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Merced County Sheriff Mark Pazin on Thursday unveiled a new one-stop shop to provide various services to county jail inmates released under the guidelines established by Assembly Bill 109, the state’s prison realignment law.

After years of cutbacks, layoffs — and now climbing crime rates — police departments throughout the Bay Area have begun taking on new recruits again.

Overall crime in the county’s unincorporated areas went down more than 5 percent in 2012, according to data released by the Merced County Sheriff’s Department this month.

Now, despite the somewhat quixotic nature of the quest, Monterey County officials are working to come up with a more fact-based view of local crime and whether state prisoner realignment plays any role in it.

In the early morning hours of May 11, 2011, while sleeping on his living room sofa, Jeffrey Hall was shot dead from point-blank range. The killer was Hall’s son who had a long history of violence.