Geography

The majority of inmates come from the southern part of the state. A whopping 50,000 – or 34 percent of all prisoners – come from Los Angeles County alone. But the highest incarceration rates are concentrated in poorer counties in the Central Valley and the Inland Empire. Leading the charge is Kings County in the San Joaquin Valley, where nearly 1 percent of the entire population is in state prison.

Click on the map below for info on the number of prisoners who come from each county in California, what percent of the prison population each county contributes, and what percent of each county’s total population is in prison.

Source: CDCR 2011 data

Race

The majority of prisoners are non-white. The largest group is Hispanic. But African Americans – who make up less than 7 percent of the general population and almost 30 percent of the prison population – are dramatically more likely to be imprisoned than any other group.

Source: Public Policy Institute of California (using 2010 CDCR and 2010 Census data)

Age

The prison population is aging. Currently nearly 20 percent of inmates are age 50 and up, about quadruple the rate from 20 years ago. Meanwhile, the percent of prisoners under age 25 has steadily dropped.

Source: CDCR 2010 data

Gender

California’s prison population is overwhelmingly male. Men make up nearly 95 percent of all inmates. 30 of the system’s 33 facilities are for men.

Source: CDCR 2010 data

(Teachers: check out our educator guide to explore this topic further with your students)

So what’s happened since last October?

Since October, when realignment began, most “non-serious, non-violent,  non-sex offenders” (as defined by the California’s Penal Code) have been sentenced to county jails or put in locally-run probation programs. The program shifts a huge amount of criminal justice responsibility and power from the state to the local level. Prior to last October, every county came up with it’s own individualized plan for how it would handle a potential increase in inmates and parolees. Each county then received an allotment of state funding based on its specific plan and the number of new inmates in projected receiving.

What’s the goal?

The state was mandated by a court order to cut its prison population by more than 30,000 inmates – almost the capacity of the Oakland Coliseum. Again, the new rule mainly applies to inmates convicted of non-violent crimes like drug sales and theft-related offenses.

On the one hand, the state has significantly reduced its prison population since realignment went into effect last October. At the end of September 2011, there were 144,456 inmates in the state’s 33 prisons, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. (Note: that does not represent California’s total prison population, which also includes prisoners in in-state and out-of-state private facilities, and those in work camps).

California’s 33 prisons are designed to hold about 80,000 prisoners (based on one inmate/cell). So at the start of realignment, the prisons were at about 180% overcapacity.

Data source: CDCR (click on the chart above to see the interactive version)

By the end of July 2012 the inmate population had been reduced to just over 120,000, or 150 percent of capacity. So over the last ten months, California’s 33 prisons shed more than 24,000 inmates. And that puts the system within reach of meeting its court-ordered goal of getting population down to about 110,000 (or 137.5 percent capacity) by June 2013.

All in all, sounds pretty good.

There are some skeptics, however. who are likely to point out several factors that might detract from this record of success. For one, much of the reduction – about 30 percent – took place within the first three months of realignment. But that trend has slowed, casting some doubt as to whether the June 13 goal can actually be met.

Also at issue is the burden that realignment has placed on many county jails throughout the state. New low-level offenders are now mostly serving out sentences in county jail facilities, many of which have limited space and are not equipped to hold inmates for long periods of time. In the first four months after realignment went into effect, the jail populations in a number of counties across the state skyrocketed . The trend isn’t universal, but it increased overcrowding in various county facilities. (Check out the interactive map).

The rising jail population also raises the question of whether California’s realignment experiment is actually reforming the state’s beleaguered prison system or just serving as a quick-fix. Nearly as many non-violent, low-level offenders are still being thrown behind bars for lengthy terms; it’s just that more of them are now being packed into county jails rather than state prisons.

Click on each county below for average jail population rates of sentenced inmates between the third quarter of 2011 (before realignment began) and the first quarter of 2012.

Data Source: California Board of State and Community Corrections

Here’s what happened:

State prison inmates in Chino by Kevork Djansezian

The language of the law literally says: “the purpose of imprisonment for crime is punishment.”  Beforehand, rehabilitation had been the penal system’s primary agenda. But with the new law,  punishment became the explicit goal.

How it used to be

Prior to 1977 California judges would typically sentence convicted offenders to very broad-ranging prison terms (say, five years to life for armed robbery). After an inmate had served a minimal period amount of time, a parole board would then determine the remaining sentence length. The board’s decision was supposed to be influenced by how the inmate had behaved during his/her sentence and the demonstrated degree of  “rehabilitation” (completing classes and job training, attending counseling, etc.).

