California's Public Safety Realignment initiative, officially known as "Realignment",[1] was a combination of two bills passed by the state of California, with the ultimate goal of reducing its state prison population by shifting much of that population to county jails. It was the result of a court-order in response to shortfalls in medical and mental health care for the state's prison population.
On 23 May 2011, the US Supreme Court upheld an order by a three-judge federal court requiring the state of California to reduce its state prison population to no more than 137.5% of its design capacity within two years. Prior to the initiative the state's prison population had risen to roughly 180% of its design capacity, and prisoners had become unable to receive routine medical or mental health care. In response, the governor and the state legislature passed two bills, Assembly Bill 109 and Assembly Bill 117, which became law and went into effect on 1 October 2011. Under these laws, new non-violent, non-serious, and non-sexual offenders with sentences of longer than one year would be housed in county jail facilities rather than state prisons (existing prisoners falling in those categories would not be relocated). Also, inmates released from such facilities would be placed on county-directed supervision rather than state parole. The laws also provided new funding for county facilities for the management of this increased in population.
By 2014 the state had offloaded approximately 25,000 prisoners to county facilities, but was still 9,600 prisoners short of the requirements set by the federal court. The court then granted the state two more years to meet its target prison population. However, the overall inmate population in the state had grown by approximately 12% since the original court order was upheld.[2]