Sonoma County incarcerating fewer people

Sonoma County is putting fewer people behind bars since the passage of landmark legislation three years ago to ease prison overcrowding, the head of a state corrections board said Friday.

Last year, county residents were incarcerated at a rate of about 400 per every 100,000, a 22 percent decline over 2007, when 509 out of every 100,000 residents were in jail or prison, according to data from the Board of State and Community Corrections.

By comparison, the average incarceration rate for all 58 counties over the same period dropped 19 percent, the data said.

“You’re trending down,” Linda Penner, the board’s chairwoman, told a statewide gathering of criminal justice officials and advocates of overhauling prisons who met in Santa Rosa on Friday.

The conference, organized by the Santa Rosa Violence Prevention Partnership and the city, drew about 250 people to the Hyatt Vineyard Creek and Spa, including Mayor John Sawyer, Supervisor Efren Carrillo and past and present law enforcement leaders.

Penner, a former Fresno County chief probation officer, was appointed by Gov. Jerry Brown to head the corrections board.

She spoke about changes following the 2011 adoption of AB 109, also known as realignment, which shifted responsibility for housing low-level felons from the state prison system to county jurisdictions.

Penner said the law has reduced the state’s prison population from 170,000 to 130,000 inmates, saving hundreds of millions of dollars and satisfying a court order to decrease numbers.

It also coincided with an overall reduction in crime and improving economic conditions that have cut both unemployment and the number of people living in poverty.

Sonoma County has done its part, committing fewer people to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, she said.

In 2014, the county’s prison incarceration rate was down 29 percent from seven years ago compared with 26 percent statewide, and the jail rate was down 13 percent compared with 6 percent across the state, the data showed.

At roughly the same time, she said reports of violent and property crime in Sonoma County dropped by 14 percent and 17 percent, respectively. In 2013, the felony arrest rate was down 9 percent compared with 2007, she said.

But the shift also means more people convicted of serious crimes are doing time in county jails or on county probation. In 2014, the percentage of inmates in the county jail who are felons rose to 80 percent from 66 percent in 2007, according to board’s data.

More serious crimes mean county inmates are serving longer sentences. That’s a problem because facilities originally designed to house prisoners for no more than a year are now seeing people being sentenced to 10 years or more.

She said Gov. Jerry Brown is planning to spend $1 billion on statewide jail construction.

“We’re not out of the crisis yet,” Penner said. “There’s a lot of work to be done. But we are having the conversations.”

Another advocate of changes to the corrections system, Elizabeth Siggins of the nonprofit group Californians for Safety and Justice, said despite improvements from realignment and a more recent initiative reducing some felonies to misdemeanors, prison populations soon could inch back up.

She said it is important to continue looking for new sentencing models that don’t contribute to the problem and cost taxpayers more.

“There’s a chance here to redesign how we’ve been reacting to this problem for so long,” Siggins said.

You can reach Staff Writer Paul Payne at 568-5312 or paul.payne@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @ppayne.