Last week, the Committee on Revision of the Penal Code and California Policy Lab published a report looking at the recidivism rates of people resentenced under some of the state’s major criminal justice reforms.
The report looked at people released from state prison through some of the better known reforms and some lesser known ones.
In 2012, California voters approved Proposition 36 to reform the “three strikes” law so that the third strike carrying a life sentence had to be a serious or violent felony. In total, 2,200 people have been released from state prison thanks to that reform.
Unlike the general population of prisoners who get released from prison, those impacted by Prop. 36 skew older, with most of them older than the age of 50 and most of them having served 15 or more years in prison.
With these characteristics in mind, while the three-year conviction rate for all prisoners released in fiscal year 2018–19 was about 42%, the rate for people released through Prop. 36 was about 25%, with most of those being for misdemeanors.
This corresponds to a common intuition and truism about crime being a young man’s game, with criminality being most pronounced among younger people (mostly men) and less common among older people.
Meanwhile, very much unlike Prop. 36, the set of people released from state prisons by way of 2014’s Proposition 47 are quite different. About half were under the age of 40 at the time of release and generally spent no more than a year in prison.
Those released from Prop. 47 indeed had a much higher three-year conviction rate after release from prison, with 57% convicted again (mostly for misdemeanors). Most (29% of those released) were convicted within the year of release, mainly for misdemeanors.
Given the set of crimes covered by Prop. 47 — drug possession and low level theft — it’s probably no surprise that many of them ended up back in the justice system. Many of those swept up into the justice system under such offenses are drug addicted, homeless, mentally ill or some combination of all of those things. The justice system has had and continues to have a hard time striking the right balance of handling such people.
Meanwhile, other sets reforms covered by the report, including changes to the felony murder rule (when people who don’t directly kill someone buy are involved in the commission of the crime that resulted in murder), sentencing reforms tied to good conduct and changes to sentencing enhancements, showed lower one-year recidivism rates to the general population.
Taken together, the report shows that sentencing reforms can be and mostly have been undertaken responsibly. But the findings also underscore the need to better handle those who are most prone to become repeat offenders, even if those offenses are relatively low-level. How, for example, 2025’s Prop. 36 works will be something to watch, as are any other sentencing reforms.
The more clear data we have, the better. Without data to appropriately analyze what’s working or what isn’t, we’re left doing justice policy via competing slogans and vibes.