Seemingly without a “grim roster of victims,” California reduces extreme prison crowding as ordered in Plata

As long-time readers will recall, the US Supreme Court in 2011 in Plata upheld, by a 5-4 vote, a lower-court order that imposed on California a requirement to have its prison population reduced below 137.5% of capacity to remedy extreme Eighth Amendment violations in prison conditions (basics here).  In their dissenting Plata opinions (as noted here and here), Justices Alito and Scalia predicted this ruling would likely produce “a grim roster of victims” and a massive number of “murders, robberies, and rapes” in California.  Similarly, as noted here, in response to Gov Jerry Brown’s realignment plan to deal with the Plata problems, the Los Angeles DA predicted “the greatest spike in crime of the last several decades.”

Fast forward a few years and this local story now reports that “California’s prison system has hit a milestone, with new figures showing that the inmate population inside the state’s 34 adult prisons has fallen below a court-ordered cap more than a year ahead of schedule.”  Here is more: 

California’s prisons steadily filled in the 1990s as tough-on-crime measures such as the “three-strikes” law won public support. In November 2006, the prison population hit 162,804 — larger than Elk Grove’s current estimated population — or 200.2 percent of the design capacity at that time.

Lawyers for the inmates said overcrowding had reached the point that medical and mental health care services for prisoners were unconstitutional, and they renewed their legal challenge to a system in which inmates were being housed in triple-deck bunks in prison gyms and other open spaces.  The state disagreed and continued to fight, but in August 2009 a panel of three federal judges said the situation had “brought California’s prisons to the breaking point.”

The panel decreed that within two years the state would reduce inmate populations to 137.5 percent of capacity.  The U.S. Supreme Court agreed in a 5-4 decision in 2011 that the prison population had to be reduced, prompting a series of efforts under Gov. Jerry Brown that led to Thursday’s levels.

Under the latest court orders, California has until Feb. 28, 2016, to cut its inmate population to the 137.5 percent benchmark. The early success in getting to that point can be traced largely to the governor’s prison realignment plan, passed in 2011, which shifted responsibility for nonviolent, low-level offenders from the state to counties.

Before that plan, as many as 60,000 inmates annually were sent to prisons as parole violators and served an average of 90 days. The Department of Corrections says realignment has cut the prison population by about 25,000 inmates. Counties statewide have seen an increase in jail inmates during that time frame….

[In addition,] 2,035 inmates have been released since passage of Proposition 47 in November, which redesignated several felony-level crimes, including some drug possession and property offenses, as misdemeanors. [And] 1,975 inmates in prison after a “third strike” have been released since voters approved Proposition 36 in 2012.  The measure allows for inmates to seek resentencing if their third strike was not considered serious or violent.

So, one should ask, what has happened recently in California with respect to crime rates, especially violent crimes that produce the greatest harms to victims.  This Crime & Consequences post provides a quick summary of the latest official data: “California property crimes per 100k population totaled 2,665.5 in 2013, a 3% drop from the 2012 figure although still above the rate before the realignment law went into effect.  Even better, the rate of violent crimes, less affected by that law, is down to a level not seen since 1967.”

Posts at C&C highlight data indicating an increase in car thefts and other property crimes in recent years in California.  But I do not think even the greatest critics of Plata and the state’s responses can assert that, as was predicted by a prominent prosecutor, California has experienced “the greatest spike in crime of the last several decades.”  In sharp contrast, violent crime has continued to drop in the state in the wake of Plata.  

Though I doubt we will be hearing any sort of mea culpa from those who predicted that the public safety sky was sure to fall after Plata, I hope the California story will help inform assessments of future Chicken-Little-type predictions.