At this late date, I think it’s fair to say Redding is a city under siege by petty criminals. Everyone knows it and the rising property crime rate shows it. It’s the talk of the town.

Gaunt phantoms stalk the streets and parks, aggressively panhandling every possible intersection and business, vandalizing and stealing from even the toniest neighborhoods, vanishing into local homeless and transient communities with impunity. When police do manage to nab a suspect, he or she is often immediately released because there’s not enough room in the jail to hold low-level offenders.

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I’ve heard at least a dozen different versions of the same theory regarding AB 109, the Public Safety Realignment Act, which was passed by the California Legislature five years ago. They all sounded plausible, until I came to understand the dramatic scope of the AB 109. Stanford Law School professor Joan Petersila, who has done extensive research on the legislation, calls it “a prison downsizing experiment of historic significance.”

“Experiment” is a word used often in the Stanford Law School’s research on AB 109. For a great primer on the topic, the school’s 2013 study, co-authored by Petersila, “Follow the Money: How California Counties Are Spending Their Public Safety Realignment Funds,” is highly recommended.

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“Theoretically, Realignment is designed to promote rehabilitation and reentry by moving offenders closer to their families and community-based services,” notes Petersila in “California Prison Downsizing and Its Impact,” published by Harvard Law & Policy Review. “Community agencies can more easily access inmates in local jails, building relationships and encouraging inmates to access their services after release. In fact, recognizing that change is best achieved at the local level and that counties are better at rehabilitating offenders than the state is one of the underlying premises of the bill.”

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Counties are required to establish their own AB 109 plans and given a wide range of discretion on how to spend funds. In “Follow the Money: How California Counties Are Spending Their Public Safety Realignment Funds,” Petersila and company broke down county budget expenditures by the percentage devoted to sheriff and law enforcement and the percentage devoted to programs and services and discovered some surprising results.