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

This report presents findings from the three years of the California County Resentencing Pilot Program, which was established to support and evaluate a collaborative approach to exercising prosecutorial discretion in resentencing. Nine California counties were selected and were provided with funding to implement the prosecutor-initiated resentencing (PIR) three-year pilot program. In each pilot county, participants in the pilot were to include a county district attorney (DA) office and a county public defender (PD) office and may have included a community-based organization.

RAND, a nonprofit research organization, was selected by the California State Legislature as the independent evaluator of the pilot program. The pilot term was September 1, 2021, through September 1, 2024; the evaluation term was September 1, 2021, through January 31, 2025. The evaluation in this report comprises three components: a descriptive and outcomes analysis of data collected by DA offices and supplemented by data from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, a qualitative implementation assessment, and a cost study to estimate the resources required to implement the pilot activities. Subsequent reports will present the recidivism outcomes.

Key Findings

PIR filled a gap in sentencing policies by focusing on crimes against persons.

The program was not a single intervention at the county level but rather a set of different types of interventions by the nine pilot counties and was implemented in the context of other resentencing legislation.

Each county developed its own eligibility criteria for resentencing consideration. The criteria focused on such factors as the age of the inmate, the crime committed, and the length and other details of the sentence.

Factors that facilitated implementation include a history of collaboration between the DA and PD, leadership support, positive political climate, adequate resources, close coordination with the courts, and the use of stipulation.

Factors that hindered implementation include a less-supportive political context, differing views between DAs and PDs, inclusion of more-serious and more-complex cases, staffing shortages, and the complexity of reentry planning.

Among 1,146 case reviews initiated during the reporting period, 240 cases were referred to the court for resentencing; the DA offices decided not to refer 710 cases that they had reviewed; and 196 cases were still under DA review or were deferred for future review.

Of the 233 cases for which courts had ruled on a resentencing motion, 227 resulted in resentencing, and 174 of those individuals have been released from prison.

Resources for pilot-related activities were primarily for personnel.

Total expenditures for the six counties most actively engaged in the pilot reached nearly $28 million over the three years.

Recommendations

There is a need to clarify the respective roles of DAs and PDs and for an accountability mechanism to encourage them to work more closely together.

There need to be more-realistic time frames for the resentencing process, including the number of cases reviewed and length of time for DA review of cases to serve as benchmarks for counties to meet.

Eligibility criteria should be revisited and possibly streamlined, in addition to some standardization of what factors should be considered in the review of cases and decisions of whether to recommend to the court for resentencing.

A more formal arrangement between California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and the counties is needed to tackle the complexity of resentencing under PIR and improve access to clients and documentation.

Training is needed for the DA and PD staff, especially in such areas as the overall PIR initiative, case reviews, and offender central file analysis.

Key factors that helped streamline the resentencing process were the use of stipulation and having a dedicated court assigned to PIR cases. In the future, counties implementing PIR might consider using these two mechanisms.

Funding agencies could consider allocating the community-based organization contract funding to the PDs to implement and varying the size of the funding according to the size of the incarcerated population in a county.

Reentry planning requires further examination.

Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2025.

By Matthew Millings, Lol Burke, Harry Annison, Nicola Carr, Gwen Robinson & Eleanor Surridge.

This article presents findings from a major longitudinal research project of probation in England and Wales, arguing that the process of its ‘unification’ (re-nationalisation) continues to be a painful process whose end state remains elusive. Having previously articulated how practitioners experienced unification as ‘painful but necessary’, here, using the imagery of a journey, we argue that the speed and direction of travel have encountered a more perilous trajectory than expected as high workloads and staffing challenges have persisted. Second, we argue that enduring challenges in bedding in new working practices – and building the confidence of new and existing colleagues to deliver them – have acted as ‘hazards’ that have needed careful navigation. Third, we argue that staff experience a sense of individual and collective operational vulnerability, in the face of the relentless demands placed upon them. In conclusion, we identify a series of forks in the road that prompt profound questions about the delivery of probation services now and in the future.

