Public Safety Realignment initiative

California's Public Safety Realignment initiative represents an attempt by the state of California to reduce its state prison population by shifting much of that population to county jails. It was the result of a court-order in response to shortfalls in medical and mental health care for the state's prison population.

On 23 May 2011 the US Supreme Court upheld an order by a three-judge federal court requiring the state of California to reduce its state prison population to no more than 137.5% of its design capacity within two years. Prior to the initiative the state's prison population had risen to roughly 180% of its design capacity, and prisoners had become unable to receive routine medical or mental health care. In response, the governor and the state legislature passed two bills, Assembly Bill 109 and Assembly Bill 117, which became law and went into effect on 1 October 2011. Under these laws, new non-violent, non-serious, and non-sexual offenders with sentences of longer than one year would be housed in county jail facilities rather than state prisons (existing prisoners falling in those categories would not be relocated). Also, inmates released from such facilities would be placed on county-directed supervision rather than state parole. The laws also provided new funding for county facilities for the management of this increased in population.

By 2014 the state had offloaded approximately 25,000 prisoners to county facilities, but was still 9,600 prisoners short of the requirements set by the federal court. The court then granted the state two more years to meet its target prison population. However, the overall inmate population in the state had grown by approximately 12% since the original court order was upheld.

As of 2011, California’s state prisons were designed to house approximately 85,000 inmates. At that time, the Prison system housed nearly twice that many, approximately 156,000 inmates. The prison population consisted mainly of men (93%), Latinos and African Americans (roughly 67%), the majority from large urban centers (60% from Los Angeles), and were either unemployed or members of the working poor. Before the 1970s, imprisonment in the United States was rare: only 0.1% of the population was classified as incarcerated on any given day. Forty years later, approximately 1 in every 31 Americans was either in jail/ prison, or on probation/ parole. The financial cost has been estimated at over $60 billion a year for prisons alone, and when factoring in the cost of police and courts the figure has been identified as closer to $215 billion.

...
Wikipedia