Thread by @JohnFPfaff

1. Realignment was a sprawling, complex bill that did a lot, but the part I’m focusing on was closing a giant fiscal moral hazard problem between county prosecutors and state prisons.

https://twitter.com/wavedemocratic/status/1105807673583382529

2. Prosecutors are county officials, and the county pays (mostly) their budgets. Jails and probation, where ppl go for lower-level misdemeanors, are also county-funded institutions.

Prisons, where ppl go for (more-serious) felonies, are state agencies.

That’s a problem.

3. Being harsher is actually CHEAPER for a county DA because it pushes the costs off the county and onto the state. Leniency is politically riskier AND more expensive.

So of course DAs over-avail themselves of “free” prison beds, and states have few to no ways to stop them.

4. Realignment, among other things, requires counties to detain ppl convicted of a wide range of felonies (“non-violent,” a term of art in CA, “non-serious,” which excludes a few other serious financial crimes, and “non-sexual”: the triple-nons).

Now the county has to pay.

5. Details quickly get complicated. Some of CA’s prison decline was offset—tho not entirely—by rising jail pops. And there are some tricky issues w state subsidies to the counties.

But still: making counties pay made counties pay attention.

And other states could do this too.