% OF NEW BOOKINGS AND A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF RECIDIVISM RATES BY TWO
METRICS (NEW CONVICTIONS AND NEW BOOKINGS)VERSUS PARTICIPATION IN SUD
PROGRAMMING AND AGGREGATE TOTALS BETWEEN OFFENDER TYPES (1170OR PRCS)
AND BY RACE OR ETHNIC ORIGIN AND PARTICIPATION IN SUD PROGRAMMING
“Santa Cruz County Recidivism Study of Post-Realignment Offenders (2011–2016)”
Cohort Examined and Compared: RECIDIVISM BY TYPE OF OFFENSE (PROPERTY- AND DRUG-RELATED OFFENSES) BY PERCENTAGE OF THREE-YEAR NEW BOOKINGS and COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF RECIDIVISM RATES BY TWO METRICS (NEW CONVICTIONS AND NEW BOOKINGS) VERSUS PARTICIPATION IN SUD PROGRAMMING AND AGGREGATE TOTALS BETWEEN OFFENDER TYPES (1170 OR PRCS).
Figure 14: Total% of Three-Year New Bookings for Santa Cruz County AB 109 Population by Booking Category or Offense Type
“Santa Cruz County Recidivism Study of Post-Realignment Offenders (2011–2016),”
demonstrates in Figure 14, the volume of re-bookings (1581 re-bookings in total) for the three-year post-release period versus the number of people, AB 109 offenders, who account for those re-bookings (299 individuals). For context, there were a total of 4259
bookings for all realignment offenders for the study period, of which this 1581 represented in Figure 14 represents 36.3%.
Figure 14 also illustrates that Drug- and Alcohol-Related Crimes and Property Crimes are the top two categories of offenses for Santa Cruz County AB 109 offenders who recidivate by booking category and three years post-release.
Of the 500 reclassified AB 109 felonies in the initial legislation and the further reclassifications in ballot initiative Proposition 47 (2014) of minor drug crimes and property crimes under $950 as misdemeanors, drug- and alcohol-related crimes and property crimes comprise a significant portion of the AB 109 offenses and the most important primary category of offenses that AB 109 offenders recidivate. Though this measure of recidivism deviates from the BSCC standard definition of recidivism by conviction, “three year rebooking” as used in “Santa Cruz County Recidivism Study of Post-Realignment Offenders (2011–2016)” is an accepted alternative, and the three-year post-release period is adhered to for this “Santa Cruz County Recidivism Study of Post- Realignment Offenders (2011–2016)” illustration.
Figure 15: Percentage of Multiples of Three-Year Recidivism by New Bookings for High-Risk Offenders from 1 to 7
Key Finding: Furthermore, as Figure 15 demonstrates, the volume of new bookings as a
measure of recidivism for Santa Cruz County must account not only for the fact that the total volume of bookings for the AB 109 populations might be high at 1581 as shown in Figure 14, but the number of bookings will not likely be equally distributed among offenders in the recidivism cohort, but instead clustered around certain individuals in various subgroup cohorts for the majority of re-offenders.
Figure 15, “High-Risk AB 109 (1170)% of Multiples of New Bookings Three- Year,” demonstrates that 57% of all of the new bookings for high-risk offenders (1170) are distributed in groupings of new bookings that consist of multiple bookings per offender type from more than 1 to more than 7 per high-risk 1170 offender post-release for the standard three-year follow-up period. For offenders designated high-risk 1170, who were locally sentenced in Santa Cruz County, 9 percent, or 17, of the new bookings
consisted of 7 or more bookings per offender. Thirteen percent (25 of the new bookings) consisted of 4 to 6 new bookings per offender, and 35 percent, or 67 new bookings, consisted of groupings of 1–3 bookings per high-risk 1170 offender post-release for the standard three-year follow-up period.
(Figure 11)
Figure 15 in conjunction with Figure 11, repeated for clarity above, both illustrate that county facilities process a high volume of bookings, and it is important to associate
conduct and to calibrate the second metric for Santa Cruz County recidivism re-booking to target new criminal activity that threatens public safety. This helps avoid overvaluing recidivism rates based on rebooking without discounting the frequent returns by some offenders before publishing a final rate. If one offender is rebooked (returns to custody) seven different times on potentially seven different grounds, that offender may drive up recidivism statistics on this rebooking metric.
