Georgia Bar Journal December 2011 : Page 6
dous financial commitment, our recidivism rates remain stubbornly high. In short, we are not achieving public safety returns sufficient to justify this level of public expendi-ture. In these hard times, we must ensure that our resources are being used in the most effective way possible to keep our communities safe. Georgia’s prison population has grown 35 percent over the past decade. If we do nothing, it is projected to grow an additional 8 percent during the next five years, bringing the total to nearly 60,000 inmates and forcing the state to spend an additional $264 million on corrections. What accounts for this extraordinary growth? It cannot be chalked up simply to the violent crime rate, which has declined 20 percent over the past decade. Rather, it is the result of policy decisions that have sent more people to prison and held them there for longer. Whatever else we do, we must remember prisons are important in the fight against crime. As a prosecutor long ago, I looked into the heart of darkness, the evil that drives the most hard-core of crimi-nals. There is no doubt that serious violent offenders need to be locked up for a long time to protect law-abiding citizens, and the money we spend to put them behind bars is money well spent. However, approximately two-thirds of those admitted to prison in Georgia have been convicted of non-violent offenses and more than half have never before been to prison. The percentage of sentence served for offenders in prison has more than doubled over the past 20 years. Turning even a small percentage of non-violent offenders from tax burdens in prison to tax payers in community based corrections, and reinvestment of a portion of the cost of prison into programs that have proven effective elsewhere, could help both public safety and public budgets. It is not just the prison popula-tion that has grown. Since 2000, Georgia’s felony probation popu-6 lation has grown 22 percent and the parole population has grown 9 percent. With an overwhelming majority of its corrections budget allocated to prisons, Georgia spends relatively few resources on commu-nity corrections, leaving agencies strained in their efforts to effec-tively supervise offenders in the community. For example, probation officers in Georgia have an aver-age caseload of about 200, and the state spends just over $1 per day supervising each probationer. In addition, there are limited program options to address the significant substance abuse and mental health problems among this population and long lines for the ones that do exist. We need look no farther than our high recidivism rates to see that these inadequate community super-vision options are not enough. Ensuring that Georgia’s com-munity corrections agencies have the resources and authority to supervise this growing number of offenders effectively is essential to public safety. If we adopt proven strategies to improve their suc-cess rate—by creating incentives for success and strengthening their supervision, sanctions and servic-es—we all win, with less crime, fewer victims, more accountability and reduced costs of punishment. The council developed a num-ber of recommendations to meet this objective: expanding drug, DUI, mental health and veterans accountability courts that have been proven to effectively improve public safety; expanding treat-ment options for those offenders with substance abuse and mental health issues; implementing pro-grams and practices such as cogni-tive interventions that research has proven are effective at reducing recidivism; and introducing earned compliance credits to encourage offenders to comply with the con-ditions of their supervision and to participate in programs while under supervision. We agreed on reclassifying minor traffic offens-es as administrative rather than criminal, and adjusting the felony threshold on property offenses to account for 30 years of inflation. These are just a few of the recom-mendations that will focus not just on saving money, but also on pro-tecting families and communities. While the council enjoyed broad consensus on a number of issues, including accountability courts, reclassification of some offenses and more community-based corrections, we were not able to make a unani-mous recommendation on modifica-tions of the mandatory minimum sentences that cumulatively drive a portion of the increase in Georgia prison populations. In the 1990s, Georgia was one of a number of states that reacted to a perception of softness among judges and parole boards by enacting a set of mandato-ry minimum sentences that sounded good politically but in application to individual cases could be unfair because they ignore the infinite vari-ations of facts unique to each case. One view is that more sentenc-ing discretion should be restored to judges, possibly through a “safety valve” procedure requiring find-ings of fact and conclusions of law on a list of factors that would jus-tify departure from prescribed sen-tence ranges. Such a “safety valve” might include the right of the district attorney to appeal from a sentenc-ing decision. A variety of such pro-cedures are employed to varying degrees in federal courts and some other states that have mandatory minimum sentencing laws. A second view is that mandatory minimums are important due to the perception that some judges would be reluctant to impose adequate sentences on dangerous offenders and that district attorneys who are familiar with the cases and the offenders should be able to control sentencing through exercise of discretion as to charging greater or lesser offenses. A third approach is to modify mandatory minimum sentences by attempting to carve out identifiable inequities without restoring broader sentenc-ing discretion to judges, partly out of concern that too much discretion would be open to favoritism based Georgia Bar Journal
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