USA : mass reduction of California prison population didn’t cause rise in crime, two studies find

After California’s prison population reached the crisis stage of overcrowding — with some prisons at 300 percent capacity — the state in 2011 began to parole thousands of inmates to their original counties.
Within 15 months, more than 27,500 inmates had been “realigned” from state prisons to county jails or to parole in what was called “an act of mass forgiveness unprecedented in U.S. history.” This led to the understandable fear that suddenly returning thousands of convicts to the streets would cause a spike in crime.

It hasn’t happened.

Two detailed studies that examined crime in California, including one released last week by the journal of the American Society of Criminology, found that when considering the patterns of crime nationally and in California between 2010 and 2014, there was little or no deviation in the crime rate after the mass prisoner release.
  

Read full article.