Crime

California's Prison Reform Experiment Worked. The State's Crime Rate Has Fallen by 27% in 15 Years.

Facts don't care about the GOP's "crime wave" feelings.

Steven Greenhut | 7.24.2026 7:30 AM

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For those of us who are more interested in policy than politics, it's frustrating to try a rational discussion about any issue once it's caught up in a partisan maelstrom. Few matters are more given to hysteria than crime, for the obvious reason that everyone (except criminals) is against it—and politicians are incentivized to use crime-related policy to score political points.

We have to await the passage of time to analyze which anti-crime policies worked, which created unintended consequences, and which made little difference. I'm long past expecting politicians to learn about past policy, but it's worth trying. So I cheer the Legislative Analyst's Office, which last month released a report evaluating the results of a brouhaha that most of us have forgotten: prison realignment. The short take: the doomsayers were wrong.

Fifteen years ago, California prisons were filled to 180% of their design capacity—the result of 1990s tough-on-crime initiatives that boosted sentences and created larger populations. A 2009 federal court decision agreed that overcrowding undermined inmates' right to receive "adequate" healthcare, but the court stayed the full implementation of California's proposed fixes while the........

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