Dan Walters: Data’s thin on whether shift to counseling prevented felons from committing later crimes

The Los Angeles Times, California’s largest newspaper, has editorialized against Proposition 36, the Nov. 5 ballot measure that would increase penalties for some crimes.

Propsition 36 would modify Proposition 47, the 2014 measure that reduced punishment for drug possession and other nonviolent offenses. The changes are needed, bill advocates say, to stem an uptick in such crimes.

“Backers of Proposition 36  would have you believe that California’s criminal laws attract thieves and that public safety is not possible without long prison sentences for people holding illegal drugs for their personal use,” the Times editorial declares. “They offer a ballot measure that would rescind voters’ smart reforms, partially refill prisons and revive the disastrous war on drugs.

“They claim their solution will ramp up drug treatment and combat homelessness, when it is at least as likely to do the opposite. It would suck up much of the funding Californians recently approved for mental health care and gut programs that have successfully slashed recidivism and brought much-needed trauma recovery services to crime victims.”

Setting aside all other aspects of Proposition 36 and the arguments for and against its passage, the Times’ defense of “programs that have successfully slashed recidivism” merits a deeper examination.

The editorial specifically refers to a report that the state’s Board of State and Community Corrections issued in February about outcomes of post-Propsition 47 programs that direct savings from lowered prison costs into counseling and other services to prevent felons released or diverted from prison from returning to crime.

In 2015, a year after Proposition 47’s passage, the Legislature enacted Assembly Bill 1056, which formalized the “Second Chance Program” of grants to agencies to provide anti-recidivism services.

One sentence in that bill, which was not mentioned in its summary or in the information given to legislators at the time, did something else. It defined, or redefined, recidivism as “a conviction of a new felony or misdemeanor committed within three years of release from custody or committed within three years of placement on supervision for a previous criminal conviction.”

The bill codified a definition that the corrections board had adopted in 2014 to supersede all other definitions being used by various arms of the criminal justice system, not only for statistical purposes but to determine how individual inmates or parolees would be treated.

Prior to Proposition 47, parole agents could send felons back to prison for violating the terms of their paroles, as well as for being arrested for new offenses.

The new and official definition of recidivism, requiring conviction of a new crime, was the least onerous of the options considered by the corrections board. Once placed in law, the definition, by eliminating arrests and parole violations, immediately reduced the statistical occurrence of recidivism.

The report to which the Times editorial refers claims that offenders who received counseling and other services from the Second Chance Program had a recidivism rate of just 15.3%.

That’s less than half the rate of offenders not in the program. However, the report acknowledges that its recidivism rate is based on a sample of enrollees and only counts convictions during the duration of the grant program, not three years following. It also doesn’t track convictions in jurisdictions other than the home county of each program.

In brief, the watered down recidivism definition adopted by the corrections board and later the Legislature — convictions within three years after release — is diluted even further in the report that the Times editorial cites as proof of success.

Thus, we really have no hard evidence that Proposition 47’s substitution of counseling and other services for time behind bars has really reduced recidivism, or if it has merely put more criminals on the street to commit more crimes.

Dan Walters has been a journalist for nearly 60 years, spending all but a few of those years working for California newspapers. His commentary comes via CalMatters.org, a public interest journalism venture committed to explaining how California’s state Capitol works and why it matters. For more, go to calmatters.org/commentary.