BILL ANALYSIS
AB 760
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Date of Hearing: April 6, 2005
ASSEMBLY COMMITTEE ON APPROPRIATIONS
Judy Chu, Chair
REVISED
AB 760 (Nava) - As Introduced: February 18, 2005
Policy Committee: Public
SafetyVote: 7-0
Urgency: No State Mandated Local Program:
Yes Reimbursable: Yes
SUMMARY
This bill:
1)States legislative intent to encourage law enforcement and
protective service agencies to develop protocols in
collaboration with local educational, judicial, correctional,
and community-based organizations, when appropriate, regarding
how to best cooperate in their response to the arrest of a
caretaker parent in a home where a minor child resides in
order to ensure the child's well being.
2)Provides an arrested custodial parent three phone calls - in
addition to the one provided under current law for all
arrestees - to arrange care for the minor child or children.
3)Adds inmates who are sole custodial parents of minor children
to the category of inmates for whom the Legislature encourages
the development of policies and programs designed to educate
and rehabilitate.
4)Requires the Judicial Council to amend its rules of court
relating to standardizing the content and sequential
presentation of probation reports, to include a defendant's
custodial responsibilities.
5)States that local correctional administrators should provide
special consideration for home detention in lieu of
incarceration to low-risk offenders who are the sole custodial
parents of minor children.
AB 760
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6)Requires the Commission on Peace Officer Standards and
Training (POST) to develop guidelines and training to ensure
child safety at the time of a caretaker parent's arrest.
FISCAL EFFECT
1)Moderate state-reimbursable mandated local costs, potentially
in excess of $500,000 statewide, to local law enforcement
(primarily county jails) for additional custody coverage for
what could be hundreds of thousands of additional phone calls.
For example, if five percent of the 1.4 million people
arrested in California in 2003 were determined to be custodial
parents and made three additional phone calls, the result
would be an additional 210,000 calls. Assuming several minutes
per call, local law enforcement could pursue reimbursement for
hundreds of thousand of dollars for these custodial costs.
2)One-time costs to POST in the range of $100,000 to develop
guidelines and training for local law enforcement.
COMMENTS
1)Rationale . This bill is the result of an informational hearing
of the Assembly Select Committee on California Children's
School Readiness and Health - "Children of Prisoners: Ensuring
Their Safety and Well-Being" and a California Research Bureau
publication, "California Law and the Children of Prisoners"
(February 2003), which referenced an estimated 1.5 million
children nationwide with parent in state or federal prison;
22% of these children were under five years of age. The
California sample of this survey found that two-thirds of the
state's male prison inmates and 79% of female prison inmates
were parents with an average of 2.5 children for men and 2.9
children for women.
The author has introduced this bill in an effort to help
address problems faced by potentially hundreds of thousands of
children in California.
2)Should inmates be treated preferentially if they have young
children ? Encouraging jails and prisons to provide special
consideration to inmates with dependant children - in terms of
home detention in lieu of incarceration and participation in
transitional re-entry programs - raises the issue of whether
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inmates who have committed the same crime should be treated
differently, and whether such favorable treatment could lead
to litigation.
3)Presumably increasing the number of calls at booking will
require monitoring to determine whether the additional calls
are in fact being used to arrange child care, as well as
additional screening to determine whether persons being booked
are child custodians. This could pose staffing/budget problems
for jails and prisons.
4)Similar legislation , AB 1941 (Chan, 2004) was passed off of
this committee's Suspense File last year after amendments
significantly narrowed the scope of the bill. AB 760 reflects
those amendments. AB 1941 was eventually held in Senate
Appropriations.
Analysis Prepared by : Geoff Long / APPR. / (916) 319-2081