California spent $600 million to house and rehab former prisoners — but can’t say whether it helped (calmatters.org)

A watchtower at the California Health Care Facility in Stockton on Feb. 5, 2023. Photo by Rahul Lal, CalMatters

To read more of Byrhonda Lyon's article, please click here.

As Gov. Gavin Newsom retools the state’s prison system to emphasize rehabilitation, his administration has little evidence that a privately run program for parolees costing taxpayers $100 million a year works to prevent future crime.

The state does not collect data on whether parolees who participate in the program have found jobs or whether they are returned to prison for another crime. What state data does show is that only 40% of participants completed at least one of the services they were offered.

The information gap frustrates critics of the governor’s policies as well as supporters who want evidence that the state’s investments are working.

“At the end of the day, we’ve come from 160,000 people incarcerated down to 95 (thousand). So we’ve had some success,” said Assemblymember Reggie Jones-Sawyer, a Los Angeles Democrat, referring to the decline in the state’s prison population since 2011.

CalMatters found:

• Corrections department data is outdated, inaccurate or doesn’t exist. When the department provided CalMatters with a roster of more than 400 locations providing rehabilitation services, we visited 23 of them, finding some with inaccurate addresses, one with a padlocked gate in front of a seemingly closed site, another that appeared to be abandoned, and three where employees said they were no longer providing rehabilitation services.
• Department officials struggled to explain how many people enrolled in the program in 2020-2021. The department published an annual report noting 17,650 participants. Dana Simas, a department spokesperson at the time, told CalMatters the program served 9,516 people. The department later revised that number to 8,213.
• State data show only two out of five parolees who participated in the rehabilitation program in 2020-2021 completed at least one service offered to them. Based on how the state collects data, it’s unclear if anyone finished all of the services offered to them. A spokesperson said the corrections agency “is unable to provide further completion information.”
• State officials rarely review the operations of the four companies that operate the program, state accountability reviews show. Records show state officials only documented reviews of three of the more than 400 state-funded reentry homes and treatment facilities from 2018 to December 2022.