Probation Journal 1–18 © The Author(s) 2025  

By Andrew Blum and Alfredo Malaret Baldo

The problem is as old as the justice system itself—how to reduce the chance that an individual reoffends

after they commit an offense and become involved with the justice system. This challenge of reducing

recidivism remains critical. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, there are over 120,000 individuals in

state prisons in California. Another 380,000 cycle through jails in California every year. In 2021, roughly

25,000 individuals were released from prison in California. This is the scope of the challenge. In San

Diego County, a wide variety of agencies and organizations are working to address the recidivism

challenge. In addition, although there is no way to measure this accurately, there is a willingness across

the spectrum to experiment with new approaches and solutions. This report focuses on one area of

relatively new and promising approaches—those that elevate the talent and expertise of individuals with

“lived experience” with the justice system. Support for lived experience approaches is growing both

nationally and in San Diego. Beyond the rising number of lived experience initiatives, this type of work in

San Diego has become largely normalized. There is broad agreement that lived experience work should

be part of the portfolio used to reduce recidivism, with clear demand from stakeholders involved in

reentry, including law enforcement officials, service providers, community members, and, crucially,

justice-involved individuals. Given the growing prevalence of and support for lived experience approaches

in San Diego, it is important to create a deeper understanding of how to increase the impact of these

approaches. Toward that end, this report identifies strengths of lived experience approaches to amplify,

challenges of lived experience approaches to mitigate, and lessons from lived experience approaches

that can be applied more broadly. Based on a review of the research and dozens of conversations held

with stakeholders in San Diego, we identified the following strengths of lived experience app roaches: —

They can engage successfully with justice-involved individuals; — They can provide a model of success;

— They are skilled navigators of the social service and justice systems; — They bring a long-term

approach to their work; and — They have specific expertise that helps them help others. To amplify these

strengths, we suggest: (a) deploy lived experience practitioners during acute situations, (b) leverage lived

experience practitioners not only within programs but also as navigators across programs, (c) build

flexibility into programs that include lived experience practitioners, (d) encourage lived experience

practitioners to role model success without being directive, and (e) continue efforts to normalize lived

experience approaches. We also identified challenges of lived experience approaches, particularly

related to scaling the approaches more widely. These include: — The personalistic nature of many lived

experience initiatives; — The difficulty of finding, vetting, hiring, and training sufficient lived experience

practitioners; — The toll the immersive nature of the work takes on practitioners; and — The potential

reputational risks lived experience approaches present to individuals, organizations, and agencies. To

mitigate these challenges, we recommend (a) creating training and certification programs for lived

experience practitioners, (b) developing standards of practice, (c) creating organizational capacity -

building initiatives for lived experience organizations, (d) pairing lived experience with non-lived-

experience practitioners, (e) treating lived experience individuals as professional staff, and (f) developing

a lived experience advocacy coalition. Furthermore, seeking a broader impact, we identified five key

lessons from lived experience approaches that are transferable and can be applied by those without lived

experience who are designing and implementing initiatives to prevent recidivism. The lessons are: 1.

Create supportive spaces for justice-involved individuals to work through challenges; 2. Design programs

with flexibility so support can be tailored to individuals; 3. Ease navigation of services and improve

coordination among providers; 4. Engage justice-involved individuals with consistency and long-term

vision; and 5. Commit to providing trauma-informed care. We conclude this report by noting the

longstanding good practice in the social services field to design initiatives with the input of those impacted

by them. The key lessons identified from lived experience practitioners can be viewed in this way. They

provide insight on how to design more effective recidivism reduction initiatives based on the experience

and expertise of those who previously lived the challenges the initiatives are designed to address.

San Diego: University of San Diego, Kroc School Institute for Peace and Justice, 2023. 31p..

