A recent CBS Sacramento investigation into college programs for formerly incarcerated and justice-involved students relies on one of the oldest and most misleading tactics in criminal justice reporting: find a few sensational cases, highlight their most disturbing details, and use them to cast doubt on an entire reform.
It makes for dramatic television. It does not tell us whether these programs work.
CBS focused heavily on the arrest of a young woman attending the University of California, Davis through Underground Scholars while she remained under juvenile court supervision. The allegations are serious and deserve appropriate investigation. But rather than ask whether this case was typical of students in Underground Scholars, Project Rebound, Rising Scholars, and similar programs, CBS went looking for other troubling cases. The result was predictable: a story built around failure.
There was another story sitting in plain sight.
What Happened to the Other 1,700 Students?
Project Rebound serves more than 1,700 students across 20 California State University campuses. So how are those students doing? Are they staying in college? Graduating? Finding jobs? Returning to prison?
The answers were readily available.
Project Rebound students are earning bachelor’s and graduate degrees, staying enrolled, and finding work. For their reported 2024 – 2025 data, they also have a less than 1% recidivism rate. At Sacramento State, the program has reported a 93 percent retention rate and an average GPA of 3.4.
These are remarkable accomplishments for people who often enter college after years of incarceration, interrupted schooling, and the enormous barriers that come with a criminal record. They deserve applause. Instead of examining this record, CBS focused on the cases most likely to alarm viewers.
An Old and Tired Tactic
For decades, opponents of criminal justice reform have used individual failures to discredit broader reforms. A person released from prison commits a serious crime. A young person in a community program is arrested. Someone on probation reoffends. Suddenly that individual becomes the face of an entire policy, while the hundreds or thousands of people who complete programs, find jobs, attend school, support their families, and never return to the system disappear from the discussion.
A sensational case may show that a particular placement went wrong. It may reveal a failure of supervision or a decision that deserves scrutiny. What it cannot tell us is whether an entire program works. For that, you need evidence. CBS had the evidence available and barely looked at it.
College Is Where We Should Want People to Go
There is also a basic question of common sense: what do we want people to do when they leave prison?
We tell them to rebuild their lives, find work, support their families, and contribute to their communities. Going to college is precisely the path we should want them to take, and Project Rebound and Underground Scholars help them take it.
No program succeeds with everyone. Neither does prison. California’s correctional institutions have struggled for decades with violence, drugs, assaults, recidivism, and enormous public costs. Yet community programs are held to a different standard: one failure becomes an indictment, while thousands of successes remain invisible.
The Probation Connection
Readers should know one more piece of context.
The Chief Probation Officers of California (CPOC) has been pushing for greater probation oversight of Less Restrictive Programs, the type of placement involved in the UC Davis case. In 2026, CPOC sponsored Senate Bill 1157 to impose additional requirements on these placements. CBS prominently featured the bill’s failure under the heading “Oversight quietly killed.”
There is also a prior connection between the CBS reporter and CPOC. Less than a year before this investigation, reporter Julie Watts appeared at CPOC’s statewide conference on a panel with CPOC’s executive director and a public-relations professional. The session was titled “Behind the Headlines: Insights on Public Safety Media Coverage,” and according to CPOC, part of the discussion concerned how probation could better communicate its role to the public.
There is nothing inherently improper about a journalist appearing at an organization’s conference. But when later reporting closely tracks that organization’s policy concerns, it becomes especially important to test those concerns against competing evidence.
CBS did not seriously do that. It presented the troubling cases, probation’s concerns about oversight, and the demise of CPOC-sponsored legislation. It did not seriously present the experience of the overwhelming majority of students in these programs.
The evidence was available. The success stories are everywhere. CBS chose the sensational cases instead.
The Story CBS Missed
An extraordinary story is unfolding on California’s college campuses. People who once sat in prison cells are now sitting in university classrooms. They are earning degrees, going on to graduate school, finding jobs, supporting families, and building lives no longer defined by incarceration.
CBS Sacramento had every right to investigate a placement that may have gone terribly wrong. But an investigation worthy of the name would determine whether a sensational case reflects a broader pattern before using it to cast suspicion on programs serving thousands of people. CBS never established that.
Sources
Cal Matters Digital Democracy (2026) Senate Bill 1157, 2026 https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260sb1157
Chief Probation Officers of California (2026). Behind the Headlines: Insights on Public Safety Media Coverage, 2025. https://www.cpoc.org/post/behind-headlines-insights-public-safety-media-coverage
Davis Vanguard (2026). UC Davis Arrest Raises Oversight Questions, but Broader Record Shows Success of Prison-to-College Programs, October 2026. https://davisvanguard.org/2026/10/uc-davis-student-arrest-lrp/
Project Rebound (2026) Project Annual Summary, 2026. https://www.calstate.edu/impact-of-the-csu/government/Advocacy-and-State-Relations/legislativereports1/Project%20Rebound%20Annual%20Report%20-%202026.pdf
(2026)
Sacramento State (2026). Project Rebound helps formerly incarcerated students rebuild their lives, January 17, 2024. https://www.csus.edu/news/news…
X.com (2026). Julie Watts Post, September 24, 2026. https://x.com/juliewattsTV/sta…