Impacts of Criminal Justice Reforms on Homelessness and Drug Related Outcomes

• In Event: Drugs and Alcohol

Abstract

While policymakers around the country are grappling with homelessness, California faces a stark challenge as the state’s homeless population has increased considerably, exacerbated by the opioid crisis. Here, we leverage the exogenous variation in incarceration and enforcement created by two criminal justice reforms (realignment in 2011 and Proposition 47 in 2014) motivated by a 2009 federal court orders to reduce overcrowding in the state’s prisons, an order that was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2011, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic, to examine whether criminal justice responses to these interventions have contributed to California’s growing homeless population and the often-intertwined issues of substance use and treatment.

We will implement several difference-in-difference strategies to identify the causal impacts of California’s reforms on homelessness and drug use/treatment. Our principal estimation strategy exploits cross-county variation in the impact of realignment, Prop 47 and the pandemic. Specifically, we assess whether counties, or continuums of care (CoCs) that have experienced larger declines in county/CoC-specific incarceration or drug offense enforcement rates experience relatively large increases in homelessness or substance use related outcome rates. We also plan to apply a synthetic difference-in-difference framework to assess whether California’s trends in homelessness and substance use related outcomes appear to deviate from a combination of states that had similar trends prior to California’s reforms. Additionally, we will explore using this approach at the county level, matching individual California counties, particularly large urban ones, with counties elsewhere.

 Our initial examination of the data shows that the context and timing of when incarceration in California decreased markedly and quickly in the immediate wake of implementation of realignment and Prop 47, and most recently the pandemic. While we do not see strong evidence of changes in drug enforcement in the wake of realignment, arrests for drug offenses changed notably in the immediate wake of both Prop 47 and the pandemic, plausibly due to a sudden shift in law enforcement priorities. Key to our approach, the data show that the impacts of these events varied notably across counties, generating considerable county variation, partly driven by pre-event incarceration and drug offense arrest rates and voter support for criminal justice reforms.

Author

• Magnus J Lofstrom, Public Policy Institute of California
  Presenting Author