Michael Rushford is the president of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation.

Historic and recent experience in California may be helpful in evaluating the potential impact of sentencing reductions.

California has led the nation in implementing broad sentencing reforms three times over the last 50 years. In 1965, to reduce the state’s prison population and provide alternatives to incarceration, the state adopted the Probation Subsidy Act, which paid counties to keep nonviolent offenders out of the prisons and provide rehabilitation services. But by 1980, after 45,000 criminals were placed in the program, California’s violent crime rate had risen 218 percent compared to the national increase of 198 percent. As the national homicide rate doubled, California's homicide climbed 308 percent.

Over that same period similar alternative sentencing schemes were rolling out in other states. The accompanying chart, utilizing F.B.I. crime statistics to compare the national incarceration rate with the national violent crime rate from 1960 to 2008, suggests a correlation between the two rates. Note that the “tough on crime” sentence increases adopted in California and nationally between 1985 and 1995 marks the start of a sharp drop in crime rates.

While there are several factors that influence crime rates, it would be difficult to deny that the consequences for crimes have a significant influence.

In late 2011, California again reversed course, leading the nation with another sweeping alternative sentencing law called Public Safety Realignment, which releases “low level” felons to counties and requires county jail time and rehabilitation programs for convictions of most property felonies. The second chart, below, uses F.B.I. crime statistics to compare the change in three selected crimes in large cities in California with New York, Florida, Texas and nationally — spanning the first six months before the law took effect to the six months after.

There is no question that crime rates will increase if sentencing reform provides large numbers of criminals with early release from prison and requires shorter sentences when they re-offend.

The habitual felon who gunned down N.Y.P.D. officer Randolph Holder, was considered a “low risk” offender and released to a treatment program. This is exactly what the current sentencing reform bill in Congress would provide for thousands of drug dealers, even those who used guns.

The sad truth is that the crime increases enabled by this type of sentencing reform will result in a widely disproportionate number of murder, rape, robbery and drug addiction victims in urban minority communities — the very people supporters of reform say they want to help.



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