[Yolo County District Attorney Jeff] Reisig once again [stood] before supervisors last Tuesday and [referred] to Proposition 47 in terms very similar to last year's:
"It's like rolling through a spinning turnstile," Reisig said. "Our efforts ... have been pretty dismal."
And rates of both violent and property crimes continue to rise throughout the county, he said.
Numbers provided by Cardall revealed how dismal outcomes have been:
Of the 295 active Proposition 47 cases in his department, Cardall said, "40 percent are in violation."
Sixty-five offenders have never even shown up at the Probation Department as ordered, he said, and 52 have committed new offenses.
But look, dear readers, we shouldn't worry about it. These are only results for some far-off place with a weird name like "Yolo County." Houses there are not nearly as pricey as the ones in Palo Alto. And the people don't count as much, either.
Apparently probation is sufficient punishment for the defendant whose conviction was overturned due to Reisig's failure to provide the defense with exculpatory evidence.
http://www.davisvanguard.org/2011/03/courts-found-more-than-100-cases-of-prosecutorial-misconduct-in-2010/
Melissa --
Unable to dispute a single one of the data, it suffices to attack the person -- with a ten year-old case.
Again, I'll be happy to let that one speak for itself.
What data? It's a Chief Probation Officer, stating "We are not funded to supervise those clients so (it is) an additional load on the Probation Department" and how counties aren't even attempting to supervise Prop 47 releasees. Apparently much hasn't changed from last year when the same PO reported that releasees choose drug treatment over jail but then never received treatment.
California's marginal cost of a state prison inmate is $28,500. The 295 individuals in Yolo county currently in Prop 47 represent $8,407,500 in incapacitation costs. Seems like Prop 47 is not the problem. IF the anecdotes are accurate (no data on supervision costs provided) then it's a problem of execution not policy for failure to account in the increased workload for probation.
Although, I will note that even the numbers in an article you seem to think supports your argument the 52 new offenses equals a 17.6% recidivism rate, so 82.4% of Yolo County's Prop 47 releasees have not committed a new offense. The anecdotes lack data on what time frame they are narrating though, so it's difficult to tell exactly what Yolo's probation department and DA are complaining about.
[The final sentence of this comment has been deleted as insulting and over the top. The commenter is admonished to refrain from this behavior -- WGO].
1. First you were attacking the district attorney; now you've switched to the probation officer.
2. I will be happy to let readers judge for themselves whether you have a better idea of the results of Prop 47 releases in Yolo County, CA than the chief probation officer of Yolo County, CA.
3. Policies undertaken without anticipating problems in execution are per se flawed.
4. You say, "Although, I will note that even the numbers in an article you seem to think supports your argument the 52 new offenses equals a 17.6% recidivism rate, so 82.4% of Yolo County's Prop 47 releasees have not committed a new offense."
Because very many offenses are not even reported, much less result in an arrest or a prosecution, it is simply false -- and you know it to be false -- blandly to assert that 82.4% "have not committed a new offense." You know no such thing.
1. While pointing out the DA's past transgression may have been a character attack (a valid one in my opinion), I was not attacking the Probation Officer. But labeling my comment an "attack" is a good way of diverting attention away from substance.
2. I was not presenting readers a dichotomy between my idea of the results of Prop 47 versus the county's Chief PO's opinion on the results. Nowhere in my comment do I state what "my idea" of Prop 47's results are. Rather I just apply the various data revealed to state what we know about the results. Dismissing data as an opinion is a good way of diverting attention away from substance.
-applying the 52 new offenses to the the number of crimes committed over the last 12 months of the county's available crime statistics reveals that non-Prop 47 releasees accounted for 89.5% of the reported crime for that period.
http://www.yolocountysheriff.com/outreach/crime-stats/
But again this is a problem with using quotes on numbers that don't reveal the numbers' context. We don't know what period the 52 draws from, if it spans from a longer or shorter period this could make a drastic change. Also, as you have pointed out the number of violent crimes (especially homicides) are another important characteristic behind the numbers the public would likely want to know.
3. I largely agree. While I don't think policies can take into account all possible execution problems, I do think a policy that fails to account for likely execution issues in its execution is flawed. It's not clear that Prop 47 failed to do this though. The law directs savings from incarceration costs towards treatment which could conceivably include supervision (the Chief PO seems to think it's a possibility and hopes it will occur). Government agencies and employees notoriously complain they need more money for their workload, so it's difficult to evaluate fiscal needs absent data as opposed to requests for more funding.
4. True, I should have stated 82.4% of Yolo County's Prop 47 releasees have not been rearrested for a new offense while on release.
(P.S. I don't know if this is an just an issue on my end, but the hyperlink to "it's doing well" is not working for me).
Mr. Romano of the Stanford Justice Advocacy Project and co-author of Prop 47 cites the measure as a success because of the reduction in the prison population as well as the fact that most prop 47 defendants have not been returned to prison.
Part of the reason they have not been returned to prison is because when they commit new prop 47 offenses they cannot be sent to prison. How clever to define success as when you commit the same crime again, because now that it is a misdemeanor, you cannot go to prison. This would be like saying we have eliminated most robberies by decriminalizing most robberies.
David is correct. State corrections and most academics are evaluating the impact on Proposition 47 based upon how many offenders return to prison. The answer is very few. The reason for this is, the thief who steals a $900 television from WalMart, or a handgun from a car, even on a weekly basis, has committed a misdemeanor and cannot be sentenced to prison. But it's worse than that. If the thief steals a $90,000 Jaguar, or Melissa's ID and cleans out her bank account, under AB109 (Realignment) the toughest sentence he can receive is County Jail. This means the former felon who is now a misdemeant, can commit any property felony he wants, other than residential burglary, and never go back to state prison or be counted as a recidivist by the nice folks at Stanford or in Governor Brown's Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
As I've mentioned before in other pieces you've done on Prop 47, part of the problem is not Prop 47 itself, but the fact that judges aren't exercising their sentencing discretion to impose longer terms. In fact, the article points this out:
- Victor
The article doesn't mention jail capacity, and Yolo is a relatively small county, so maybe it's not a problem there. In many counties, though, there simply isn't enough jail capacity.
Any way you look at it, Prop 47 is either a cause or a catalyst for more recidivist crime. C&C is replete with entries quoting one local sheriff or police chief after the next to the effect that they are now seeing more of the revolving door of crime than in the pre-Prop 47 days, and have fewer effective tools to deal with it.
The impulse to minimize crime and recidivism is both misleading and unworthy. It brings to mind Kent's discussion of a Peggy Noonan column about "The Unprotected."
http://www.crimeandconsequences.com/crimblog/2016/02/the-unprotected.html