During the COVID pandemic there were numerous prisons and jails releasing people from incarceration and one of the biggest states to do so was California. Releasing thousands of people there was instant lash back towards the actions of the state with worry that crime rates would rise. Before the COVID pandemic started California had lowered their rate of incarceration from 329 per 100,000 residents to 290 from 2009 to 2019 without any impact on crime rates. However, in 2020 there was an increase in homicide rates with a total of 500 victims.
There is discourse on if this was due to incarceration or due to the pandemic as there was a lot going on in this year and correlation does not equal causation. So in order to tackle this question Charis Kubrin and Bradley Bartos took a quasi-experimental approach to better understand jail decarceration in California during COVID. In order to do this they gathered information on the 58 counties in california and identified 6 counties that had the highest amount of decarceration in reference to their jail populations the year before. They compared these groups to groups that had the least decarceration rate in order to look for any gaps in crime that would show if there was an increase in crime for the states with higher rates of decarceration.
Looking at rates of violent and property crimes there was not a set pattern of crime and the patterns ranged from increased crime in counties with higher decarceration to a null impact to even a decrease in crime in counties that had higher decarceration. Even though the study had a few limitation that the researchers go over, they still showcased that there is not a relationship between decarceration and crime rate.
The researchers left their article with a quote stating “In the words of one research team: “The pandemic created rare natural experiment research conditions that enable unique and potentially valuable insights … that may indicate future justice practices and policies.” The valuable insight from our study is knowing that we can downsize our prisons and jails without seeing crime rates skyrocket.”