Abstract
Court-mandated downsizing of the CA prison system has led to a redistribution of detainees from prisons to CA county jails, and subsequent jail overcrowding. Using data that is representative of the LA County jail system, we build a mathematical model that tracks the flow of individuals during arraignment, pretrial release or detention, case disposition, jail sentence, and possible recidivism during pretrial release, after a failure to appear in court, during non-felony probation and during felony supervision. We assess 64 joint pretrial release and split-sentencing (where low-level felon sentences are split between jail time and mandatory supervision) policies that are based on the type of charge (felony or non-felony) and the risk category as determined by the CA Static Risk Assessment tool, and compare their performance to that of the policy LA County used in early 2014, before split sentencing was in use. In our model, policies that offer split sentences to all low-level felons optimize the key tradeoff between public safety and jail congestion by, e.g., simultaneously reducing the rearrest rate by 7% and the mean jail population by 20% relative to the policy LA County used in 2014. The effectiveness of split sentencing is due to two facts: (i) convicted felony offenders comprised ≈ 45% of LA County’s jail population in 2014, and (ii) compared to pretrial release, split sentencing exposes offenders to much less time under recidivism risk per saved jail day.
Highlights
To mitigate severe prison overcrowding, the U.S Supreme Court
Our goal is to identify policies that optimize the tradeoff between public safety—as measured by the annual rearrest rate of anyone on pretrial release, after a failure to appear in court, on regular probation or on supervision during a split sentence—and jail congestion, as measured by the mean jail population or the mean amount of jail overcrowding
We begin by simulating the status quo policy (Table 2) and find that the total jail population, the composition of felons vs. non-felons and sentenced vs. non-sentenced, and the amount of overcrowding are generally consistent with reported values for LA County (Table 5)
Summary
To mitigate severe prison overcrowding, the U.S Supreme Court CA counties have two primary options for reducing jail overcrowding in the short run They can offer pretrial release to defendants, in the hope that these defendants appear in court and do not recidivate (i.e., commit another crime) prior to case disposition. Bill 1468 requires that—unless the court finds it is not in the interest of justice—as of January 1, 2015 low-level felony sentences be split between jail time and mandatory supervision. To aid in these decisions, correctional systems throughout the U.S employ risk-based tools that use a defendant’s demographic data and criminal history to predict the likelihood of recidivism and of appearing in court. These tools are moderately predictive, achieving an area under the curve of the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.7 [3], meaning, e.g., that the probability a three-year recidivist has a higher risk score than a three-year non-recidivist is 0.7
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