Realignment and Recidivism

• Date: 01 March 2016
• DOI: 10.1177/0002716215603319
• Author: Ryken Grattet,Mia Bird
• Published date: 01 March 2016
• Subject Matter: III. Effects on the Criminal Justice System

603319ANN
The Annals of the American AcademyRealignment and Recidivism
research-article2015
California’s 2011 Public Safety Realignment created an
unprecedented policy experiment by transferring the
authority over lower-level felony offenders from the
state correctional system to fifty-eight county jail and
probation systems. While centered in California, these
changes are reflective of an ongoing national conversa-
tion about the appropriate level of government at
which to focus crime control efforts. In this article, we
first situate Realignment in criminological and sociole-
Realignment gal literatures, showing how the reform offers opportu-
nities to further inquiry as to the effectiveness of a wide
and Recidivism variety of correctional strategies, implementation, and
local variation in correctional law and policy. We then
review early research focused on the statewide effect of
Realignment on recidivism, which has produced mixed
findings depending on the measure of recidivism
applied. We then examine variation in recidivism out-
comes across county sites and present findings that
indicate there is an important relationship between
local Realignment implementation strategies and recid-
By
ivism outcomes. throughout, we focus on two over-
MIA BIRD
arching themes. the first is the challenge of
and
disentangling the roles of offender behavior from jus-
RykeN GRAttet
tice system response in meaningfully interpreting
changes in recidivism outcomes. the second is the
challenge of evaluating the effects of policy or practice
changes under limited data. Although the need for bet-
ter and more expansive data is a common theme, we
highlight it here in the context of a larger data collec-
tion that we have under way.
Keywords: recidivism; correctional reform; reentry;
mass incarceration; law-in-action
On October 1, 2011, California began imple-
menting Public Safety Realignment, a
decentralization of authority over corrections
and rehabilitation from the state to the
Mia Bird is a research fellow at the Public Policy
Institute of California. Her current projects examine
the effects of major policy changes—including
California’s Public Safety Realignment and the imple-
mentation of the Affordable Care Act—on county pri-
orities, local intervention strategies, and individual
criminal justice outcomes. Bird also serves on the fac-
ulty of the Goldman School of Public Policy at the
University of California, Berkeley.
Correspondence: bird@ppic.org
DOI: 10.1177/0002716215603319
176 ANNALS,
AAPSS, 664, March 2016

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ReALIGNMeNt AND ReCIDIvISM
177
fifty-eight counties. Motivated by federal court rulings linking overcrowding to
the inability of the state to provide a constitutional level of health care in
California prisons, as well as a state budget crisis, the new law represents a sub-
stantial shift of responsibilities and has been described as “revolutionary and
sudden” (Weisberg 2011), “the most significant correctional reform in decades”
(Misczynski 2012), and “the biggest penal experiment in modern history” (Santos
2013). Realignment moves authority over most nonserious, nonviolent, nonsexual
felony offenders from the state to the counties and allows counties to exercise
much greater discretion to implement new practices in incarceration and postre-
lease supervision.
Realignment was expected to sharply curtail the prison population by statuto-
rily limiting revocations to prison, as well as limiting the types of convictions that
would be prison-eligible. While the immediate goal of Realignment was to
address prison overcrowding, a secondary aspiration of Realignment was to
reduce California’s historically high recidivism rates. there are two key mecha-
nisms through which Realignment might reduce recidivism. First, supporters of
Realignment hypothesized that the “locals could do it better.” that is, given
increased resources from the state, local justice systems could make better use of
programmatic interventions to treat and rehabilitate their populations. In addi-
tion, they hypothesized that justice populations may do better when they are kept
closer to their families and communities.
Second, supporters hypothesized that Realignment would induce behavioral
changes within justice systems because it fundamentally changed the incentives
those systems face. While prior to Realignment, counties could choose to rely
heavily on the prison system, effectively passing the correctional burden of felony
offenders to the state, post-Realignment counties would bear the burden of man-
aging revocations and lower-level felony convictions through their local jail and
probation systems.
Opponents of Realignment were concerned that the policy change would
lower overall incarceration rates and, ultimately, reduce the penalties associated
with offender misconduct. As a result of this reduction in deterrence, opponents
expected to see an increase in crime and recidivism post-Realignment. In addi-
tion, concerns were also voiced about an increase in the extent of the variability
of treatment and outcomes across local justice systems due to difference in the
resources or orientations of counties.
Realignment offers the opportunity to test these hypotheses. this article begins
by situating the case of Realignment in the broader research literatures on recidi-
vism and mass incarceration. We then summarize the preliminary findings on the
effect of Realignment on recidivism outcomes, measured through rearrests,
Ryken Grattet is a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California and a professor
of sociology at the University of California, Davis. He previously served as Assistant Secretary
of Research in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. His current work
focuses on California correctional policy at the state and local levels.
NOte: this article was originally prepared for “Realigning California Corrections: Legacies of
the Past, the Great experiment, and trajectories for the Future,” A National Science Foundation
Workshop held at the University of California, Irvine, October 17–18, 2014. the authors thank
Charis kubrin, Carroll Seron, Anjuli verma, and the anonymous reviewer for The ANNALS.

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178
tHe ANNALS OF tHe AMeRICAN ACADeMy
reconvictions, and returns to prison custody. We then review and discuss findings
on the variability across counties in approaches to Realignment implementation
and the relationship between these approaches and recidivism outcomes.
there are three reasons we present these findings as preliminary. First, unlike
prison incarceration levels and crime rates, an analysis of recidivism requires a
substantial window of time to observe offenders postrelease. Second, currently
available data capture only the prison-release population, leaving out the popula-
tion held locally, which is arguably the population that experiences the full
Realignment treatment. Finally, currently available data capture only returns to
prison custody, leaving out returns to jail custody as a measure of recidivism.
therefore, the recidivism findings presented here represent the first phase of
post-Realignment analysis. the authors are currently leading a data collection
effort that will enable the next phase of analysis, which allows for the inclusion of
the full Realignment population, the full set of recidivism measures, and a longer
time window of postrelease observation. In addition, these data will capture
individual-level treatment experiences, allowing researchers to take advantage of
the variation in approaches to Realignment across counties and over time to
identify the effects of specific interventions on recidivism outcomes. this work
will be conducted over the next one to three years.
In the interim, we anticipate preliminary findings can be useful to three key
audiences. First, policy audiences in other states may draw on the California
experience with Realignment as they consider decentralization as a possible
response to high incarceration levels and recidivism rates. Second, practitioner
audiences within California, and perhaps beyond, may draw on early findings on
the relationship between implementation approach and recidivism outcomes as
they tailor their local strategies. Last, we hope to participate in a conversation
with our fellow researchers who are grappling with questions of how to analyze
the effects of particular policy changes or other treatments on recidivism out-
comes. this research community is the main audience for the article, and there-
fore, we contextualize our review of findings in a broader conversation about the
definition and measurement of recidivism. We draw on our empirical findings to
demonstrate that multiple measures of recidivism are required to begin to disen-
tangle the two mechanisms at work—changes in individual behavior and changes
in justice system response—under policy regime change. And finally, we
acknowledge that perfectly disentangling these two mechanisms may not be pos-
sible given available data.
Situating Recidivism and Realignment
in Sociolegal Scholarship
Recidivism: Services, sanctions, supervision, and community
contexts of reentry
With a few exceptions, research on recidivism has not given substantial
attention to how legal and policy changes like Realignment affect recidivism

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179
outcomes. As a result, Realignment...