SB Supervisors Get Progress Report on AB 109

Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors will get a progress report on how the county is managing the state’s controversial prison realignment program otherwise known as AB 109.

Hundreds of non-violent convicted felons have been transferred from the state prison system into an already over-crowded county jail and into the county Probation Department in the past three years.

“We have a 30 percent recidivism rate, now that is preliminary, but after three years of providing services to these offenders, I would say that that’s pretty good”, says Santa Barbara County Chief Probation Officer Beverly Taylor, “through our evaluation with UCSB, we are finding that our programs, our enhanced supervision, our collaborative efforts are having an impact on this population.”

Taylor says 7 out of 10 state prison offenders released into Santa Barbara County are not re-offending.

“We are able to show a 30 percent recidivism rate for our post-release community supervision offenders” Taylor says, “those are the offenders, prior to realignment, would have been placed on Parole in our local community, and post realignment they are now under the supervision of the Probation Department.”

“We are doing that through enhanced supervision, through evidence-based programming”, Taylor says, “we assess the offenders as they come out of prison, so we know what services will benefit them.”

“I’m very pleased with where we are with realignment”, says Santa Barbara County Fifth District Supervisor Steve Lavagnino, “because of the fact that originally we had a completely broken system, the state recidivism rate was close to 70 percent, and we had no programs in place for criminals that were exiting the state prison system.”

Lavagnino says the county is benefitting from successful prevention and intervention programs that are partially funded by AB 109.

“They are coming into our local system where we have better case control, our probation officers are dealing with a 40-1 ratio, instead of what parole was dealing with which was 70, or 80 to one case load”, Lavagnino says, “so we know where these people are at, we are monitoring them, we are providing wrap-around services, if they have got alcohol or drug problems, if they have got mental health issues, anger issues, we’re dealing with those.”

“Its five or six times more expensive to incarcerate somebody than it is to treat them”, Lavagnino says, “if these guys are on release and they screw up and they miss a meeting or they are not where they are supposed to be, we have he ability to flash incarcerate them, they put them back in the county jail for ten days, wake them up, tell them, hey, we’re serious, so I think it’s a combination we really have to look at, prevention and intervention.”

Santa Barbara County is spending thousands of dollars every year for UCSB researchers to track the success or failure of the prison realignment program.

“We just didn’t want to look at realignment and say let’s just implement it without measuring it”, Lavagnino says, “one of the things Santa Barbara County did was a little bit different than other counties, we also put money in to make sure we were studying what’s working, what isn’t working as we move through the system because if can’t measure it, we can’t manage it, we can’t fix it.”

Results of the UCSB study and the AB 109 recidivism rate will be discussed by the Board of Supervisors when it meets Tuesday in Santa Maria.