The Political Dynamics of Justice Reform in The U.S.

“This shortfall of resources relative to demand contributes to significant delays in
treatment,” Justice Anthony Kennedy, who has since retired, wrote in the majority
opinion. “Mentally ill prisoners are housed in administrative segregation while awaiting
transfer to scarce mental health treatment beds for appropriate care. One correctional
officer indicated that he had kept mentally ill prisoners in segregation for ‘[six] months or
more.’”
Abbie VanSickle is a staff writer at The Marshall Project, where her work on California’s
prison reform movement is part of an ongoing series called “The California Experiment.”
VanSickle, as with others closely monitoring the implications of newly adopted laws and
initiatives, says California’s eagerness to pursue change can clearly be traced back to
the court’s mandate nearly a decade ago.
“It set in motion a sort-of series of changes in the way that the state’s prisons worked in
who was held and for how long, and eventually how people could gain early release,”
she tells News Beat podcast.
Reform
It all started with AB 109—or more popularly known as “realignment.”
As VanSickle notes in the podcast, AB 109 essentially moved people with nonviolent,
nonsexual and non-serious convictions out of prisons and into the custody of county
jails. That meant the onus was on each individual county to figure out the best way to
absorb low-level offenders into their respective systems, and come up with plans to
reduce recidivism—AB 109’s ultimate goal.
According to Bird, the law also included funding for local jurisdictions to develop
“evidence-based practices.”
“That’s really when we started to see the prison population come down in California,”
she tells News Beat podcast.
Along with lessening the degree to which people with non-serious felonies would serve
their time in prison, AB 109 also “very importantly…prevented revocations to prison for
most individuals who are leaving prison,” Bird notes. “And this meant that if they were
picked up for misconduct they either needed to be formally processed through the court
system and reconvicted of an offense or they needed to be revoked and serve that
revocation term locally.
The was significant, Bird says, because not only did it alleviate the pressure on prisons,
but overall incarceration levels also fell.
California no longer had “that sort of revolving door that had perpetuated the size of the
prison population in California,” she explains. “And what we saw as a result was really a
dramatic decline in the prison population. And that wasn’t surprising given that the rules
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