California Could Reduce Prison Population by Half
By: Wayne Boatwright
Tags: California, Mass Incarceration, Criminal Justice, Murder, Criminal Justice Reform

Once you accept that some violent offenders can safely return to their communities, mass decarceration suddenly looks plausible.

Three-fourths of all the incarcerated held by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) have been convicted of violent acts. Decarcerating the CDCR by 50% would require releasing large numbers of people convicted of violent crimes.

“Is it possible to do that safely? A wealth of evidence suggests that the answer, again, is yes. All it would require is a fresh look at the data. And some political courage,” reports Jason Fagone in an August 14, 2020, San Francisco Chronicle article.

The main worry about decarceration is public safety related to releasing violent criminals and a possible uptick in crime. Ironically, those who have committed murder can be safe to release: According to a study by the Stanford Criminal Justice Center, between 1995 and 2010, 48.7% of all paroled prisoners in California went on to commit new crimes, but among prisoners convicted of murder who were released, the rate was a minuscule 0.58%.

The challenge for California is that more than 30 percent of California’s prisoners — nearly 40,000 people — is serving a life sentence (mainly for violent crimes), including 5,100 serving life without the possibility of parole. That’s more than the number of people serving life sentences in Florida, New York, and Texas combined, according to the Governor — offer more hope to those serving long prison sentences article in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Gov. Jerry Brown granted 283 commutations, more than his predecessors. So far, Gov. Newsom has issued 65 commutations in almost two years, reported Fagone.

As an example of how decarceration can work, Emile DeWeaver, convicted of murder, is highlighted in Fargone’s California could cut its prison population in half and free 50,000 people. Amid pandemic, will the state act?

I know DeWeaver and served with him in San Quentin. I also wrote a letter in support of his commutation.

DeWeaver is one of a few hundred Californians to have had their criminal sentences commuted by the California governor. Everyone from Stanford professors to tech-industry professionals testified that he had transformed himself and was serving the community. In 2017, Gov. Jerry Brown agreed, commuting DeWeaver’s sentence to a lesser charge and allowing him to walk free a year later.

DeWeaver has a good job with Pilot, a successful tech startup that handles bookkeeping and tax preparation. He lives in East Oakland in a house he shares with four housemates. He pays his rent and owns some stock, is a published writer, the founder of his own justice-reform nonprofit (Prison Renaissance), former staff reporter for the San Quentin News, and a leader of the first Society of Professional Journalists chapter at San Quentin State Prison.

“This idea of ‘violent offender’ is way more complicated and counterintuitive than people understand,” said Emile DeWeaver in Fagone’s article.

“DeWeaver’s experience suggests that a violent act doesn’t freeze someone in amber, that an offender is more than just the offense, and he says he’s not an exception. There are tens of thousands of others in California’s 35 prisons who could be safely returned to their communities, he said, if the governor wanted to do it — and if the public supported him,” said Fagone.

DeWeaver says he wishes people could see what he saw during his 21 years of incarceration. Inside prison, “there is genius and there’s compassion and there’s creativity. There are models for compassionate living in prison that we could give to society. There are fathers we could give to their families. There are mothers we could give to their families,” he said.

If Gov. Newson wanted to decarcerate at scale, he could. Legally, he could declare an emergency, as Gov. Schwarzenegger did in 2006 to alleviate overcrowding (a process now known as “Realignment”). Multiple groups have asked Newsom to do the same in the COVID-19 crisis, reports Fagone.

Reformers say that large releases could also be achieved through the existing clemency process Article 5 allows the governor to substitute less severe punishments for existing ones, giving him wide latitude to alter people’s fates by commuting their sentences. Legal experts say the power could be wielded to release entire categories of incarcerated people.

“A common argument against decarceration is that these reentry services cost a lot of money, and they do. But right now, the state invests almost nothing in reentry programs — a few million here or there — and because state taxpayers spend an average of $81,000 per year just to keep a single relatively healthy person locked up, decarceration would save money, too,” said Fagone.

Before Realignment, California prison officials warned that the violent crime rate would surely rise. Instead, according to the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California and academic researchers, the state’s violent crime continued to hover at about the same level it was in the 1960s — a historic low. “There were no impacts on violent crime,” said Magnus Lofstrom, the institute’s policy director of criminal justice.

After Realignment, there was a brief uptick in property crimes like car theft, but even that fluctuation soon disappeared, returning to historically low baseline, Lofstrom said.

Once you accept that some violent offenders can safely return to their communities, mass decarceration suddenly looks plausible.