Last week, the Judicial Council awarded millions of dollars to
fund
pretrial projects in 16 trial courts throughout the state.
This year’s state budget earmarked $75 million to the Judicial
Council to launch and evaluate two-year pretrial projects in
local trial courts.
On behalf of the California Department of Corrections and
Rehabilitation, we are pleased to announce that the Division of
Rehabilitative Programs has released a Request for Applications
(RFA) for Round Six of the Innovative Programming Grants for
Victim Impact programs.
AB 597 (Levine) extends the sunset date by two years on the
use of “flash incarceration,” which is a period of detention of
up to ten days in a county jail without going before a judge, for
a violation of an offender’s conditions of probation or mandatory
supervision. CSAC supported AB 597, which was sponsored by the
Chief Probation Officers of California (CPOC) and signed into law
by the Governor on July 1.
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra recently released five
annual criminal justice reports that provide law enforcement
agencies and the public with statewide data on criminal justice
statistics. The reports, as well as the data behind each report,
can be accessed via the OpenJustice website.
A new proposal based on the work of the Commission on the
Future of California’s Court System, seeks to
decriminalize minor traffic offenses by making traffic
infractions a civil violation rather than a criminal violation.
The Futures Traffic Working Group is proposing Judicial
Council-sponsored legislation and is requesting comments on the
proposal.
California’s 2017 wildfire season was devastating. State of
emergencies were declared by the Governor for the record-breaking
fires in October and December for 13 counties in both Southern
and Northern California. Then, while California was still
recovering, it was struck with the deadliest and most destructive
wildfire in our state’s history: the 2018 Camp Fire in Butte
County killed 85 people, burned 153,336 acres and destroyed
18,804 structures.
The Board of State and Community Corrections today approved grant
awards for three programs. The first is the second round of
Proposition 47 funding approved by the Board, to which voters
allocated the bulk of the state savings for rehabilitative grants
targeting Prop 47-impacted individuals. Approximately $96 million
will go to 23 applicants whose rehabilitative programs were
deemed most promising.
The Council of Criminal Justice and Behavioral Health (CCJBH), is
hosting a kick-off event for the Lived Experience
Stakeholder Engagement process. The process will begin this
summer and continue into the winter, culminating in an RFP to
award competitive grants, as well as written summary reports and
possible recommendations for future activities. Attached
is the draft agenda.
CSAC is excited to announce a grant from Blue Shield of
California for domestic violence recidivism prevention. The grant
funding will allow CSAC to provide research and technical
assistance necessary to create a domestic violence analytical
tool, support a six-county pilot project testing innovative
strategies for preventing recidivism in cases of domestic
violence, and convene a statewide conference in
November.
The Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) recently released a report
to the Legislature regarding the Governor’s proposal to move the
Division of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) from the California Department
of Corrections and Rehabilitation to the Health and Human
Services Agency.
The LAO opines that there is a lack of detail on how exactly the
Governor envisions this proposal, so the report recommends that
the Legislature consider the trade-offs of making this change,
and presents a series of questions. These questions include:
The Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) recently
released a report titled “A Closer Look at Women’s Arrest Rates.”
The report looked at data between 1980 and 2016, and found that
arrest rates in California have dropped for both men and women,
however, the arrest rates have dropped significantly more for men
than women.
