by Lois M. Davis, Louis T. Mariano, Melissa M. Labriola, Susan Turner, Andy Bogart, Matt Strawn, Lynn A. Karoly

he California County Resentencing Pilot Program was established to support and evaluate a collaborative approach to exercising prosecutorial discretion in resentencing eligible incarcerated individuals. Nine California counties were selected and were provided funding to implement the three-year pilot program. Participants in the pilot include a county district attorney (DA) office and a county public defender (PD) office and may include a community-based organization in each county pilot site. The evaluation seeks to determine how the pilot is implemented in individual counties, whether the pilot is effective in reducing criminal justice involvement (e.g., time spent in incarceration and recidivism), and whether it is cost-effective.

This report documents evaluation results, focusing on the implementation of the program from September 2022 through July 2023 — the second year of the pilot program. In addition to providing a review of the pilot program and evaluation methods, the authors describe year 2 findings based on stakeholder interviews and analysis of pilot data. Qualitative interviews revealed key strengths and challenges of the pilot in its implementation. Analyses of quantitative data describe the population of individuals considered for resentencing and document the flow of cases from initial consideration through resentencing. These findings shed light on the experiences of the nine counties in implementing the pilot program during year 2.

Key Findings

• Interviews with DA and PD offices indicated overall support for the program but faced key challenges

• The PDs tended to want to play a more proactive role in defining eligibility criteria, identifying cases for consideration, and making recommendations to the courts than what the DAs envisioned.

• Personnel shortages were mentioned by multiple offices as a continuing challenge.

• Only four of the counties were working with a community-based organization.

  The pilot counties each developed their own criteria for identifying cases eligible for resentencing consideration

• Although the inclusion criteria varied somewhat across the pilot counties, overall the criteria focused on such factors as the age of the incarcerated individual, the crime committed, and the length and other details of the sentence.

• Counties indicated use of less strict criteria in this second year of implementation and were embracing flexibility in the cases they were reviewing.

  Analysis of case-level data covering the first 18 months of pilot implementation revealed important data points

• Among the 684 case reviews initiated during the reporting period, 105 cases had been referred to the court for resentencing, the DA offices had decided not to refer 321, and 258 were still under DA review.

• Of 94 cases for which courts have ruled on a resentencing motion, 91 cases have resulted in resentencing. Of the 91 resentenced individuals, 63 have been released from prison.

• Among those cases awaiting a DA decision on whether to proceed with resentencing, 72 percent have been under review more than six months.

Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2023. 95p.

By Brad Lander

The purpose of bail is to ensure that a person who is arrested returns to court for trial. However, in practice, the impact of bail has been to detain tens of thousands of New Yorkers, presumed innocent, before trial and cost low-income families tens of millions of dollars every year. To address these concerns, in April 2019 the New York State Legislature passed sweeping reforms to state bail laws. The guiding principle was that no one should be jailed because they are too poor to pay bail. The law prohibited bail-setting for most misdemeanor and non-violent felony charges, required judges to consider a person’s ability to pay before setting bail, and required that defendants have at least three options for making bail, including less onerous options. In the ramp-up to implementation of bail reform on January 1, 2020, the jail population dropped quickly, falling from about 7,100 on November 1, 2019 to 5,800 on January 1, 2020 and to 5,500 on February 1, 2020. When COVID-19 hit the city in March 2020, the jail population fell further, temporarily falling below 4,000 as arrests dropped and efforts were made to reduce the incarcerated population, including those at greater risk of severe illness, during the pandemic

New York: Office of the City Comptroller, Bureau of Budget and Bureau of Policy and Research 2022. 17p.

By Mari McGilton; William Adams; Julie Samuels; Jessica Kelly; aND Mark A. Motivans

This report provides details on the sentences of persons in federal prison at fiscal yearends 2013–2018. Since 2012, federal policy changes related to both U.S. sentencing guidelines and the use of mandatory minimum penalties have affected persons held in Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) facilities for drug offenses. The report describes four policies that are particularly relevant to this population: Smart on Crime, Drugs Minus Two, the Clemency Initiative, and the First Step Act. Findings in this report are based on fiscal yearend 2013–2018 prison records from the BOP that were linked to fiscal years 1994–2018 sentencing records from the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

Highlights:

• At fiscal yearend 2018, about 47% (71,555) of persons in Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) custody were sentenced for drug offenses.