Key Finding: When there are clusters of multiple re-bookings around certain individuals or subgroups of individuals in the Santa Cruz County AB 109 population, the risk level alone does not seem to address why this clustering of multiple bookings occurs for offenders of high- and moderate-risk levels but not at statistically different levels, or as a whole, whether persons with multiple or the most bookings can be targeted with recidivism reduction programming or different tactics during incarceration or
probationary supervision, which may contribute to multiple bookings per offender.
Future Research Question: At the heart, the point of recidivism reduction programming
is to target an individual’s criminal behavior for change. Further, in the interests of public policy, Santa Cruz County may want to do a manual case by case assessment for the type of offenders who have the highest volume of re-bookings (re-arrests, returns to custody due to violation, jail admissions) and determine why there is clustering around certain individuals or subgroups of individuals. To further this inquiry, when moderate-risk offenders AB 109 (1170) three-year post release is examined for this same clustering of multiple bookings around types of offenders, just under half of all re-bookings for moderate-risk 1170 offenders at 48% of new bookings were multiples, which is only marginally better than the high-risk offenders whose multiples amounted to 57% of all re-
bookings. This difference is not statistically significant. Policy analysts and probation case officers need to examine why certain offenders have so many repeated jail admissions or returns to custody (re-bookings).
Figure 14 also illustrates that in the “Santa Cruz County Recidivism Study of Post- Realignment Offenders (2011–2016),” Warrants, Violations, and Holds are grouped together as the second-largest category of recidivism by type of offense, with re-booking as the primary measure of recidivist behavior, three years post-release.
Figure 14 also illustrates that in the “Santa Cruz County Recidivism Study of
Post-Realignment Offenders (2011–2016)”: Warrants, Violations, and Holds are grouped together as the second-largest category of recidivism by type of offense with re-booking as the primary measure of recidivist behavior, three years post-release. This category includes probation violations, including non-technical ones, that include a significant portion of new crimes that are also drug, alcohol, or property offenses but were pursued as a probationary non-technical violation (return-to-custody/re-booking), rather than through a case adjudicated through the courts. These non-technical violations are labor- intensive to extract and categorize by type of offense, and as such they likely create an underreporting of the already large drug-, alcohol- and property-related crimes in the AB 109 population because of these “new offense” violations.
Though some initial information is available on violations, there was not enough accuracy with regard to technical and non-technical to break down the violations by categories of crimes to report the data individually. However, some effort was made to break down the non-technical violations by type, particularly including whether a non- technical violation included the designation of “new offense” committed. However, that
assignment process was done individually using each offender’s case history. The data set for violations did not consistently include primary offense type by category with the same level of redundancy as the numbers that are presented. However, there were 326 total probationary violations of all types within the three-year post-release period.
Figure 16: 47.3% of the Recidivism by Percentage of New Bookings for the AB 109 Population are Alcohol- and Drug-Related or Property Crimes
This “Santa Cruz County Recidivism Study of Post-Realignment Offenders (2011–2016)” analyzed property- and drug- and alcohol-related crimes because they are such an important component of the AB 109 population and the likelihood to reoffend in these two categories is quite high in most jurisdictions, including Santa Cruz County.
From 2011 to 2015, nearly 75% of all new crimes felony and misdemeanor have been drug- or property-related. Additionally, as part of the “Santa Cruz County Public Safety Realignment and Post-Release Community Supervision 2011 Implementation Plan, hereinafter Santa Cruz County CCP (Community Corrections Partnership) plan, a renowned researcher in the field of corrections and population projections, Dr. James Austin of the JFA Institute, made an assessment of the projected Santa Cruz County AB 109 makeup by demographics, type of offense, and risk level using the California Static Risk assessment Instrument developed by the CDCR with researchers at U.C. Irvine and
the Washington State Institute for Public Policy (Santa Cruz County, 2011).
Note the entire projection graphic included below is drawn from (Santa Cruz County, 2011), prepared just prior to the Realignment Implementation plan submitted to the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors on October 4, 2011.
Figure 17: AB 109 Inmates Now in CDCR as of 7/1/11: Crime, Risk, and Other Data (Source: CDRC, JFI Institute) PROJECTIONS (DR. AUSTIN) (SANTA CRUZ
COUNTY CCP, 2011)