Criminal Justice Reforms and County Budgets: A Bird’s-Eye View

Everyone wants to live in safe communities, and data show California continues to experience crime rates well below historical peaks. The property crime rate — the number of property crimes per 100,000 residents — was 2,178 per 100,000 in 2021, far below the peak of 6,881 in 1980. The violent crime rate was 466 per … Continued

California adopted a series of justice system reforms in the 2010s that substantially reduced mass incarceration. Did these reforms also help to reduce long standing racial disparities in state prisons — disparities that reflect the disproportionate incarceration of Black and Latinx residents as well as other Californians of color? This report answers this question by examining changes in state-level incarceration during the 2010s for both men and women through the lens of race and ethnicity. While incarceration declined nearly across the board, by the end of the 2010s men and women of color generally continued to be incarcerated at higher rates than white men and women, and racial disparities generally widened.