• The number of people in federal prison for drug offenses decreased 24% during the 5-year period from fiscal yearend 2013 to fiscal yearend 2018.

• The number of people in BOP custody decreased from fiscal yearend 2013 to fiscal yearend 2018 for marijuana (down 61%), crack cocaine (down 45%), powder cocaine (down 35%), and opioids (down 4%), while there were increases for heroin (up 13%) and methamphetamine (up 12%).

• The number of people in federal prison for drug offenses who were eligible for mandatory minimum penalties declined 33% during the 5-year period, as did the number who ultimately received penalties (down 26%) and received relief from penalties (down 52%).

  Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2023. 28p.

By Mario Salas and Angela Ciolfi

Across the country, millions of people have lost their licenses simply because they are too poor to pay, effectively depriving them of reliable, lawful transportation necessary to get to and from work, take children to school, keep medical appointments, care for ill or disabled family members, or, paradoxically, to meet their financial obligations to the courts. State laws suspending or revoking driver’s licenses to punish failure to pay court costs and fines are ubiquitous, despite the growing consensus that this kind of policy is unfair and counterproductive. Fortythree states and the District of Columbia use driver’s license suspension to coerce payment of government debts arising out of traffic or criminal convictions. Most state statutes contain no safeguards to distinguish between people who intentionally refuse to pay and those who default due to poverty, punishing both groups equally harshly as if they were equally blameworthy. License-for-payment systems punish people—not for any crime or traffic violation, but for unpaid debts. Typically, when a state court finds a person guilty of a crime or traffic violation, it orders the person to pay a fine or other penalty along with other administrative court costs and fees. If the person does not pay on time, the court or motor vehicle agency can—and in some states, must—punish the person by suspending his or her driver’s license until the person pays in full or makes other payment arrangements with the court. By cutting people off from jobs, license-for-payment systems create a self-defeating vicious cycle. A state suspends the license even though a person cannot afford to pay, which then makes the person less likely to pay once he or she cannot drive legally to work. The person now faces an unenviable choice: drive illegally and risk further punishment (including incarceration in some states), or stay home and forgo the needs of his or her family. In this way, license-for-payment systems create conditions akin to modern-day debtor’s prisons. Despite their widespread use, license-for-payment systems are increasingly drawing critical scrutiny from motor vehicle safety professionals, anti-poverty and civil rights advocates, and policymakers. new state- based advocacy campaigns across the country have produced reforms by way of the courts, legislatures, and executive agencies. To provide national context for these efforts, we analyzed license-for-payment systems in all 50 states and the District of Columbia to generate conclusions about the prevalence and uses of license-for-payment.

Charlottesville, VA: Legal Aid Justice Center, 2017. 20p.

By Carl Lieberman, Elizabeth Luh and Michael Mueller-Smith

Millions in the United States face financial sanctions in the criminal court system each year, totaling over $27 billion in overall criminal debt. In this study, we leverage five distinct natural experiments across multiple states using regression discontinuity designs to evaluate the causal impact of these sanctions. We consider a range of long-term outcomes including employment, recidivism, household expenditures, and other self-reported measures of well-being, measured using a combination of administrative records on earnings and employment, the Criminal Justice Administrative Records System, and household surveys. We find consistent evidence across the range of natural experiments and subgroup analyses of precise null effects on the population, ruling out long-run impacts larger than +/-3.6% on total earnings and +/- 4.7% on total recidivism. These results are inconsistent with theories of criminal debt poverty traps but also do not justify using financial sanctions for local revenue or as a crime control tool.

Unpublished paper, 2023. 54p.

By Michael Rempel

This research brief summarizes what we know about New York City’s jail population since the COVID-19 outbreak. The data point to a 30 percent reduction in the city’s daily jail population from March 18 to April 29—attributable to urgent efforts to gain people’s release as well as to declining arrests, as people sheltered indoors at the start of the pandemic. Since then, the use of jail re-increased, reversing over half of the prior reductions. If the current trend continues, the jail population will return to its pre-COVID-19 level by mid-February 2021. The COVID-19 era has also seen considerable variations in the jail trends applicable to different subgroups, with the numbers held in pretrial detention progressively rising, even as incarceration has remained low among people convicted and serving sentences of one year or less. After reviewing key emergency release strategies adopted at the outset of the pandemic, this research brief documents overall jail trends and more specific changes in the composition of the jail population from mid-March to the beginning of November 2020.