By Louisa Treskon and Anna Kyler

For more than a decade, California has been enacting policy changes that are intended to lower the number of people who are incarcerated in the state. These policy changes include sentencing reforms and new funding streams for programs aimed at addressing underlying causes that can lead to incarceration, such as mental health and substance use disorders. Los Angeles County’s Reentry Intensive Case Management Services (RICMS) program, which began in 2018, is one such program. The RICMS program connects people who have been involved in the criminal legal system to community health workers who work at community-based organizations. Community health workers help people reintegrate into their communities by providing case management and connecting them with supportive services. This brief presents the results of a benefit-cost study of the RICMS program. The RICMS program comes with a cost, mostly borne by the state of California and Los Angeles County, since the program is publicly funded, as are many of the services it refers clients to. However, these costs could be offset by benefits such as reductions in participants’ involvement in the criminal legal system. Benefit-cost analysis provides a tool to compare these costs and benefits, which provides decision makers with a monetary lens through which to assess the potential effects of the program. The study, which is led by MDRC, is part of the Los Angeles County Reentry Integrated Services Project, a multiyear, multistudy evaluation of services that are offered by the Justice, Care and Opportunities Department (JCOD) of Los Angeles County.

New York: MDRC, 2024. 18p.

By Margaret Love & Rob Poggenklass

At the beginning of each year since 2017, CCRC has issued a report on legislative enactments in the year just ended, new laws aimed at reducing the barriers faced by people with a criminal record in the workplace, at the ballot box, and in many other areas of daily life. These annual reports document the steady progress of what our 2020 report characterized as “a full-fledged law reform movement” aimed at restoring rights and dignity to individuals who have successfully navigated the criminal law system. In the three years between 2019 and 2021, more than 400 new record reforms were enacted. Many states enacted new laws every year, and all but two states enacted at least one significant new law during this period. A full appreciation of the scope of this movement can be gained by reviewing the detailed 50-state charts and state-by-state profiles in our Restoration of Rights Project. The modern law reform movement reflected in our annual reports is bipartisan, grounded in and inspired by the circumstance that almost a third of adults in the United States now have a criminal record, entangling them in a web of legal restrictions and discrimination that permanently excludes them from full participation in the community. It reflects a public recognition that the “internal exile” of such a significant portion of society is not only unsafe and unfair, but it is also profoundly inefficient. We are pleased to present our report on new laws enacted in 2022, titled The Frontiers of Dignity: Clean Slate and Other Criminal Record Reforms in 2022. While this report shows that the legislative momentum gathering since 2018 slowed somewhat in the past year, there has still been progress, with more new laws enacted this year than in 2018 when the current reform movement took off in earnest.

Washington, DC: Collateral Consequences Resource Center, 2023. 43p.

By ACLU Smart Justice Nebraska

Fairness and freedom should not depend on how much money an individual possesses. Nebraskans who are struggling financially should have the same experience in the legal system as anyone else. Yet today, despite United States Supreme Court precedent and safeguards at the federal and state level, Nebraskans are still routinely confined simply because they lack the resources to pay fines or post bail or bond. This report reveals the findings of an intensive ACLU of Nebraska court watching project, the first of its scope in the state. ACLU staff and interns spent roughly three months in 2022 observing bail and sentencing hearings to document how recent reforms from the Nebraska Legislature — part of the nationwide movement to reform modern-day debtors’ prisons — are being implemented. What this project uncovered is a cause for concern. Observations from a combined 2,300+ bail and sentencing hearings show systemic disregard of laws meant to protect Nebraskans who are struggling financially. They also show continued reflexive practices that perpetuate a modern “debtors’ prison,” where Nebraskans are routinely confined simply because they cannot afford to post cash bail or pay fees or fines. This publication discusses the legal framework behind bail, fees and fines in Nebraska’s criminal legal system before detailing the court watching project’s findings and offering recommendations for reform. As readers progress through its pages, it is critical to remember that if the system were functioning as the Constitution and state law envision, in most cases, any person assigned cash bail or assessed a cou  

Lincoln, NE: American Civil Liberties Union - Nebraska, 2022. 36p.

By William J. Sabol and Thaddeus L. Johnson

Although significant gaps remain, disparities between Black and White people continued to narrow at nearly every stage of the criminal justice process between 2016 and 2020. In some cases, the pace of the decline slowed; in others, the disparity gap closed entirely. These trends extend patterns from 2000 to 2016 that were identified in CCJ’s first report on correctional control by race and sex. Subsequent reports will explore trends in disparity among female populations and by ethnicity, assess trends in multiple states, and seek to identify what, if any, policy changes may have contributed to reductions in racial disparities.

New York: Council on Criminal Justice, 2022. 36p.