The Unexpected Player in California Criminal Justice Reform: The DA

In recent years, California has been at the forefront of criminal justice reform. Over the last decade, we have enacted a series of legislative changes: reforming the overly punitive three-strikes law, removing the possibility of prison for certain low-level offenses, and granting judges the discretion to strike firearm use and prior felony conviction enhancements.

Despite this, we continue to keep nearly 100,000 people behind bars. While much work is happening on the front end to stem the flow of people entering prisons, it’s crucial that we not forget the people currently languishing in our prisons as a result of the very policies we are fighting to undo.

We can’t change the future without confronting our past. This means finding solutions that can keep our communities safe and address the decades of harm our justice system has caused.

That’s why, three years ago I proposed what sounded to some like a crazy idea. I asked, “What if we enlisted prosecutors to be part of the solution to address excessive prison sentences and help bring people home?”

The Prosecutor-Initiated Resentencing Law

Understandably, many eyebrows raised at the concept that district attorneys—known for putting people in prison—could ever be allies in getting people out of prison. But as a former prosecutor myself, I know firsthand that many prosecutors struggle with past decisions, and a growing majority are open to revisiting past sentences that, in retrospect, may have caused more harm than they prevented.

So I conceptualized and drafted AB 2942, which created the nation’s first prosecutor-initiated resentencing (PIR) law, allowing prosecutors to facilitate the release of people from prison.

So far, it’s working: roughly 75 people have been released from California state prisons under PIR, from a San Jose man who is now a tight-knit member of his community, to a Yolo County father who was 14 when he committed his crime, to an elderly and ill San Diego man who returned home after serving 28 years of a 140-year sentence. And we are just getting started.

A New Pilot Program on Resentencing

Now, as another milestone in California’s track record on innovation, Calif. Gov. Gavin Newsome (D) on June 28 signed into law, as part of the state’s budget act, the California County Resentencing Pilot Program. The pilot program is an $18 million investment for nine counties to lead a collaborative approach to further PRI efforts. Funding is allocated for district attorneys, public defenders, and community-based organizations—with the goal of having these stakeholders work together towards the safe release of even more people currently serving unjust prison sentences.

This historic investment is emblematic of California’s commitment to pulling all the levers to undo the harm caused by decades of tough-on-crime policies, which imposed excessive and harsh sentences, essentially throwing people away.

The three-year-long pilot program provides funding to Los Angeles, Santa Clara, San Francisco, Riverside, Contra Costa, San Diego, Yolo, Merced, and Humboldt counties. The diversity among these counties is intentional—diversity in geography, voting base, prosecutor leadership, re-entry resources, prison population, and incarceration rates. In a multi-faceted state like California, this type of variety will allow us to seriously examine the impact and opportunities of prosecutor-initiated resentencing statewide.

Cost Savings to Be Demonstrated

One opportunity we hope this pilot program will demonstrate is the scale of cost savings that occur when unjust sentences are eliminated.

Often, when talking about public safety, we fail to acknowledge how expensive it is to send people to prison: it costs California taxpayers more than $100,000 per year to incarcerate just one person. Not only does this cost taxpayer dollars that could be spent on other priorities, but it also bears huge “costs” for families and communities.

Consider the gas money spent on long trips visiting incarcerated loved ones, the slashing of dual income, the need for consistent childcare, the loss of a productive community member—the list goes on.

I believe that the state’s investment in this program will show us a pathway for reallocating prison spending and instead enable us to invest these precious resources back into our communities: in our schools, our workforce, childcare services, or other prevention models to stop crime before it occurs.

As we’ve often done, California can guide the way for other states across the country to double down on decarceration strategies, pass more PRI laws, and prioritize visionary budget allocations just like this one. We can and must do better with how we spend our resources, in California and beyond.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Bureau of National Affairs, Inc. or its owners.

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Hillary Blout is founder and executive director of For The People. Prior to that, she served as an assistant district attorney for the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office. She also ran implementation of Proposition 47 at Californians for Safety and Justice, a law that allowed resentencing of certain lower-level offenses as misdemeanors. Finally, she drafted and secured the passage of AB 2942.