The 2025-26 Budget: California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation

Feb 25, 2025 - The administration has not provided data showing a demand for additional bachelor ’s degree program capacity systemwide. Accordingly, it is unclear whether adding a bachelor ’s degree program at SQRC would simply siphon some of the roughly 400 bachelor ’s degree students off of existing bachelor ’s degree programs at other prisons or whether it would actually result in more bachelor ’s degree attainment.
https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4986

Assessing Community College Programs at State Prisons

Jul 1, 2024 - (As further context, the state does not provide the higher education segments with specific funding earmarks to complete their data collection requirements and facility utilization studies.) Given that the results of the recommended data and studies have the potential to notably improve legislative decision ‑making on prison postsecondary education policy and programs moving forward, we believe the added administrative workload is warranted.
https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4913

The 2025-26 California Spending Plan: Other Provisions

Oct 16, 2025 - Control Sections 90.00 and 90.01 During the special session called by the Governor, the Legislature added Control Sections 90.00 and 90.01 to the 2024-25 Budget Act providing up to $2.5  billion one-time from the General Fund for response and recovery costs related to the January 2025 Southern California wildfires.
https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/5081

The 2025-26 Budget: Estimated State Savings From Proposition 47

Feb 26, 2025 - We recognize that any estimates will be subject to significant uncertainty due to the limited amount of actual data since the enactment of Proposition  36. However, the flaws we identify above are conceptual problems that can be improved through reasonable assumptions in areas where actual data is lacking.
https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4991

The 2025-26 Budget: SB 678 County Probation Grant Program

Apr 11, 2025 - Specifically, including 2021 data is problematic because failure-to-prison rates during 2021 were artificially low due to factors related to the COVID-19 pandemic rather than county performance. For example, because state prisons were not admittin g people for a portion of 2021 to prevent the spread of the virus, some people who should have been counted in failure-to-prison rates were not.
https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/5031

The 2024-25 Spending Plan: Judiciary and Criminal Justice

Sep 10, 2024 - Figure 3 Summary of Total CARE Program Funding General Fund (In Millions) Training, Data Collection, and Other Activities 20.2 $106.9 $107.6 CARE = Community Assistance, Recovery, and Empowerment; CalHHS = California Health and Human Services Agency; and DHCS = Department of Health Care Services.
https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4924