The Flawed NRC Report: No Mention of Realignment!

(This is Part 5 in my criticism of the recent National Research Council report on incarceration. Here are Part 1,  Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.) 

In my previous post, I pointed out that the NRC report overlooked the centrality of prosecutors to prison growth, and thus ignored the importance of counties. In my next few posts, I will expand on the signficance of this oversight. But in the meantime, I wanted to write a short post to highlight just how badly the NRC over-emphasizes national and state factors over county-level ones.

At no point--nowhere, not a single time--does the report discuss Realignment in California.

It talks briefly about Plata v Brown, the Supreme Court case that upheld the 9th Circuit's decree that California's prison system was constitutionally deficient. It talks briefly about the fact that following Plata the state has been releasing numerous prisoners. But that's it.

I searched the entire pdf for the word "realignment" and got nothing relevant. To be careful, I then checked every time the word "California" appeared. Nothing.

For those not up on California penal policy, Realignment is potentially one of the biggest penal policy changes in recent history. In my next post, I will discuss in more detail how a potentially major cause of prison growth is that sending an inmate to prison is basically "free" to a DA: as a county official, the DA doesn't care about the cost incurred by the state for the defendants he sends to prison. In fact, the problem is even worse: since jail and probation are county expenses, the DA likely prefers to send them to prison, since he looks tougher and pays less.

Realignment is California's effort to directly confront this moral hazard problem. Simplifying greatly, under Realignment, counties are required to detain "triple-nons" (non-violent, non-sexual, non-serious offenders), no matter how long the sentence. In other words, if a county DA wants to lock up a low-level offender, the county jail now has to pay for it.

Now, the details of how Realignment is playing out in practice are incredibly complex. But the fact that California has chosen to go this route to reduce its prison population indicates that the state with the largest state-level prison population feels that a major cause of prison growth is county-level budgetary moral hazard, and it has adopted a revolutionary process to try to correct it.

Yet in a twenty-five page chapter on the causes of prison growth, the NRC committee gives the moral hazard problem two sentences (almost in passing), and it never once talks about Realignment. 

This is a shocking oversight, and it indicates that the report truly does not provide a viable explanation of where prison growth is coming from, and thus that it is in no position to recommend how to regulate it.