weisberg
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12211
• Date: 01 May 2016
• Published date: 01 May 2016

POLICY ESSAY

DOWNSIZING PRISONS

Can We Shrink the Prisons Without

Growing Crime?

Decarceration, Decentralization, and the Meaning

of Realignment’s Success

Robert Weisberg

Stanford University

The California Public Safety RealignmentAct (AB 109) of 2011 was unquestionably

an exigent response to a dramatic crisis—the declaration by a federal court that

California’s prison system violated the Eighth Amendment. Although, as will be

noted in this essay,the law’s promoters argued that Realignment would improve the criminal

justice system in progressive ways (i.e., a new commitment to rehabilitation and reentry

services in “the community”), the primary motivation for the law was to get enough inmates

out of the state prisons to satisfy the court’s injunction. Thus, improving public safety was

not the primary goal of the law, and for some, it was not even an expectation. In the view of

many,the best hope was that AB 109 would not worsen public safety. Some critics considered

the law to be a grim legal necessity that at least risked an increase in crime (Petersilia, 2014),

whereas two U.S. Supreme Court justices spoke in more apocalyptic terms: Justices Scalia

and Alito, dissenting from affirmance of the injunction in Brown v. Plata (2011), were

confident that the court order that led to AB 109 was so likely to deal a serious blow to

public safety as to make the injunction illegal under the strictures of the Prison Litigation

Reform Act of 1995.

So to put things bluntly, in their conclusion that AB 109 has caused at most a very

small and very isolated increase in crime (the exception being a modest uptick in auto theft),

Jody Sundt, Emily Salisbury, and Mark Harmon (2016, this issue) have shown that that

the warnings were wrong. Thus, assuming that the ratio of prisoners to real estate has been

Direct correspondence to Robert Weisberg, Stanford Criminal Justice Center, Stanford University, Crown

Quadrangle, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, CA 94305-8610, Room N221, Neukom Building (e-mail:

weisberg@law.stanford.edu).

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12211 C2016 American Society of Criminology 367

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 15 rIssue 2