New York: Center for Court Innovation, 2020. 22p.

By Olive Lu, Erica Bond, and Preeti Chauhan

On April 1, 2019, New York State passed extensive legislative reforms (“2020 Criminal Justice Reforms”) aimed at transforming the criminal legal system and its impact on New Yorkers. Amongst other changes, the reforms (which came into effect on January 1, 2020) now require police in New York State to issue desk appearance tickets (commonly referred to as “DATs” or “universal appearance tickets”), rather than make a custodial arrest for many types of criminal charges. In May 2020, DCJ released a research brief examining the use of DATs across New York State in 2018 to provide a baseline against which the future impact of these changes can be measured.

This report uses 2019 data to examine DAT arraignments and associated appearance rates in New York State district and city courts prior to the implementation of the reforms. In addition, the metrics are disaggregated by charge type, by geographic region (New York City, Suburban New York City and Upstate Cities), and by individual courts. Future research from DCJ will examine the actual impact of the 2020 Criminal Justice Reforms on DAT issuance in 2020. DCJ will also examine how DAT issuance and associated appearance rates have been impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic in New York State.

New York: The Data Collaborative for Justice (DCJ) at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, 2021. 24p.

By Olive Lu, Erica Bond, and Preeti Chauhan,

In April 2019, New York State passed significant reforms to the laws governing bail, which the state legislature then amended in April 2020 (collectively referred to as the "2020 Bail Reforms"). The first set of reforms (“Original Reforms”),1 which went into effect on January 1, 2020, included restrictions on which charges were eligible for money bail, mandated that people be released on recognizance (ROR)2 unless more restrictive conditions are needed to assure court appearance, required that judges set at least three forms of bail, and take into account an individual's ability to pay when setting money bail. The amendments to the bail reforms (“Amended Reforms”)3 went into effect in July 2020 and moved some charges that had been made ineligible for bail under the Original Reforms into the category of charges where judges have discretion to set bail.4 In September 2019, DCJ released a research brief that examined how the Original Reforms would have impacted the number and proportion of cases resulting in pretrial release without bail had they been in effect in 2018. This report updates DCJ’s prior research brief by using 2019 case data, applying the Original and Amended Reforms, and includes additional analyses on how the reforms would have impacted different types of charges and demographic groups in 2019.

New York: The Data Collaborative for Justice (DCJ) at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, ,2021. 34p.

By Sarah W. Craun and Alyssa Purdy

There are numerous federal criminal statutes authorizing a sentence of life as the maximum sentence allowed, such as for offenses involving drug trafficking,1 racketeering, 2 and firearms 3 crimes. While convictions under these statutes are common,4 sentences of life imprisonment are rare, accounting for only a small proportion of all federal offenders sentenced during the last six fiscal years. During fiscal years 2016 through 2021, federal judges imposed a sentence of life imprisonment (“life imprisonment sentence”) on 709 offenders. Another 799 offenders received a sentence so long that it had the practical effect of a life sentence (i.e., 470 months or longer) (“de facto life sentence”). Together these two groups of offenders represent only 0.4 percent of the total federal offender population during the last six fiscal years. By comparison, other federally sentenced offenders during this time received a median sentence of imprisonment of 24 months. Due to the infrequency and nature of life imprisonment, such sentences are of heightened interest to policymakers. In February 2015, the United States Sentencing Commission released Life Sentences in the Federal System, examining the application of life sentences by federal courts during fiscal year 2013.5 Using data from fiscal years 2016 through 2021, this report updates and augments the Commission’s previous findings by examining the offenses that led to the life sentences imprisonment imposed, along with offender demographics, criminal histories, and victim-related adjustments

Washington, DC: United States Sentencing Commission , 2022. 40p.

By April A. Christine, Courtney R. Semisch, Charles S. Ray and Amanda Russell

This comprehensive study of robbery offenders sentenced in fiscal year 2021 provides an analysis of the characteristics of robbery offenders, their criminal history, and their sentences imposed. The report also provides analyses on the prevalence of robbery offenses and how they were committed, including who was robbed, what was taken, the use or threatened use of physical force, the use of a firearm or other dangerous weapon, and whether any victim was injured or killed during a robbery.

Washington, DC: The United States Sentencing Commission, 2022. 60p.