The Santa Barbara County Main Jail is less crowded, fewer people are on probation and local prosecutors are charging fewer low-level criminals with felonies.
Those were just some of the impacts seen since the passage of Proposition 47, or the “Safe Neighborhood and Schools Act,” which aims to reduce incarceration rates by treating nonviolent drug, theft and other low-level felonies as misdemeanor crimes.
Residents across the state voted the ballot initiative into law last November.
The Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors and law enforcement officials on Tuesday couldn’t decide whether those re-classifications — and the accompanying consequences — were a good or bad thing after hearing a presentation about the impacts.
The supervisors ultimately voted 4-1 to accept the report and to support forming an ad hoc committee with representatives from criminal-justice agencies and Alcohol, Drug and Mental Health Services to monitor the effects.
Fourth District Supervisor Peter Adam opposed the motion because he wasn’t sure what a committee would have to study, arguing statistics were still preliminary.
“Unknown” was the word of the day, as department after department lamented not having enough information to flesh out Prop. 47’s direct effects.
The law — crafted outside the state Legislature — is supposed to save the state $100 million to $200 million by reducing the criminal-justice workload and freeing up jail beds and probation resources, according to a recent nonpartisan report released by the Legislative Analyst’s Office.
Those anticipated savings won’t be realized until 2016, however, which is also when a fund would be created at the state level, mostly to support mental-health and substance-abuse treatment programs, with the rest for crime-prevention support programs in K-12 education and trauma-recovery services for crime victims.
While the state figures out how money would be redistributed, the county is seeing a sharp increase in court workloads associated with re-sentencing and reclassification of offenders — a rise that should subside over time as felony filings and other court hearings are minimized.
The District Attorney’s and Public Defender’s offices saw the biggest bump in workload, having to sift through new and old files to determine whether applicants were Prop. 47 eligible.
“We don’t know the number because it’s retroactive,” District Attorney Joyce Dudley said, explaining that at least 300 county cases have been re-sentenced since Nov. 5, 2014.
Approximately 200 more petitions are pending, and the county has 130 jail inmates that might be eligible for re-sentencing, she said.
Dudley said about 20 percent of eligible cases are litigated, with the other 80 percent settled because both sides agree.
She feared treatment courts would see a decline in enrollees, since some low-level drug offenders might choose lesser jail time for a misdemeanor charge over substance-abuse counseling.
Two other Prop. 47 provisions worried Dudley: A “shoplifting” misdemeanor for those charged with stealing property worth less than $950 (previously a felony commercial burglary charge) and taking away the ability to consider a person’s criminal history.
On the public defender side, the office has opened 927 files to determine Prop. 47 eligibility, with 377 cases resolved, 358 in process, 83 pending, and 38 where the applicant is in state prison, according to Public Defender Raimundo Montes de Oca.
County Probation hasn’t seen big changes in its juvenile division, except for reclassifying cases as misdemeanors instead of felonies, and about 1,500 adult offenders of a total 5,900 were also Prop. 47 eligible.
The county Main Jail average daily population was down 17 percent since November, with a 42-percent decrease in arrests and 92-percent increase in citations for narcotic possessions that previously were felonies, Sheriff Bill Brown said.
A decrease in those crimes has led to an increase in property crime, and Brown worries that drug-related offenders would plead guilty to misdemeanor charges and be sentenced to County Jail instead of diversion programs.
Brown spent most of his presentation defending the need for more custody deputies, and telling officials including First District Supervisor Salud Carbajal not to get “too excited” by a reduction in jail population.
Carbajal said savings could help plug the $2 million hole in operation costs the Sheriff’s Department is facing.
ADMHS and the court system could be affected by Prop. 47, but to what level wasn’t yet known.
“I think this was very helpful,” Fifth District Supervisor Steve Lavagnino said of the joint presentation, requesting county staff monitor any bills that have been proposed to shore up Prop. 47 gaps.
Calling the correlation with statistics premature, Adam suggested the board take another look at Prop. 47 impacts a year from now instead of on a quarterly basis, which the majority of supervisors agreed upon.
— Noozhawk staff writer Gina Potthoff can be reached at gpotthoff@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.