The Prospects and Perils of Ending Mass Incarceration in the United States

Abstract

Until recently, the state of California was home to the nation’s largest state prison system. After several decades of rapid growth, California’s prison population peaked at 173,000 in 2006, despite the fact that its prisons were designed to hold a maximum of 79,858 people. In 2011, the Supreme Court decided that prison conditions in California were tantamount to cruel and unusual punishment and required the State to bring its prison population down to 137.5 percent of design capacity by reducing the rolls by some 33,000 inmates over a two-year timeframe. To comply with the court order, California enacted a controversial law – Public Safety Realignment – which transferred responsibility for lower level felony offenders from the state correctional system to 58 county jail and probation systems. The realignment of California corrections has been described as “the biggest criminal justice experiment ever conducted in America.” How did California end up in the Supreme Court? How has Realignment been implemented in the State? Is the Realignment experiment working? Going forward, what can we learn from California? Addressing these questions, this issue of The Annals of American Academy of Political and Social Science offers the first systematic, scientific analysis of the recent realignment of California’s corrections. This is the introductory chapter to the volume.