Is Downsizing Prisons Dangerous?

• Date: 01 May 2016
• Author: Emily J. Salisbury,Jody Sundt,Mark G. Harmon
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12199
• Published date: 01 May 2016

RESEARCH ARTICLE

DOWNSIZING PRISONS

Is Downsizing Prisons Dangerous?

The Effect of California’s Realignment Act on Public Safety

Jody Sundt

Indiana University—Purdue University, Indianapolis

Emily J. Salisbury

University of Nevada—Las Vegas

Mark G. Harmon

Portland State University

Research Summary

Recent declines in imprisonment raise a critical question: Can prison populations be

reduced without endangering the public? This question is examined by testing the

effect of California’s dramatic efforts to comply with court-mandated targets to reduce

prison overcrowding using a pretest-posttest design. The resultsshowed that California’s

Realignment Act had no effect on violent or property crime rates in 2012, 2013, or

2014. When crime types were disaggregated, a moderately large, statistically significant

association between Realignment and auto theft rates was observed in 2012. By 2014,

however,this effect had decayed and auto theft rates returned to pre-Realignment levels.

Policy Implications

Significant reductions in the size of prison populations are possible without endangering

public safety. Within just 15 months of its passage, Realignment reduced the size of

the total prison population by 27,527 inmates, prison crowding declined from 181%

to 150% of design capacity, approximately $453 million was saved, and there was no

adverse effect on the overallsafety of Californians. With a mixture of jail use, community

A version of this article was presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology, Nov.

2014. Direct correspondence to Jody Sundt, School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana

University—Purdue University Indianapolis, 801 W. Michigan St., BS 3025, Indianapolis, IN 46202 (e-mail:

jsundt@iupui.edu).

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12199 C2016 American Society of Criminology 315

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 15 rIssue 2

Research Article Downsizing Prisons

corrections, law enforcement and other preventive efforts, California counties have

provided a comparable level of public safety to that previously achieved by state prisons.

Nevertheless, sustaining these policy objectives will require greater attention to local

implementation, targeted crime prevention, and sentencing reform.

Keywords

California Public Safety Realignment Act, prison downsizing,regression point displace-

ment design, prison population, Brown v. Plata

In the mid 1970s, the United States prison population began a steady climb that

continued until 2010 when, for the first time in 30 years, the number of inmates

declined (Guerino, Harrison, and Sabol, 2011). The prison buildup was based on the

premise that incarceration improves public safety. This argument was succinctly voiced in

1992 by U.S. Attorney General William Barr who said the nation had a “clear choice”—

build more prisons or tolerate higher rates of violent crime (Fletcher, 2000). Confidence in

the utility of incarceration was so great that policies to increase sentence lengths and punish

a broader range of crimes with imprisonment were pursued with vigor over several decades

by every jurisdiction in the United States (Clear, 1994; Travis, Western, and Redburn,

2014). Thus, the recent decline in the size of the prison population raises a critical question.

Can prison populations be reduced without endangering the public?

This question is examined by testing the effect of California’s dramatic efforts to lower

its prison population and comply with court-mandated targets to reduce prison overcrowd-

ing (Brown v. Plata, 2011). California exemplifies the confluence of fiscal, political, and

social changes that are reopening the debate about the value of incarceration. Most impor-

tant for our purpose, the implementation of the California Public Safety Realignment Act is

a natural experiment that allows us to test one of the most important crime policy questions

of our time.

The California Experience

Perhaps more than any other state, California exemplifies the fiscal and social consequences

of policies that exponentially increased the prison population by 572% in the 30 years

between 1980 and 2010 (Lawrence, 2012). California’s embrace of “total incapacitation”

led Simon (2014) to argue that, “California is to incarceration what Mississippi was to seg-

regation” (p. 17). Although California’s incarceration and crime rates have largely mirrored

those of the nation, the sheer size of the California prison population and a management

strategy of “hyper-overcrowding” and neglect are exceptional manifestations of the excesses

of mass incarceration (Simon, 2014).

At its peak in 2006, close to 175,000 inmates were incarceratedin California’s 33 prisons

(West and Sabol, 2008) and in 2008 California was ranked 2nd nationally in per capita

316 Criminology & Public Policy