The Effect of Criminal Justice Reform on Academic Achievement: Cross-County Evidence from California's Public Safety Realignment

 

Background/Purpose: The U.S. incarceration rate is about four times greater today than in the 1970s. However, in recent years a number of states have started to reduce their reliance on incarceration in an effort to reduce fiscal costs and prison overcrowding. Perhaps the most notable of these reforms is California’s Public Safety Realignment Act (AB 109). Post AB 109, California reduced its prison population nearly 20% by largely eliminating the use of state prisons for technical parole violations and by increasingly sentencing the “triple nons” - nonserious, nonsexual, nonviolent offenders - to county jail or to community alternatives.

A key issue surrounding efforts, like AB 109, to reduce incarceration is what the implications of these policy reforms are for society. Existing scholarship is limited and has almost exclusively focused on the implications for crime rates. In this study, we build on this research by exploring whether school district grades in counties that reduced incarceration greatly post AB 109 experienced greater English and Math test score improvement than school district grades in counties that responded less dramatically.  

Methods: To explore these questions, we created a panel dataset by linking data from the Stanford Education Data Archive to data from the California Board of State and Community Corrections and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Our key dependent variables are measured as the change in English and Math test scores in a school district grade from the year before AB 109 (Spring 2011) to the years after (Spring 2012 and Spring 2013). Our key independent variables are the change in prison, jail, and total incarceration rates measured at the county level from December prior to AB 109 (2010) to the years since AB 109 (December 2011 and December 2012).

Our empirical strategy exploits the substantial variation in the degree that counties reduced incarceration in response to AB 109.  Our models include school district grade fixed effects (to control for unobserved time stable county, school district, and school district grade level differences that may impact both changes in incarceration and changes in test scores) and year fixed effects (to control for characteristics that vary across time, but are the same across school district grades). We also control for changes in county level crime rates and changes in school district/school district grade characteristics, such as racial composition and school funding levels.

Results: Our results suggest that a reduction in the total incarceration rate is associated with improved English test scores; we do not find a significant association with math scores. Decomposing total incarceration, we find that reductions in jail incarceration are associated with improved English and Math scores. We did not find evidence of an association between prison incarceration and Math and English scores.

Conclusions and Implications: Our findings suggest that policies that reduce incarceration may improve child-wellbeing. However, reducing prison populations by increasingly relying on jails to house individuals convicted of low-level offenses is not likely to help children; for low-level offenses, community alternatives may be more effective.