Overview—California’s corrections system, one of the largest state-level systems in the world, is in crisis. Prison overcrowding led to U.S. Supreme Court intervention (Brown v. Plata 2011). The Plata order required the state to reduce its prison population to 137.5 percent of design capacity within two years, translating into a reduction of nearly 33,000 prisoners. In response, the state enacted “Public Safety Realignment,” considered the largest prison downsizing experiment in U.S. history. Realignment is designed to comply with Plata by devolving from the state to each of its 58 counties the responsibility for supervising a sizeable class of offenders. This historic shift in the structure and workings of the criminal justice system evokes a series of questions amenable to empirical examination; such questions are consequential for theorizing the workings of the state, penology and social control. We will convene a workshop at University of California, Irvine to catalyze an interdisciplinary research agenda to answer these crucial questions. Participants will conduct original research, present and discuss findings, solidify productive collaborations and identify promising avenues for future research. Papers resulting from the workshop will be published in an edited volume that uses the Plata case and Realignment as a lens through which to advance scholarship in the study of law and society as well as criminology and criminal justice.Intellectual Merit—The workshop will accomplish four objectives: (1) identify the historical antecedents to California’s prison crisis, (2) understand the diffusion and translation processes of legal mandates, such as Plata and Realignment, among different levels of government and society, (3) document and explain the effects of Plata and Realignment on all aspects of California’s criminal justice system, including probation, parole, the courts, law enforcement and crime rates, and (4) leverage the California case to more broadly theorize and research prison downsizing and correctional reform beyond California. Given that Realignment only recently went into effect, it is not surprising that there are no peer-reviewed published findings examining its origins, structure, workings and consequences. Therefore, the research that emerges from this workshop and that will be published in the edited volume will present the first comprehensive analysis of California’s path to the Plata ruling, as well as the implications of Realignment on the future of the criminal justice system.
Broader Impacts—Understanding how Plata and Realignment affect California’s criminal justice system, crime rates and communities is crucial for evaluating the viability of prison downsizing more broadly in the U.S. The development of an interdisciplinary scholarly research agenda will shed light on the practical issues that face California as well as on how the U.S.’s reliance on mass incarceration is being reconciled with the economic crisis facing the nation at large. The steps taken in California are being closely watched by other states confronting similar challenges arising from prison overcrowding. These states are asking whether large scale prison downsizing in California will compromise public safety or whether they can look to Realignment as a possible solution to replicate in their own states. While speculation abounds, rigorous, high-quality scientific research has yet to be done. As such, policymakers and the public lack the knowledge base needed to make evidence-based decisions about the operation of criminal justice systems in the future. The workshop represents a necessary first step in producing such research.
This project is funded by the National Science Foundation ($50,000).
Workshop website: http://sites.uci.edu/lawcrimeworkshop/.