Public Safety Realignment - ACLU of Northern California

Instead of taking extraordinary and expensive measures to finance jail construction, maintenance andstaffing or to open closed facilities—especially in a time of fiscal crisis with critical social servicesand education funding being cut across the board—counties would do better to implement smart,effective policies that reduce the number of people unnecessarily taking up expensive jail space. Jailbeds should be reserved for those who present a significant threat to public safety. Counties shouldnot be spending the lion’s share of AB 109 funding to expand jail capacity. The state should eithersuspend all AB 900 funding until such time as less costly and more effective community-basedalternatives have been fully implemented, or expand the AB 900 grant criteria to allow counties touse AB 900 monies for non-jail community sanctions and alternatives to incarceration.INCARCERATED WITHOUT TRIAL: THE REALITY OF JAILOVERCROWDING IN CALIFORNIABecause the state will no longer take mostpeople convicted of low-level felony offensesinto state facilities, there is a common—butmistaken—perception at the local level that jailconstruction is essential. Indeed, as noted above, all butone (Alameda) of the Big 25 counties intend to add jailcapacity, and of those all but three dedicated someportion of AB 109 money to do so. 60 However, effortsto create new jail capacity not only ignore the utterlyfailed state prison expansion and overcrowdingexperience; they also turn a blind eye to the reality ofjail overcrowding in California and to the new powersgiven to counties to better manage their jailpopulations. Rather than expand jail capacity, countiesshould implement evidence-based practices to manageboth pretrial and sentenced populations.As sheriffs have readily admitted, county jails are not full of individuals who have been convicted ofcrimes, or even individuals thought to present a high public safety risk to the community. Rather,most of those filling up scarce and expensive jail beds are individuals waiting for their day in courtbut unable to afford bail. It is hard to overstate the severity of this crisis. Years before the enactmentof realignment, the California State Sheriffs’ Association bemoaned the fact that there was “no roomfor sentenced inmates” in county jails due to the rising pretrial detainee population. 61California far exceeds the national average of 61 percent of jail space occupied by pretrial jailpopulations. 62 More than 50,000 of the 71,000 Californians held in county jail on any given day havenot been convicted of a crime but rather are awaiting trial—71 percent of county jails’ average daily18