Probation Chief Briefs Congressional Aides on Realignment Progress

San Diego County Chief Probation Officer Mack Jenkins was among a panel of Public Safety Realignment experts in the state that briefed congressional aides last week on local strategies for implementation and how it is working.Probation Chief Mack Jenkins spoke on Capitol Hill last week about the impact of public safety realignment on San Diego County and the state.

Jenkins participated in a panel to brief Congressional staffers and national groups about California’s effort to reduce the prison population as part of public safety realignment. The panel was organized by Congressmen Adam Schiff and Paul Cook, both from California, during a time when the federal government is also reconsidering its prison system.

Public safety realignment took effect in the California in 2011, shifting responsibility for non-violent, non-serious, and non-sex offenders from the state to counties. That means community offenders who would have previously been in state prison or on state parole now serve their sentences in County jail or under County Probation’s supervision.

Since realignment began, California’s prison population has declined by more than 25,000 people or 17 percent.

“From a San Diego standpoint, I talked about how we already had an exceptional collaboration with law enforcement, the courts and even community providers before the task of implementing it came to us and that has helped us immeasurably in managing this at the local level,” Jenkins said. ” We feel as though we are making good progress in implementing realignment.”

Jenkins also discussed Probation’s Community Transition Center where all state prisoners report before transitioning into the community, as well as realignment’s effect on recidivism, which is when an offender commits a new crime. Last month, the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation released a report that tracked recidivism rates for 58,000 offenders across the state who were supervised by probation instead of the state.

“The CDCR report shows that for the realigned offenders that county probation officers statewide are doing as well and arguably better than what they were doing at the state,” said Jenkins. “As for the reduction in prison populations, some states have made some reductions but nothing on the scale of California.”

Jenkins was joined on the panel by Matt Cate, executive director of the California State Association of Counties, as well as other government and law enforcement representatives from California.

The event was sponsored by the Council of State Governments Justice Center, the National Association of Counties (NACO), and the American Probation and Parole Association.