BILL ANALYSIS Ó AB 1998 Page 1 Date of Hearing: May 4, 2016 ASSEMBLY COMMITTEE ON APPROPRIATIONS Lorena Gonzalez, Chair AB 1998 (Campos) - As Amended April 5, 2016 ----------------------------------------------------------------- |Policy |Rules |Vote:|9 - 0 | |Committee: | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |-------------+-------------------------------+-----+-------------| | |Public Safety | |7 - 0 | | | | | | | | | | | ----------------------------------------------------------------- Urgency: No State Mandated Local Program: NoReimbursable: No SUMMARY: This bill requires the Board of State and Community Corrections (BSCC) to prepare guidelines for counties on how to disaggregate juvenile justice caseload, performance and outcome data by race and ethnicity. FISCAL EFFECT: AB 1998 Page 2 One-time cost in the $50,000 range for the BSCC to prepare the guidelines. COMMENTS: 1)Background: In 2007, the Legislature passed and the governor signed the Budget bill on Corrections, SB 81, which required the State Commission on Juvenile Justice to develop a Juvenile Justice Operational Master Plan and to make available, for implementation by all of the counties of the state, a number of strategies, including "Juvenile justice universal data collection elements, which shall be common to all counties." Each county in the state is required, as a condition of receiving an allocation from the Youthful Offender Block Grant fund, by October 1 of each year, to submit an annual report to the Corrections Standards Authority on its utilization of the block grant funds in the preceding fiscal year. BSCC prepares an annual "Youthful Offender Block Grant" report to the Legislature. The report includes data for Hispanic/Latino youth in county detention. In the 2015 report, BSCC did not provide comprehensive data about all youth in detention, but analyzed a sample of youth and found that approximately 54% of the sample study were Hispanic or Latino. The author asserts that inadequate data collection is singularly harmful to Latino youth. 2)Purpose. According to the author, Latino youth are increasingly singled out by the criminal justice system. However, with many Latinos being classified as white or African-American, the extent of this problem is not well known. The flawed data collection system, does not AB 1998 Page 3 consistently separate ethnicity from race. The author states, "Gathering accurate race and ethnicity data from youth involved in the juvenile justice system allows for better understanding of trends, policy effects, and inequities by legislators, the public, and state or federal agencies. AB 1998 will enable policy-makers and social justice advocates to take adequate actions to address the issue of Latino over incarceration in California." 3)Support. According to NOXTIN: Equal Justice for All, "The failure to collect disaggregate data on Latinos inflates the incarceration rate of non-Hispanic white youth, further masking the inequity and disproportionality of all youth of color in confinement. 4)Related Legislation. SB 1031 (Hancock), pending in Senate Appropriations, requires BSCC, on or before July 1, 2019, to establish a Juvenile Justice Information System to develop and maintain statewide statistical information, as specified. The bill, effective, January 1, 2020, will also remove the requirement that the Department of Justice collect information regarding the juvenile justice system. The bill appropriates an unspecified sum from the General Fund to the BSCC for the purpose of funding the development of a design structure and implementation plan for the Juvenile Justice Information System. 5)Prior Legislation: a) AB 1468 (Assembly Committee on Budget), Chapter 26, Statutes of 2014, established the Juvenile Justice Data Working Group (JJDWG) within BSCC and stated: "[t]he purpose of the working group is to recommend options for coordinating and modernizing the juvenile justice data AB 1998 Page 4 systems and reports that are developed and maintained by state and county agencies." b) AB 1050 (Dickinson), Chapter 270, Statutes of 2013, required BSCC, in consultation with certain individuals, including a county supervisor or county administrative officer, a county sheriff, and the Secretary of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, to develop definitions of specified key terms in order to facilitate consistency in local data collection, evaluation, and implementation of evidence-based programs. Analysis Prepared by:Pedro Reyes / APPR. / (916) 319-2081