Public Safety Realignment - ACLU of Northern California

ealignment, the state opted against meeting the court mandate through prison construction, prisonerrelease, or more modest reforms to its failed parole policies. Should the state fail to meet its totalpopulation reduction targets—or aim to exceed those targets—it will need to implement additionalchanges, such as sentencing reform, to further safely reduce overcrowding.While realignment encourages counties to use alternatives to incarceration, state funding allocationsto the counties thus far send a contradictory message. On the one hand, the state urges counties not torepeat at the local level the mistakes that led to the state prison overcrowding crisis. On the otherhand, the state has allocated more money to counties that have historically incarcerated the mostpeople, and on top of AB 109 funding is providing hundreds of millions of dollars more earmarkedfor county jail expansion, incentivizing the very practices that led to prison overcrowding in the firstplace.The decisions counties are making right nowabout how to implement realignment will havedramatic and long-lasting impacts on publicsafety and on local taxpayers. Will countiesfocus on expanding incarceration at theexpense of good public safety policy? Or willthey tackle complex criminal justice challengesby implementing policies and practices basedupon evidence rather than upon the politics offear? Will counties ask only what is to be donewith the realigned population? Or will they ask the broader, much more important question: howshould local public safety systems and structures change to provide the best public safety return onthe taxpayers’ investment?The ACLU of California produced this report to aid policymakers and policy advocates at the stateand county levels working to implement public safety realignment. We published our firstrealignment report, Community Safety, Community Solutions, 14 in August 2011, a month after thepassage of AB 109, just as counties were developing their implementation plans. Community Safety,Community Solutions provided an overview of AB 109’s legal provisions, twelve guidelines andrecommendations on implementation planning, and real-world examples of safe and effectivealternatives to incarceration. In this new report, the ACLU examines realignment five months afterimplementation began to determine how local governments are dealing with it on the ground.4