Local leaders have joined other counties in the San Joaquin Valley in calling for state lawmakers to fairly allocate funding for public safety realignment.
Monica Nino, chief executive officer for Stanislaus County, said in a report Tuesday that counties in the Bay Area and other regions receive several times more money per offender this year than the valley counties. Kern, Fresno, Merced, Stanislaus and other counties are expected to ask state representatives to change the funding formulas so they are more equitable.
In the first 12 months of realignment, Stanislaus County's Probation Department received 807 former prison inmates for local supervision, almost 30 percent above the state's initial projections. The Sheriff's Department booked 1,575 parole violators in jail, which was 25 percent more than the state had predicted.
Starting a year ago, prison realignment due to Assembly Bill 109 gave county agencies the responsibility to supervise low-level prison inmates released on parole and for jailing nonviolent offenders.
Nino said the county's realignment funding from the state is "critically short of the amount needed to provide effective treatment to help reduce (repeat offenses) among Stanislaus' rapidly growing AB 109 offender population."
She said the funding needs to be more closely tied to the population shifted to the counties, or the valley counties will be unable to afford treatment and supervision programs needed to break the cycle of reoffending and incarceration.
That pattern filled state prisons to the point of overflowing and "now threatens to do the same to county jails in the valley," Nino said.
Stanislaus was given $6.2 million, out of $300 million statewide, for the first nine months of corrections realignment, and received $12.2 million for the fiscal year that began July 1. The state distributed $842 million statewide for this fiscal year.
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