Realignment: What Exactly is Governor Brown Doing?

Image via Flickr user Steve Rhodes.

It all started in the 1990s, when a federal court found that California’s prisons were overcrowded to the point of violating constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment. In May of 2011, the situation was nowhere near resolved, and California prisons were still disturbingly overcrowded, the Supreme Court finding that they had about twice as many inmates than their 80,000-person capacity allowed for. In the same decision, they upheld the injunction to reduce California’s state prison population, which led to the continuation of the programs known as “realignment,” wherein California’s state prisons transfer their “surplus” non-violent (mostly drug-related) offenders to County facilities.

            So two years later, everything is all wrapped up, right? Well, not exactly. In January, Governor Jerry Brown decided it was time to end “intrusive federal oversight” and return power over California’s prisons back to California. Even though the special three-justice panel appointed to the case unanimously ruled against Brown, anyone who knows the Governor knows he’s not one to shy away from a fight, but his apparently-sudden opposition to realignment remains a bit…puzzling, to borrow a word.

            For one thing, in 2012’s State of the State speech, what little Brown said about realignment was positive:

            “The year 2012 presents plenty of opportunity and, if we work together, we can… [m]ake sure that prison realignment is working – to protect public safety and reduce recidivism.”

            For another, the Chief Probation Officers of California concluded in their 2012 report that realignment was demonstrating positive effects after only six months. Their report found that local probation departments were far more effective at rehabilitating felons, with only 4% of those supervised by county departments losing contact with their officers, versus 14% for those supervised by state officials.

            Less reputable sources, such as Breitbart News (best known for releasing pictures of then-Congressman Anthony Weiner’s genitals) have made claims like, “CA Crime Skyrockets in Wake of Brown’s Prison Release Plan, but even if crime rates have risen (which is dubious, Breitbart News’ source is an organization whose website’s tagline is “Organization advocating reduced rights for accused and convicted criminals”), it has yet to be demonstrated that realignment has anything to do with it. And as Margaret Dooley-Sammuli of the ACLU points out, “Simply building new jails or re-opening unused space treats the symptom but not the underlying disease.” But it would appear that fear of increased crime is the major driving force of Brown’s reversal, given that he cites public safety as the reason why we can’t release the last 10,000 inmates as mandated by the Supreme Court. Jonathan Simon of justicenotjails.org suggests an alternative explanation, namely that Brown is simply too deeply mired in California’s overly-punitive penal system and is behaving the way that system requires him to behave. Whatever the reason, Brown’s opposition to the Supreme Court’s mandate is mystifying and likely unproductive.