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California over the past dozen years enacted a series of criminal justice laws that were meant to give more people an opportunity to be resentenced and thin out the state’s severely overcrowded prisons. This week a state agency released the most-comprehensive look yet at how those changes are playing out among formerly incarcerated people.
The report found low recidivism rates among people who were older and had served lengthy sentences. Those patterns contrasted with people serving shorter prison sentences for nonviolent crimes, which showed higher rates of recidivism, the majority of which were for misdemeanors.
The Committee on Revision of the Penal Code and California Policy Lab on Wednesday published the report, which details demographics and recidivism rates for five of the most significant resentencing policies implemented between 2012 and 2022 under Gov. Gavin Newsom and former Gov. Jerry Brown.
- Changing Three Strikes: Proposition 36 in 2012 allowed people serving a life sentence for a “non-serious, non-violent” third strike offense to petition courts for resentencing. Nearly half of the 2,200 people who were released were Black and most were above age 50. The group had an especially low recidivism rate.
- Lower penalties for drugs and petty theft: Proposition 47 in 2014 allowed incarcerated people convicted of certain low-level drug and theft offenses to petition courts for resentencing. This population, which accounted for the largest share of people released among all of the policies, had a higher recidivism rate.
- Restricting felony murder charges: New laws in 2018 and 2022 narrowed the circumstances for prosecutors to charge people with felony murder if they were involved in a crime but did not pull the trigger to kill someone. Those released under the changes had a very low recidivism rate.
- Good conduct: A 2018 policy allows the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to recommend resentencing due to changes in the law or positive conduct. The department’s secretary has referred over 2,200 people for resentencing. The report found that 786 of those cases were denied. Those released under the policy had a low recidivism rate.
- Rethinking sentencing enhancements: A 2022 law allowed courts to reduce sentences for people who were serving time for enhancements that had been repealed through other laws. The report found that Black and Latino people accounted for 75% of people who were resentenced under the law.
Under all five policies, approximately 12,000 people have been resentenced and 9,500 have been released, according to the report. Black and Latino people represented the majority of those released under the policies.
The Committee on Revision of the Penal Code, a state agency created by the Legislature in 2020, is led by a group of academics and lawmakers, most of whom are appointed by Newsom to recommend statutory reforms. The agency partnered with the California Policy Lab, a research institute at UC Berkeley, to produce the report.
Tom Nosewicz, legal director for the agency, said the data show that the policies have been largely successful at reducing the prison population without increasing risks in public safety and can serve as a blueprint for future changes.
About 90,000 people are incarcerated in California prisons, down from a peak of about 170,000. It costs roughly $130,000 per year to incarcerate someone. As of December 2024, more than 30,000 incarcerated people were over the age of 50 and had served more than 15 years, according to the report.
The new laws “helped reduce our prison population, but of course, it’s a drop in the bucket,” said Nosewicz. “That’s why I think it’s important to show how we can expand some of these opportunities and show ways that have worked and ways that haven’t.”
While the report includes one-year recidivism outcomes for all five reform policies, only two of the policies were old enough to measure three-year recidivism outcomes, which is the standard timeline to determine recidivism. Researchers Alissa Skog and Johanna Lacoe acknowledged that as a limitation, noting that a longer time frame can yield “substantially higher recidivism rates.” They also noted that they could not account for people who were eligible under the policies but did not petition the courts or were denied resentencing by judges.
Michele Hanisee, special assistant of legislative affairs for the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office, said the report was not “an intense study.”
“It was a superficial data review,” she said.
Other district attorneys have been critical of the Committee on the Revision of the Penal Code.
“Generally, the committee's recommendations, though maybe well-intentioned, have proven to be damaging to victims, law enforcement, and the criminal justice system and have also endangered public safety,” said Jonathan Raven, an executive at the California District Attorneys Association.
Women benefited from felony murder changes
But Kate Chatfield, executive director of California Public Defenders Association, said that resentencing, writ large, is working.
“Looking at this holistically, 15 years is the max that we should have someone in prison for. That should be the ceiling,” she said. “If you are looking at public safety, there is no reason to hold people in prison after they age out. That is what this data shows.”
Chatfield, who drafted the 2018 felony murder reform law, was struck by the number of women who were resentenced under it. According to the report, women accounted for 11% of people who were resentenced and released, which was a notch above the 7% they represented in total prison releases.
Under felony murder reforms, the report showed that nearly 1,200 people have been resentenced, the majority of whom were just over 21-years-old at the time of their offense and nearly half of whom were Black. Many served long prison terms — generally 14 to 15 years — after never having been incarcerated before.
For those released under felony murder reforms, researchers found that recidivism rates were “notably low” at 3% within a year and 7% within two years, most of which were misdemeanor convictions. Just five people out of 274 had been convicted of a new serious or violent felony within three years.
“It reinforces how correct it was for the Legislature and Gov. Brown to enact and sign that reform,” said former Oakland Democratic Sen. Nancy Skinner, who authored the 2018 law. “A long sentence does not contribute to improved public safety. There’s just a certain point where we’re warehousing people and using taxpayer dollars in a way that’s proven to be unproductive.”
'Who actually needs to be incarcerated'?
Just over 4,700 incarcerated people were resentenced under Prop. 47, nearly half of whom were serving time for a felony drug offense and under the age of 40 at the time of their release, according to the report. Researchers found that 57% of people resentenced under the proposition were convicted of a new crime within three years of release, most of which were misdemeanors. In comparison, 42% of people released between 2018 and 2019 were convicted of a new crime within three years.
Voters last year undid part of Prop. 47 when they passed a new initiative that lengthened sentences for certain theft and drug offenses.
Matt Cate, who was California’s corrections secretary under former Govs. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Brown, wasn’t surprised by those high recidivism rates, and said the combination of substance use disorders and property crimes are typically a “recipe for additional crimes committed upon release.”
But that doesn’t mean those individuals should have been incarcerated for longer, he said.
“In California and throughout much of the United States, we built the wrong prisons,” said Cate. “We built places that are really good at keeping inmates from escaping and are good, typically, at keeping people — especially staff — safe. But they’re a terrible environment for people to change their lives.”
Jennifer Shaffer, former executive officer of the Board of Parole Hearings, said reports like this will hopefully motivate people to dig deeper and understand how California can do better.
“Who actually needs to be incarcerated is the question,” she said. “This idea that people who commit low-level crime shouldn’t go to state prison, I think makes sense. It makes sense that they get treatment at the local level as opposed to going to state prison, because state prison unfortunately is a very violent place.”
Cayla Mihalovich is a California Local News fellow.
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
