For the last five years, a great criminal justice experiment has been underway in California. Decades of "tough on crime" policies had left the state prisons—built to house a maximum of less than 80,000 people—totally overwhelmed. By 2006, the prison population had climbed to an all time high of roughly 173,000. In 2011, the Supreme Court ruled that the overcrowding in the state's prisons amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. The court ordered the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to reduce prison populations. In order to comply, the state passed new legislation—the Public Safety Realignment—which shifted the responsibility for many non-violent offenders from the state to its 58 counties, and gave each county a good deal of leeway and funding to figure out the best way to manage offenders.
Speaking to a group of the state's law enforcement officials last year, Governor Jerry Brown declared that this "realignment is working." The results of California's re-alignment experiment could serve as a model for the rest of the nation, which continues to struggle with its mass incarceration epidemic. Criminal justice reform is one of the few issues with support from politicians on both sides of the aisle; nearly every presidential candidate has called for reform. (Even former President Bill Clinton, whose "tough on crime" policies helped to catalyze the nation's incarceration crisis, has said those policies "overshot the mark.")
[For more of this story, written by Kate Wheeling, go to http://www.psmag.com/politics-...l-justice-experiment]
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