Decarceration and…?
Local Policy Responses to State-Level Criminal Justice Reform
Michaela Cushing-Daniels (University of Pittsburgh)
Public Safety Realignment significantly changed spending behavior in California’s city governments. This is the primary finding in my recent article in Urban Affairs Review: taking changes in spending behavior as an indication of policy prioritization, I provide statistical and descriptive evidence that the design of the Realignment policies led city officials to de-prioritize enforcement when dealing with the policies’ effects. I use a policy feedback framework to explain why this happened. The provisions within Realignment that led to large reductions in the state’s incarcerated population also made local policy makers feel that increased law enforcement would lead to redundancy, thus exacerbating the “revolving door” problem in their local jails. Trying to reduce incarceration and recidivism was a more pragmatic response strategy, leading city officials to spend more on areas related to social welfare after Realignment.
The paper contributes to the feedback literature by providing evidence that the mechanisms for feedback effects between cities and states combine those traditionally associated with government-to-government effects (resource and interpretive) and those associated with mass feedback effects (problem salience and duration of exposure). Given that so many criminal justice system reforms are initiated at the state level in the United States, this research also offers insights into the way state officials can design such reforms to facilitate complementary responses at the local level.
Realignment and Policy Feedback – How does policy impact politics impact policy?
Public Safety Realignment was a package of legislation that sought to reduce the number of people in California’s state prisons. A key tenet of Realignment was that “managing lower-level offenders in locally run, community-based programs using evidence-based practices” is more effective than incarceration in improving individual-level outcomes. Since law enforcement happens primarily at the local level, local government alignment with this tenet would have been essential to achieving an overall reduction in incarceration in the state. Realignment caused a 17,000-inmate decrease in across California’s prisons and jails in just the first year after its passage, indicating that there was at least some compliance (if there had been an increase in jail incarceration commensurate to the decrease in prison incarceration, that would have indicated no compliance). This paper asks: what caused local officials to comply?
Policy feedback theory (PFT) suggests that if a policy changes how resources flow or affects political perceptions about the policy’s target population, that will result in political and policy changes at other levels of government and/or among the public (resource and interpretive effects). The political/policy context in which a change happens and the salience of the problem a policy is trying to address mediate feedback in mass-politics contexts. Resource and interpretive effects and problem salience matter in the context of state-to-local government policy feedback because of the large number of city governments and law enforcement jurisdictions in each state. In the case of Realignment, I argue that the lack of new/additional resources from the state to cities after Realignment lowered the utility of expanding law enforcement and increased the utility of spending on social welfare services because it changed the nature of California’s correctional landscape, targeted people who had only been convicted of low-level crimes.
“Like a revolving door” – How Realignment shaped officials’ attitudes and behaviors
Using city council meeting minutes recorded in the LocalView Dataset, I supplement my statistical analysis with an exploration of whether/how Realignment mattered to city officials. The meeting minutes show that Realignment was a salient policy issue in California cities, and that the policy feedback effects I expected to impact policy makers’ decisions were referenced by the policy makers themselves. Several officials mentioned the undue burden Realignment would put on their local police without additional resources from the state. Some officials explicitly pointed to this as a reason for moving away from enforcement-based responses, arguing that they needed to invest in alternatives to incarceration to prevent a “revolving door” problem in their local jails. On the interpretive side, one official’s comments illustrate the importance of targeting low-level offenses in the Realignment policy:
“[some] people are basically good folks and make mistakes and you need to deal with [them] in a different way. Putting them in jail is not always effective; it’s expensive and it doesn’t work…”
That city officials generally prioritized a noncarceral strategy is evident in the results from my statistical analysis, which I also use to check for feedback effects typically associated with mass-politics (problem salience and duration). I do this by using a triple-interaction model that captures the effect of being a city in California with a high number of arrests in the five years before Realignment. The results show that cities in California with a high number of arrests significantly increased their spending in areas related to social welfare after Realignment, indicating the effects were limited to places where crime as a policy problem was more salient. Additional tests revealed that this result is limited to cities that were already ideologically aligned with the state (evidence of contextual effects impacting feedback).
Overall, the results in this paper indicate that policy feedback between state and local government happens through a combination of government-to-government pathways and government-to-public pathways. The fact that cities in California responded in a way that was ideologically aligned with Realignment suggests that states can generally use these design elements to facilitate complementary policy making at lower levels of government, something that matters especially for criminal justice policy, since law enforcement is primarily executed at the local level.
The critical question that follows from this study is: who benefits from the increases in social policy spending observed in this study, and from social policy expansions more broadly? Do these reforms/expansions actually stop the “revolving door”?
Michaela I. Cushing-Daniels is an incoming visiting assistant professor of politics at Washington and Lee University. Questions of policy congruence, federalism, representation, and American institutions are important to her work, as she focuses on using quasi-experimental methods and large administrative datasets to explore the creation and implementation of policy solutions designed to solve systemic policy problems. Her current research agenda examines the resonances between criminal justice and social policy; she has additional published and forthcoming work focused on descriptive and substantive representation postelectoral reform. Cushing-Daniels holds a PhD in public and international affairs from the University of Pittsburgh School of Public and International Affairs and bachelor's and master's degrees in political science from Boston University.