Measuring the Impact of Complex Penal Change—A Consumer’s Guide

• Author: Franklin E. Zimring
• DOI: 10.1177/0002716215601417
• Published date: 01 March 2016
• Date: 01 March 2016
• Subject Matter: Concluding Comment

304 ANNALS, AAPSS, 664, March 2016

DOI: 10.1177/0002716215601417

Measuring the

Impact of

Complex Penal

Change—A

Consumer’s

Guide

By

FRANKLIN E. ZIMRING

601417ANN The Annals of the American AcademyMeasuring the Impact of Complex Penal Change

research-article2015

Keywords: compliance; reform by stealth; jail popula-

tion; intergovernmental relations

The California Correctional Realignment

that inspired this collection of analyses was

a singular event in the legal and administrative

story of American imprisonment in its scale, in

its structure, in the complexity of the intergov-

ernmental relationships that will determine its

eventual impact, and in the mix of motives and

incentives at work to determine its destiny.

The issue of scale is a rather simple matter of

arithmetic. The population of persons in state

prisons stopped its generation-long massive

expansion after around 2007. On a national

basis, it appeared that the population incarcer-

ated in state prisons declined by about 3 percent

in the three years between the end of 2010 and

the end of 2013. But one state in the United

States, California, accounted for almost two-

thirds of the nationwide decline, with twenty-

nine thousand of the less than forty-five thousand

reduction in prisoners. The California decline

(at 17.6 percent) was more than thirteen times

the net percentage reduction in the other forty-

nine states. From the standpoint of reducing the

scale of state imprisonment, California’s experi-

ence in the period after Realignment must be

examined with care as a special case.

The complicated structure of the series of

steps that produced Realignment is also without

any obvious precedent. The primary govern-

mental initiative that launched the effort to

reduce the prison population was a federal court

order that found the levels of crowding, the lack

of adequate living conditions, and the failure to

provide required levels of health care in

Franklin E. Zimring is Simon Professor of Law at the

University of California, Berkeley.

Correspondence: fzimring@law.berkeley.edu