Offenders have better outcomes when released to counties prioritizing reentry services rather than enforcement.

After decades of growth, prison populations are dropping in several US states. In California, which houses the US’s largest prison system, recent declines are driven by a landmark policy change—Public Safety Realignment—that decentralized correctional authority and management from the state to the counties. New research from Mia Bird and Ryken Grattet finds evidence that offenders released to counties that prioritized reentry services under realignment had better recidivism outcomes than those released to counties that focused on traditional incarceration approaches

Climate Change and Legitimate Governance: Land Use and Transportation Law and Policy in California

The primary challenge of addressing climate change lies in it requiring a rethinking and even reorganization of fundamental societal institutions that define much of contemporary life. In this paper, we examine an innovative effort to address climate change through regional land-use and transportation policy. We focus on the activities of a Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO)—a novel governance structure that coordinates transportation funding between federal, state, and local governments. In 2008, the California senate mandated that the state’s seventeen MPOs implement the Sustainable Communities Strategies Act (SB 375), an effort to align transportation and land-use planning with the state’s ambitious Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32) and return CO2 emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. Our research focuses on the implementation of the SB 375 via the Sacramento region’s MPO, an early adopter of an innovative planning approach called “Blueprinting.” Prior research shows that despite being widely celebrated as a “successful” urban transportation and land-use planning approach, actual outcome and performance data suggests that the Blueprint Plan will not significantly reduce regional greenhouse gas emissions. The decoupling of the “planning process” from “policy outcomes” prompted the question that motivates this research paper: Why has the Blueprinting transportation and land-use planning process been deemed a “policy success” while the evidence suggests outcomes associated with it will not achieve SB 375 nor AB 32 attainments? The answer we found centers on legitimacy. We observe and identify four distinctive dimensions that legitimacy took in the strategies and justifications deployed by Blueprinting advocates to win support from regional stakeholders. The legitimation typology we develop in this paper involves structural, popular, technological, and professional forms of legitimacy. We conclude with a discussion of legitimacy as a multifaceted condition involving the potential for conflict and coalition as well as the broader challenges that climate change presents governance as both a material threat and one amenable to decoupling wherein “legitimacy fulfillment” trumps “material attainment.

California Jails under Realignment and Proposition 47

This article considers how recent correctional reforms in California, which downsized the state prison system, have impacted county jails. Jails have long been overlooked by researchers and, yet, as the state shifts authority for managing certain types of offenders to counties, jails have become an even more important part of the state’s correctional options. Using detailed data from twelve counties, we examine how jails are changing in terms of types of individuals that move through them as well as how long they stay in custody and how they are released. We find that the jail population is increasingly comprised of more serious types of offenders, many of whom are staying in custody for relatively long periods of time. These changes highlight the need for policymakers to consider a variety of options to improve outcomes for offenders when they return to the community as well as the need for additional research to inform to better inform who should be held in custody, what they do while being held, and who might be safely released

Bias Crime in Sacramento, 1995-2002

This report presents the findings of a research project on bias crime in Sacramento, California. The project was a collaboration between UCD Sociology Professor Ryken Grattet and four undergraduate sociology majors at UCD. The report describes the characteristics of bias crime in Sacramento and compares bias crime in the city with the State of California as a whole. The data presented in the report come from the Sacramento Police Department and the California Department of Justice. The report also contains a methodological discussion of the weaknesses of these data sources