SB 319 directs statewide data collection and public reporting tied to convictions under Penal Code section 666.1 and Health and Safety Code section 11395, and it creates parallel reporting requirements for county finance activity and court diversion program metrics. The Department of Justice must compile conviction-level and recidivism statistics; counties must disclose allocations, expenditures, and unspent funds for sheriff, probation, and court activities; and superior courts must send judicial-review and diversion program data to the Judicial Council for publication.
The bill matters because it stitches together outcome data (convictions, program participation, treatment billed) with fiscal transparency (what counties spend and leave unspent). For policy analysts, researchers, and county budget officials this creates a single-source dataset to evaluate diversion effectiveness, track recidivism over multiple lookback windows, and scrutinize how public funds are used to support treatment and court-related activities.
At a Glance
What It Does
The bill requires the Department of Justice to collect specified conviction and recidivism data elements and publish monthly county-level statistics. It also obligates counties to report detailed allocations, expenditures, and unspent balances related to sheriff, probation, and court activities, and requires superior courts to submit diversion program metrics and judicial review outcomes to the Judicial Council for publication.
Who It Affects
Directly affected entities include the California Department of Justice, the Judicial Council, county offices of the sheriff and probation, county finance officers, superior courts, and treatment providers who bill Medi‑Cal. Data teams, compliance officers, and county budget staff will need to create or expand reporting workflows.
Why It Matters
By linking outcome measures with spending and service billing data, the bill enables cross‑cutting analysis of program performance, racial and gender disparities, and fiscal efficiency. That can change how policymakers and courts evaluate diversion policies and allocate county and state resources.
More articles like this one.
A weekly email with all the latest developments on this topic.
What This Bill Actually Does
SB 319 requires the Department of Justice to assemble a specified set of conviction and recidivism statistics for convictions under Penal Code §666.1 and Health & Safety Code §11395. The DOJ must publish monthly, county‑level counts that distinguish misdemeanor from felony convictions and that report, for each conviction, whether the offender had prior convictions for the same statute.
The law asks for granular prior‑conviction detail: counts of people with two or more qualifying offenses within multiple lookback windows and a breakdown of the number of prior convictions (from 2 up to 10 or more).
Counties must submit a parallel financial feed. The bill requires each county to report annual allocations and expenditures of state and federal funds for sheriff, probation, and court activities by category and grant program; amounts held unspent (including reserve accounts); county general fund expenditures for those activities; administrative costs; contracted services and their costs; and the fund sources and amounts used as the nonfederal share for Medi‑Cal (including specialty mental health and substance use disorder services).
The report format and timelines are to be prescribed by DOJ, and the collected county finance data will be posted publicly by the department.Superior courts must provide operational and outcome metrics for diversion programs tied to H&S §11395 and related diversion activity for §666.1 cases. Required submissions include monthly counts of people diverted, average daily enrollment, monthly discharge counts with reason codes (successful completion, unsuccessful termination and detailed reasons), and detailed service billing information.
The billing data must be described using Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) or Healthcare Common Procedure Coding System (HCPCS) codes and must include the number of treatment hours billed, provider type, and the source of the nonfederal Medi‑Cal share. Courts must also report the mental health and substance use disorder diagnoses for diverted individuals and the results of judicial review proceedings; these metrics are to be disaggregated by race and gender.The bill centralizes publication: DOJ will post conviction and county data on its website; the Judicial Council will publish court metrics and judicial review outcomes.
The statutory text sets up start dates and reporting cadences: the data collection obligations begin in early 2026, DOJ’s initial public report is timed to follow (with an annual cadence thereafter), and Judicial Council and county posting obligations come into effect the following year. Together the provisions create a linked information stream—case outcomes, treatment billed, diagnoses, and county spending—that is intended to let analysts and officials see how diversion and treatment activity relate to convictions and fiscal choices.
The Five Things You Need to Know
The DOJ must publish monthly county counts for convictions under Penal Code §666.1 and H&S §11395 and indicate for each conviction whether it was a misdemeanor or a felony.
The DOJ’s recidivism reporting requires counts of people with two or more qualifying offenses within lookback windows of 1, 3, 5, 10, and 20 years, plus a separate breakdown of prior‑conviction counts (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10+).
Each county must report annual allocations, expenditures, and cumulative unspent balances (including reserve accounts) for sheriff, probation, and court activities, itemized by category and specific grant program and including reimbursements.
Superior courts must submit diversion program metrics to the Judicial Council: monthly diversion counts, average daily enrollment, discharge counts with specified termination reasons, CPT/HCPCS‑coded services billed to Medi‑Cal or private payers, treatment hours billed, provider types, participant diagnoses, and judicial review outcomes disaggregated by race and gender.
The statutory schedule starts data collection in early 2026, requires DOJ to publish the first slate of conviction statistics soon after collection begins with annual updates thereafter, and phases in county and Judicial Council public posting beginning in 2027.
Section-by-Section Breakdown
Every bill we cover gets an analysis of its key sections.
