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California's crime rate among youth has dropped to its lowest level in 30 years while at the same time the state is putting fewer of them behind bars, according to a study released Wednesday.
The findings challenge the notion that incarceration leads to less crime, the researchers said.
Daniel Macallair, executive director of the San Francisco-based Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, said researchers can't explain why the crime rate has dropped or why a similar trend has not occurred among adult offenders.
Nevertheless, Democratic lawmakers seized on the results to lambaste Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for proposing to build two new prisons, then recommended the state find ways to reduce its prison population.
Using data from the state departments of Justice and Corrections & Rehabilitation, the study found commitments to California's youth corrections system fell 75 percent during the last 11 years, the fastest decline in its six-decade history.
"This started out as solely an examination of youth crimes and youth incarceration," Macallair said. "What started coming forward were some astounding trends, a trend we've never seen in my 25 years in the correctional field."
The incarceration rate among youth aged 10 to 17 in 1980 was 170 per 100,000 compared with 91 per 100,000 in 2004, the latest figure available, according to the study, "Testing Incapacitation Theory: Youth Crime and Incarceration in California." During the same period, the crime arrest rate fell from 556 per 100,000 to 348 per 100,000, the study said.
Macallair said researchers then looked at the adult prison population and found it increased five times since 1980, when 137 adults per 100,000 were sent to prison compared with 689 per 100,000 in 2006. And the adult crime rate increased by 11 percent, he said.
Assemblyman Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, said the state must rethink its criminal justice policies in light of the statistics and should focus on changing the way sentences are imposed. Leno previously sought a temporary moratorium on state executions, but could not muster enough support for his proposal.
State spending on criminal justice has increased sharply, rising from 5.6 percent of its general fund in 2004 to 8.5 percent this year, he said.
"We have to be asking, `When is enough enough,'" Leno said. "When are we going to get back our investment?"
The California District Attorneys Association still believes the crime rate has fallen primarily because the state has been sending more criminals to prison, said David LaBahn, executive director.
He said the youth incarceration rate has dropped since the mid-1990s because the state began charging local governments a percentage of incarceration costs. At the same time, he said, the state began giving grants to counties to build local correctional facilities and create crime prevention programs.
"When you start giving money for prevention and intervention you can make an impact on the juvenile crime population," LaBahn said.
"By taking the dangerous recidivist offenders and putting them in prison longer, that has driven down our crime rate by 48 percent since the passage of the three-strikes law," he said.
The study found youth crime rates fell in all counties, regardless of the varying commitment rates in each.
Kent Scheidegger, legal director and general counsel to the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, said he has not seen the report, but said higher incarceration rates are a factor in reducing crime. He cautioned against leaping to conclusions from the data presented by Macallair.
"Finding a correlation between two numbers does not prove that one causes the other," he said.
Also Wednesday, the governor appointed a commissioner and a chairman to the Board of Parole Hearings. He came under fire this week for not fully staffing the parole board or hiring permanent top administrators for the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
Last week, a federal court special master criticized the governor for backing away from prison reforms and expressed displeasure at the resignations of two corrections administrators earlier this year.
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