Assembly Bill 109

Assembly Bill 109

A little over a year ago Gov. Jerry Brown’s AB-109 began the process of reducing the state’s prison population by 33,000 before June of 2014. Under the bill, triple-non — non-violent, non-serious, non-sexual — offenders would become the responsibility of the counties, not the state, with a large number of them returning to the streets of California. The California criminal justice system is undergoing significant changes due to this being passed. Numerous people are unaware about this bill that has been approved (AB 109) and fortunately it plays a big role in everybody’s life whether we like it or not. Thousands of less serious felony offenders are being released from prison or jails they are going to be on supervision that is similar to probation or parole. According to Fresno deputy Mimi she stated, “My biggest concern is the state needs to save money so bad that it might negatively impact the counties.” Personally it is not worth saving any money because our crime rate is going to drastically increase. I will be discussing how it will impact people perusing a career in criminal justice, how it will impact the community, how I feel about this legislation, and what I think should be done to deal with this change.

By these inmates being released it is going to have a huge impact on the criminal justice system. Luckily for the people that want to pursue there career as a peace officer/deputy it may be a bit easier for them to get hired because all these criminals being released and all the crime rates going sky high. Many peace officers are going to have to work harder than usual because they are going to have to find out ways to get these criminals back behind bars. Most importantly our officers that are here to protect our community are going to have to be more alert with these people wondering the streets, because there are going to be more drug dealers dealing the drugs, more people steeling peoples property to buy the drugs, and then more angry people because there stuff is stolen from criminals. And this is how more crimes are going to get started. If you have 24,000 inmates serving 6 months, you will need 12,000 post sentencing solutions. Post-Sentencing solutions include: Jail beds, Contract beds, and Alternative custody programs. For every 24,000 inmates released to probation supervision but they are only supervision for 6 months, it would result in a 12,000-probation caseload. So not only would the court system be a lot harder to get into, but also people are not thinking about how much more difficult it is going to be to maintain thousands of people that are probation and parole. There is going to have to be more parole officers and probation officers as well. According to ca.gov they stated that there are 30 inmates arrested every month just with violation of parole.

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