In August 1994, the California Department of Corrections released its annual five-year facilities master plan for new prison construction. This plan, usually submitted to the Legislature earlier in the calendar year, was delayed so that the additional need for new prison beds resulting from the recently enacted Three Strikes and You're Out legislation could be incorporated into the plan. The facilities plan is based on the department's spring 1994 population estimate that estimated a total of 246,000 inmates by June 1999. This projection was recently revised to 211,000, 35,000 fewer inmates. There are several reasons for this reduction, as shown in Figure 1 and discussed below. First, there have recently been fewer new admissions into the prison system than was projected in the spring 1994 estimate. The CDC now projects that total new admissions will still grow continuing a long-term trend but not as much as previously estimated. This affects the projections both for the base population (inmates and prison terms that would occur without the Three Strikes law) and for those inmates sent to prison under the Three Strikes law. The CDC assumes that there have been fewer Three Strikes admissions than previously anticipated in part because of the large backlog of Three Strikes cases awaiting adjudication. Second, the CDC has lowered its projection of felons that, because of Three Strikes, would be sent to state prison instead of being sentenced to local jails or put on probation. Third, the CDC incorporated the Three Strikes law into the computer model that is used for biannual projections for inmate population. The previous Three Strikes estimate was based on a simplified model that the CDC uses for assessing the impact of proposed legislation. (This third factor accounts for 19,000 of the 35,000 total reductions in the five-year estimate.) In total, about 30,000 of the 35,000 reductions in estimated inmate population is due to the CDC'...
