Every year, state agencies, universities, advocacy organizations, and think tanks—including the Pacific Research Institute—publish valuable analyses of crime, courts, corrections, sentencing, policing, and public safety.
Those reports shape legislation, influence budgets, and inform public debate.
Yet despite this steady stream of research, California continues to revisit many of the same policy debates year after year as most research examines individual institutions rather than how California’s criminal justice system performs as a whole.
California spends billions of dollars each year on law enforcement, prosecution, indigent defense, courts, corrections, probation, parole, and victim services. Tens of thousands of public employees work within a criminal justice system that touches every community in the state. Yet California does not publish a single annual report evaluating how that system performs from beginning to end.
Instead, it publishes dozens of reports describing individual parts of the system.
Those reports are informative. Collectively, however, they leave one important question unanswered:
How is California’s criminal justice system performing?
That question is surprisingly difficult to answer because California measures criminal justice by institution rather than by system. Each organization reports its own workload, performance, and responsibilities, but no one routinely assembles those pieces into a comprehensive picture of how offenders, cases, victims, and outcomes move through the justice process.
The consequences extend beyond academic interest. Policymakers routinely debate race, crime rates, incarceration, sentencing reform, prison capacity, recidivism, victim services, and public safety. Yet those debates often rely upon statistics drawn from only one portion of the system.
Each dataset is accurate within its own context, but none independently explains how the system functions as a whole. In addition, each reporting agency sets its own reporting schedule making timely year to year analysis impossible.
California produces integrated reports on its budget, economy, transportation, education, and public health.
Criminal justice, despite representing one of the state’s largest public responsibilities, has no comparable annual assessment.
The Missing View
The gap becomes apparent when examining three major stages of California’s criminal justice process.
The Department of Justice reported 170,397 felony arrests during 2025. Viewed in isolation, that statistic describes the volume of serious criminal cases entering the justice system.
The Judicial Council reports that California superior courts disposed of 117,208 felony cases during Fiscal Year 2023–24 (the last full year reported). Of those, approximately 97 percent were resolved before trial, while only about 2 percent proceeded to jury trial. Among all felony dispositions, 59 percent resulted in felony convictions, 19 percent were reduced to misdemeanors, and 22 percent ended in dismissal, transfer, or acquittal.
CDCR then reports an entirely different population: individuals sentenced to state prison or supervised on parole.
Each report describes one stage of the criminal justice process, but none explains how cases move from one stage to the next.
As a result, California can readily answer questions such as how many felony arrests occurred, how many felony cases were resolved, and how many inmates are housed in state prison. It cannot readily answer broader questions that define system performance:
- What proportion of felony arrests ultimately result in incarceration?
- Where do the largest changes occur as cases move through the system?
- Which institutional decisions have the greatest influence on correctional populations and public safety?
These are questions that beg a systemwide -performance analysis.
Recommendation
California should publish an annual State of the Criminal Justice System Report that synthesizes existing public data into a single framework following criminal cases and offenders through the justice system. Rather than creating another layer of reporting, it would organize information California already collects into a comprehensive annual assessment of one of the state’s largest public responsibilities.
California has the data.
What it lacks is a governance framework that allows policymakers to evaluate criminal justice as a complete system.
A Model for California: Learning from Canada
California does not need to invent such a framework.
In 2019, Canada’s Department of Justice concluded that although police, courts, corrections, and other justice agencies each published valuable statistics, policymakers lacked a comprehensive understanding of how the criminal justice system performed as a whole. Rather than creating another reporting bureaucracy, Canada established a State of the Criminal Justice System Framework that connects existing reports into a common performance model.
California already collects nearly all of the information needed to undertake a similar effort. The challenge is not producing more statistics, but organizing existing information into a framework that allows policymakers to evaluate the performance of the criminal justice system as a whole.
An annual State of the Criminal Justice System Report would allow policymakers, researchers, and the public to evaluate criminal justice as a system rather than as a collection of independent institutions. It would identify where cases change as they move through the process, reveal the cumulative effects of policy decisions across agencies, improve accountability, and provide a common factual foundation for debates over crime, sentencing, corrections, and justice reform.
California has no shortage of criminal justice data.
It has no shortage of criminal justice expertise.
What it lacks is a statewide framework that brings those pieces together.
Canada has demonstrated that such a framework is practical and achievable. California has the data, the institutions, and the analytical capacity to do the same.
Steve Smith is a senior fellow in urban studies at the Pacific Research Institute.
