Georgia Bar Journal December 2011 : Page 5
ought to win way more than 90 percent of the time, so my win rate was not due to any genius on my part, escaped my notice. Confidence soon evolved into cockiness. I rel-ished the opportunity to strut into a courtroom toting an unloaded machine gun. To a hammer every-thing is a nail, and I was a brand new hammer. I began to see almost any citizen accused of a crime as less than human, and went along with a local practice of forcing law-yers from out of town to sit and wait all week for their cases to be reached rather than placing them on call. Reflecting upon that experience decades later, I recognize that some of my decisions were based more upon ambition, testosterone and a desire to prove myself tough than upon mature judgment. After about a year I began to see that perhaps 85 percent of the people I was prosecuting probably would not have been in trouble but for alcohol, drugs and ignorance. Another 15 percent or so were pri-marily mean. There was, of course, a good deal of overlap between those groups. But lacking the con-cept of drug and DUI courts and any coordination with addiction or mental health counseling resources, we had no solution but prosecu-tion, incarceration and probation. If timing and politics had been just a little different, I might have become a career prosecutor. But in the 1978 election my desk mate lost a race to succeed our employer as district attorney, and we both left the office in the transition. Over the next three years I handled a lot of indigent criminal defense cases under the old system of random appointment. Eager for courtroom experience, I often went to trial and got lucky, but soon learned that dedicated work on appointed cases did not pay my bills. When an offer came to join an insurance defense firm in Atlanta—at a time when I was 30, broke and single in a small town—I moved on and never looked back. Thirty years later, I was installed as State Bar president and Gov. Nathan Deal appointed me to the December 2011 newly created Special Council on Criminal Justice Reform. At the bill signing ceremony at a drug court session in his son’s superior court courtroom in Gainesville, I was con-vinced that Gov. Deal is absolute-ly sincere about salvaging lives of non-violent offenders caught in the cycle of addiction, not merely sav-ing money in the state budget. At the same time, the Bar role thrust me into dealing with issues regard-ing the statewide indigent defense system and the proposed Juvenile Code, attempting to quickly get up to speed on areas of law I had not touched in three decades. Being thrown once again into the deep end of a pool, this time a pool of criminology research, I appointed a State Bar Committee on Criminal Justice Reform. It is chaired by Cobb Judicial Circuit District Attorney Pat Head and comprised of a stellar group of prosecutors, judges and defense lawyers with a wealth of “boots on the ground” experience. 1 I hope that our blue ribbon Bar com-mittee will play a significant role as the state moves forward with criminal justice reform over the next few years. The Special Council on Criminal Justice Reform included Chief Justice Hunstein, trial judges with intense criminal law experience, Judicial Qualifications Commission mem-ber Linda Evans, a bipartisan group of dedicated legislators, one district attorney and me. 2 It was formed to address the budget-busting fact that 1 in 70 adults in Georgia were behind bars at the end of 2007, com-pared to the national incarceration rate of 1 in 100 adults, and Georgia had the fourth highest incarceration rate in the country. Moreover, 1 in 13 Georgians are under some form of corrections supervision, the highest rate in the nation. Young African-American males today are more likely to go to prison than to college. People caught in a cycle of addiction, crime and unemployment are as a practical matter unavailable for pro-ductive employment and responsible parenting of children they help bring into the world. Those who complete long mandatory sentences emerge with pocket change, a bus ticket and no marketable skills other than those they learn from other inmates. The vicious cycle of recidivism continues. The top leadership of state govern-ment laid out the following goals for the Council: (1) address the growth of the state’s prison population, con-tain corrections costs and increase efficiencies and effectiveness that result in better offender manage-ment; (2) improve public safety by reinvesting a portion of the savings into strategies that reduce crime and recidivism; and (3) hold offenders accountable by strengthening com-munity-based supervision, sanctions and services. 3 This council worked through the summer and fall. We received tech-nical assistance from a strong team of state public safety and correc-tions officials and from the Public Safety Performance Project of the Pew Center on the States (Pew) as part of the state’s selection to par-ticipate in the Justice Reinvestment Initiative of the U.S. Department of Justice. Pew has provided assis-tance to more than a dozen states by analyzing data to identify the drivers of prison growth and by developing research-based, fis-cally sound policy options to pro-tect public safety, hold offenders accountable and contain corrections costs. Pew’s team was assisted by the Crime and Justice Institute and Applied Research Services, Inc. Council members divided into three working groups to devel-op specific recommendations in three areas: sentencing and prison admissions; prison length-of-stay and parole; and community super-vision. In November, the Council released its findings and recom-mendations, with the underlying goal of protecting and improving public safety, in a report to the leg-islature and other state leadership. Here’s part of what we found. Supervising the nearly half a mil-lion people under correctional control in Georgia costs state tax-payers more than $1 billion dol-lars per year. Despite this tremen-5
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