Are efforts to reduce incarceration increasing racial disparities in California?

Across many states, new criminal justice reform policies have been introduced that are aimed at reducing state prison populations. While these policies have succeeded in this initial goal, we know little about who benefits most from these reforms and whether racial groups have been affected in distinct ways. Racial discrimination in otherwise similar cases, as…

Using data from the California Department of Justice (CA DOJ), the Possibility Lab team examined data from the California Department of Justice (CA DOJ) to explore the impact of one major state policy reform on racial disparities in imprisonment: California’s historic criminal justice reform, Public Safety Realignment (AB 109). Like other decarceration policies enacted in recent years, the goal of AB 109 was to reduce incarceration for certain low-level offenses. In its first year following implementation, AB 109 reduced the prison population by nearly 30,000. However, we find that its benefits were not experienced equally across racial/ethnic groups. 

According to the data, we find that Black people were twice as likely as other groups to have prior convictions that disqualified them from serving sentences locally under AB 109, instead of in state prison. Moreover, once we include incarceration to jail, we find that racial disparities in total imprisonment increased following reform. 

Our results point to the need for criminal justice reforms to account for the long history of racially disproportionate punishment that persists through criminal histories. Hinging eligibility on prior convictions will likely favor white Americans in contexts across the United States where, like California, criminal histories vary across racial groups. This project was made possible with funding by the National Institute of Justice.