Interestingly, this process – known as indeterminate sentencing – became increasingly unpopular among both conservative and liberal political leaders: conservatives expressed concern that parole boards were releasing inmates too early, while liberals alleged that the boards too often made discriminatory decisions based on factors like race.

Determinate sentencing

Determinate sentencing was intended to make that process less arbitrary. After 1977, the vast majority of convicted felons received fixed – or “determinate” – prison terms, and no longer appeared before a parole board before being released. The state legislature decided on “triads” of specific sentence lengths for certain crimes. So, whereas previously, first-degree burglary might have gotten you, say, one to 50 years, the exact same crime was now punishable by a strictly defined term of, say,  two, four, or six years.

Trial judges were required to impose the middle sentence unless overriding evidence justified a lower or higher term. (In 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated this last part of the law (Cunningham vs. California), ruling it a violation of the Sixth Amendment’s trial by jury requirement)

This new system, however, effectively got rid of many of the incentives inmates had to seek rehabilitation services. Prison terms were now pretty much set in stone regardless of good or bad behavior (with the exception of a very modest fixed reduction for good conduct). And as a result, increasingly fewer resources were directed towards rehabilitative services.

The big increase

As violent crime rates around the country rose in the 1970s and 1980s, so too did tough on-crime political positions, especially in California. determinate sentencing gave state lawmakers the authority to determine and change the length of prison sentences. And because few elected officials wanted to appear soft on crime, the legislature kept jacking up prison terms for various relatively minor offenses.

In the two decades after the enactment of determinate sentencing in California, state lawmakers enacted nearly 100 laws that significantly enhanced sentences for various felonies. In particular, harsher punishments for non-serious, non-violent crimes like drug offenses resulted in the long-term incarceration of thousands of offenders who, previous to 1977, may have gotten only very brief terms or not gone to prison at all.

When interviewed in 2007, three decades after signing the determinate sentencing law, Jerry Brown expressed regret, noting:: “Determinate sentencing, as it has worked out, is itself arbitrary.”

During that thirty year period, the state’s prison population increased by almost 900 percent.

The Parole Factor

The nature of parole changed as well after determinate sentencing took effect. It used to be that parole basically meant early release. Determinate sentencing pretty much eliminated that possibility. Ever since 1977, almost all released offenders (non-lifers) get placed under parole supervision for up to three years, during which time the ex-offender is “supervised” by a parole agent and required to follow specific conditions. In theory, the system is intended as much to make sure ex-offenders stay out of trouble as it is to help with their transition back into society.

In actuality, however, the parole system is sorely lacking in the extent of the very needed resources it’s able to provide. And many parolees get sent back to prison as a result of technical violations (called “administrative returns”). In short, parolees receive few services and walk on very thin ice. They can be sent back to prison for slip ups as mundane as not showing up for parole visits or failing a drug test.

That, along with the lack of rehabilitative services that are offered to offenders while still in prison, is a large part of the reason why California now has the highest rate of recidivism in the country. In 1977, the recidivism rate was about 15 percent. Today, close to 70 percent of all ex-offenders return to prison within just three years.

in 1984 there were just 12 state prisons; by 2005, there were 33. (Check out the interactive feature on the statewide prison buildup)

Prisoners at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego

Since its 2006 peak, when the inmate population was more than double the system’s intended capacity, the ranks have dropped considerably. But prisons throughout the state are still woefully overcrowded, with stuffed cells and spillover inmates housed in make-shift bunk rooms.

But it wasn’t always like this

The graph on the right –  looks like a scary ski slope – shows the increase in California’s inmate population since 1960. Note the relatively steady levels until 1980 (even though California’s general population more than doubled during that period). And then all of a sudden … BOOM! Things explode.

Between 1977 and 2007 the crime rate fell and the general didn’t even double, but California built almost 20 prisons, just about tripling the number of its facilities. Meanwhile, the prison population increased by more than 800 percent.

And it’s not cheap
Until recently, the state spent about $10 billion a year on prison, or roughly 11 percent of its total budget. That’s than what goes to the University of California and California State University systems combined. In 2009–10, the average cost to incarcerate a prisoner in California was nearly $47,000 (security and inmate health care accounted for about three–quarters of that). To put that in perspective: California spends, on average, less than $9,000 per-student on k-12 public education. California can now claim the country’s most expensive prison system with the highest rate recidivism (inmates who return to prison after release).