New State Funding Boosts Prosecutor-Led Resentencing Efforts in California

A new state-funded program encourages district attorneys to resentence some incarcerated people serving long prison terms that many now consider excessive.

Nine DAs throughout California — including those in San Francisco, Santa Clara and Contra Costa counties — will receive a portion of an $18 million pot earmarked in the recently approved state budget to help identify inmates who are no longer deemed a public safety risk, but still have years left behind bars.

“Most prosecutors agree that if a person has transformed their life and there’s no justification for having them incarcerated, then they should be out,” said Hillary Blout, executive director of For The People, a sentencing reform group that is working with the DAs to help identify eligible inmates.

“That prosecutor can bring the case back to the court and essentially say, ‘Your honor, our agency asked you to send this person away and we’re here now asking you to send this person home,’ ” Blout said.

The funding is intended to implement Assembly Bill 2942, a 2018 law that Blout helped draft, which allows district attorneys to recommend that courts reconsider old cases and issue new, lighter sentences — including for people convicted of violent crimes years ago.

Some 75 incarcerated people in California have so far been resentenced under the law, according to Blout. In most cases, it’s led to their near-immediate release from prison and reentry back into their communities on parole.

That includes about 50 people from San Francisco alone, according to Arcelia Hurtado, chief of the post-conviction unit in the San Francisco DA’s Office. She said her staff is working with the Public Defender’s Office and community groups to review the sentences of the nearly 200 people from San Francisco who have already served over 20 years — about a third of the current prison population from the city. Some of those cases, she added, are women who committed violent crimes against their abusers.

“Many years ago, courts just didn’t hear that information or just didn’t give it proper weight,” Hurtado said, noting that her office will likely use the new state funding to hire a dedicated team to review the cases and develop a strong reentry program for people who are released.

The state’s investment in the program signals a shift away from the harsh sentencing policies of past decades, when laws like mandatory minimums and three strikes sparked an explosion in the prison population, mushrooming from about 50,000 inmates in 1985 to a peak of 173,000 in 2006.

“Our legacy in California has not been a great one in terms of our investment in building prisons and then filling them with people,” Blout said, noting the disproportionate impact that’s had on people of color.

But in recent years, the state has advanced a slew of criminal justice reforms aimed at reducing the prison population.

“But by and large, with all of those efforts, it historically had been prosecutors that were seen as the barrier to really being able to see the promise of these initiatives,” said Blout, who worked for years as a prosecutor in the San Francisco DA’s Office. “I think that if we’re ever going to get our system to a place where we are effectively implementing all of the different laws at our disposal, we have to have one of the most powerful actors in the criminal justice system involved, and that’s prosecutors.”

The nine DA’s offices in the pilot program, which also include Los Angeles, Merced, San Diego, Humboldt, Riverside and Yolo counties, were chosen to reflect California’s diverse geography and demographics, Blout said, and to show that the model can be applied across the state and the country. In just the last year, two other states — Oregon and Illinois — have followed California’s lead, passing similar resentencing laws. Washington State passed its own version in 2020.

After AB 2942 went into effect in 2019, Blout’s organization began working directly with the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office to begin reviewing cases and develop risk-assessment protocols.