DOJ collection and publication of conviction and recidivism data
This section tasks the Department of Justice with collecting every listed data element related to convictions under Penal Code §666.1 and H&S §11395 and publishing monthly, county‑level reports. Practically, DOJ must receive conviction records annotated with felony/misdemeanor status, prior‑offense flags, and the recidivism windows (1, 3, 5, 10, 20 years), and then post that information on its public website. For data teams, this creates a requirement to map court and local arrest/conviction records into the DOJ’s reporting schema and to maintain an auditable record of how prior convictions are identified and counted.
County financial reporting: allocations, expenditures, and unspent balances
This provision compels every county to submit a standardized finance report covering state and federal allocations and expenditures for sheriff, probation, and court activities by program and category; cumulative unspent funds including reserves; county general‑fund spending; administrative costs; contracted services and costs; and the nonfederal Medi‑Cal share by category. The department prescribes the form, manner, and timelines, which means counties must adapt budgeting and accounting workflows to provide program‑level detail and reconcile reimbursements. Because the data will be posted publicly, counties should anticipate heightened scrutiny of fund balances and contract spending.
Court reporting to Judicial Council on diversion programs and service billing
Superior courts must report operational metrics for individuals charged under §666.1 and §11395: monthly diversion counts with race/gender disaggregation, average daily enrollment, discharge counts with explicit termination reasons, types of services ordered and billed to Medi‑Cal (coded using CPT/HCPCS), total treatment hours billed, and the nonfederal funding source. The requirement to use standard medical coding increases the reporting burden on courts and treatment providers but makes it possible to aggregate service‑level utilization across counties and provider types.
Judicial review outcomes and publication schedule
Courts must also submit the outcomes of judicial review proceedings related to diversion and mandate reporting disaggregated by race and gender. The Judicial Council is charged with publishing an annual report containing the court metrics and judicial review outcomes and with posting that report online beginning in 2027. This creates a statutory feed from local court case management systems into a statewide publication intended for policy review and oversight.
This bill is one of many.
Codify tracks hundreds of bills on Criminal Justice across all five countries.
Explore Criminal Justice in Codify Search →Who Benefits and Who Bears the Cost
Every bill creates winners and losers. Here's who stands to gain and who bears the cost.
Who Benefits
- State policymakers and budget analysts — gain a unified dataset linking case outcomes, program participation, and county spending to inform policy choices and resource allocations.
- Researchers and public‑interest organizations — receive standardized, disaggregated metrics (race, gender, lookback windows) that enable rigorous study of recidivism patterns and diversion program effectiveness.
- Judicial Council and DOJ analysts — obtain operational visibility across counties and courts to identify inconsistent practices, service gaps, and trends that inform statewide guidance.
- Advocates for treatment‑based diversion — can use the bill’s service and diagnosis reporting to benchmark whether diverted individuals actually receive treatment and which services are most used.
- Taxpayers and local oversight bodies — gain transparency into how state and federal funds for sheriff, probation, and courts are allocated and whether funds remain unspent in reserve accounts.
Who Bears the Cost
- County finance offices and budget staff — must build new reporting extracts and reconciliation processes to supply granular, program‑level allocation, expenditure, and unspent‑fund data.
- Superior courts and court clerks — face additional data collection tasks to track diversion enrollments, discharge reasons, CPT/HCPCS billing codes, treatment hours, diagnoses, and judicial review outcomes.
- Local treatment providers and billing departments — may need to align billing and reporting practices with court data requests and ensure that CPT/HCPCS coding and payer breakdowns are accessible for court submissions.
- Department of Justice and Judicial Council — absorb the technical and operational costs of receiving, validating, standardizing, and publishing large, recurring datasets across many counties and courts.
- Individuals (case subjects) — bear an elevated privacy risk because the law requires public posting of highly disaggregated metrics that could increase reidentification risk in small counties or narrow cohorts.
Key Issues
The Core Tension
The central tension is between the public‑good benefits of granular, linked data for oversight and equity analysis and the operational, privacy, and resource costs of producing and publishing that data: greater transparency can improve policy decisions but risks imposing burdens that compromise data quality, patient confidentiality, and the functioning of diversion programs.
SB 319 pushes for unprecedented linkage of case outcomes, program participation, clinical billing, diagnoses, and county fiscal data. That produces real analytical power, but it also creates major implementation questions.
The bill leaves several operational details to the Department of Justice (format, manner, timelines), which means counties and courts will depend on strong data specifications and transition time to adapt case management, accounting, and billing systems. Differences in local case numbering, prior‑conviction tracking, and Medi‑Cal billing practices create a high risk of inconsistent counts across counties unless DOJ invests in validation rules and reconciliation procedures.
Privacy and legal constraints are another knotty area. Requiring disaggregation by race and gender and posting the information publicly advances equity analysis, but disaggregated datasets increase reidentification risk for small counties or narrowly defined cohorts.
The requirement to include diagnoses and CPT/HCPCS service codes intersects with HIPAA and Medi‑Cal confidentiality rules; the bill does not specify de‑identification standards or data‑use restrictions. Finally, the new reporting burdens are not matched with explicit funding in the statutory text, raising the possibility that underfunded counties and courts will supply lower‑quality data or face diversion of staff time away from casework and treatment coordination.
Try it yourself.
Ask a question in plain English, or pick a topic below. Results in seconds.