In 2023, more than two decades after prosecutors sent her to prison on a drug conviction that triggered California's three-strikes law, a woman named Micah she received an envelope from the Contra Costa County District Attorney that resulted in her release from a 28-year-to-life sentence.
Micah, who now works at a charitable thrift shop, is among a small group of people who were released under a state-funded program that encourages district attorneys to resentence incarcerated people serving long prison terms that many consider excessive.
From 2021–23, the California County Resentencing Pilot Program provided nearly $13 million to help encourage the reevaluation of long sentences.
Of the 50,000 people incarcerated in the nine participating counties, courts resentenced 227 people and released 174, according to a report by RAND, the nonprofit selected by the Legislature to evaluate the pilot, reports KQED.
Lou Mariano of RAND said the figures are modest but indicate progress. “These nine counties did review well over 1,100 cases for eligibility,” said Mariano, who noted that the counties also used their own funds, more than doubling the budget for time-intensive case review and processing over the pilot period.
The 1994 federal Violent Crime Control Act was blamed for fueling mass incarceration but had no major impact on crime rates. In California, the prison population exploded from about 50,000 prisoners in 1985 to a peak of 173,000 in 2006.
In 2018, California legislators passed law that redefined the purpose of sentencing to include punishment, rehabilitation and restorative justice. The bipartisan law allowed district attorneys to recommend courts reconsider old cases, including those associated with violent crimes.
The state spends about $133,000 per incarcerated person annually, making resentencing cases a source of financial savings.
About three-quarters of those considered for resentencing had served more than 10 years in prison, and the majority still had more than five years to go.
Most counties initially focused on cases with excessive sentences before expanding criteria to include crimes against persons, said Andrea Crider, a UC Berkeley law lecturer and former Contra Costa County public defender.
According to Crider, the resentencing work in Contra Costa included “an opportunity to provide victim-offender dialogue so that victims could have closure for past crimes and have harm reduction in that sense, too.”
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