State must more closely monitor how criminal justice realignment dollars are spent

For several years, there has been a steady drumbeat of deaths and mental health crises in local jails across the state, and an increase in media reports about the chaos and violence that results from a system that remains over-reliant on incarceration to address society’s most pressing challenges.

Just last month, San Diego County agreed to pay $15 million to the family of a woman who died in jail after not receiving the medical treatment she needed. And five people have died while in the custody of the Sacramento County jail in the last 11 weeks alone.

More than a decade ago, former Gov. Jerry Brown and the state legislature sought to ensure counties had appropriate resources to invest in effective alternatives to incarceration, like community-based drug and mental health treatment, for low-level, non-violent offenders, so counties could better manage their jail populations. For years now, counties have received billions of dollars to implement such programs, proven to successfully prevent crime and harm from occurring in the first place.

But it’s unclear whether those dollars have been used as intended.

That’s why AB 2882, introduced earlier this year by Assembly Member Kevin McCarty, is so critical.

AB 2882 is a long-overdue effort to create reporting systems for county programs that are supposed to spend criminal justice “realignment” dollars to boost mental health services and other non-incarceration-based interventions to assist those with criminal convictions. In 2011, in the face of a Supreme Court ruling mandating the state reduce the size of its prison population, Gov. Brown kick-started a “realignment” process to move low-level offenders out of state prisons and into local jails, and, ultimately, to boost alternatives to incarceration. The governor’s priorities were, soon after, codified into law with the passage of AB 109, the Public Safety Realignment Act.

AB 109 set in place a state fund to help counties manage the tens of thousands of low-end offenders they were now responsible for. For more than a decade now, the state has distributed a huge amount to the counties for this purpose; California spent roughly $8 billion on realignment last year alone. Two billion dollars of that was provided to counties exclusively to fund AB 109-mandated programs.

That sounds good in theory; in practice, however, AB 109 dollars aren’t subjected to stringent reporting requirements, and there’s a paucity of data regarding both where and how the money is spent and whether the programs invested in actually successful. A recent report by the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice found that, “AB 109 reporting is unsystematic, allowing critical planning and spending decisions to go unscrutinized.”

What we know is that, on average, counties in California channel nearly three quarters of their AB 109 funds to law enforcement. That’s simply wrong-headed.

If AB 2882 passes, it will require local Community Corrections Partnerships (CCPs) to develop detailed plans, to be submitted annually for approval by the state, for their spending of this money. And it will mandate that the CCPs bring on-board representatives from local Medi-Cal managed plans that provide Enhanced Care Management benefits, as well as county social service and mental health departments and county alcohol and substance abuse programs.

With these new requirements, it will be easier for counties to lower their jail populations, to drive down recidivism rates, and to reduce the disproportionate rates of incarceration faced by the seriously mentally ill, by non-white residents, by those with substance abuse issues, and by the LGBTQ+ population.

Both of us, and the organizations we represent, have spent many years immersed in these issues. The Steinberg Institute has long pushed for changes in the way society treats, and delivers services to, the seriously mentally ill – far too many of whom continue to cycle through the jail and prison system – and Californians for Safety and Justice has been one of the state’s leading advocates for strategies that prevent crime and harm before they occur.

We believe AB 2882 is a necessary fix. AB 109 dollars were never intended as a general fund for probation departments and other law enforcement agencies, yet in practice, that is what they have become. There are billions of state dollars in play for counties to use to fundamentally rethink how government interacts with low-level criminals whose crimes are intertwined with mental illness and/or addiction. It’s vital those dollars be spent effectively, and for that to occur it is long past time for counties to have the rigorous data-gathering and reporting processes mandated by this proposed legislation.

Darrell Steinberg is Mayor of Sacramento and has been serving the Sacramento community for over 20 years. Tinisch Hollins is a crime survivor and the Executive Director of Californians for Safety and Justice.