How can Georgia turn lawbreakers into taxpayers?

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Many states are considering alternatives to incarceration. Some find they can save money and improve public safety by sentencing nonviolent offenders to programs that will change their behavior. The AJC studied options that could help Georgia reduce its need for prison beds.

Multifaceted support

$268,000

Cost to incarcerate 
one participant

$0

Cost to taxpayers 
to rehabilitate him

Lawyers, social workers and a landscaping company. Put them together and the result is a remarkable approach to dealing with criminal offenders.

From its offices near downtown Atlanta, the nonprofit Georgia Justice Project meets its clients with a plan. A veteran attorney will handle legal issues for free. A social worker puts together a program to turn the client’s life around. The client starts the hard work of making changes and can take a day job with the group’s landscaping company.

“Our focus is to try to get the client dealing with what got him there,” said Douglas B. Ammar, a criminal defense attorney who is the group’s crusading executive director.

In most cases, it works.

Georgia Justice takes on a range of clients, including some with long rap sheets and serious charges. Just 7 percent of its clients end up in prison after charges are resolved. Four years later, 83 percent remain out of trouble.

The project’s unique approach and its success rate have drawn attention around the country. And some experts believe its holistic approach should be adopted by other criminal attorneys — especially public defenders.

Georgia Justice, which operates on private donations, requires resources up front, but saves public money because judges often don’t see the need to incarcerate its clients and most aren’t convicted again.

Ammar said his clients have plenty of potential. “They’re just regular folks making bad choices or regular folks caught in bad situations,” he said. “Poverty and life circumstances create a lot of negative opportunities for people.”

Dwight Glass is among those who changed a life focused on crime and drugs. Glass stole to support his drug habit.

Now 50, Glass received seven prison sentences, serving a total of about 15 years, all for nonviolent offenses, according to Department of Corrections records.

At today’s cost, keeping Glass locked up required $268,000 in taxpayer dollars. Without effective legal assistance and social service support at Georgia Justice, taxpayers likely would have paid for another decade or more of incarceration.

Glass has been clean for two years. He works at New Horizon Landscaping, Georgia Justice’s company. He has a pressure washing and car detailing service on the side. An energetic and engaging man, Glass is now a contributor to society instead of drain on it.

“Without Georgia Justice,” Glass said, “I would still be in prison or in the ground.”

------------------------------------

Drug court

$49

Cost per day of incarceration

$14.40

Cost per day of drug court program (Fulton)

Fifteen recent graduates of Fulton County’s drug court shared common tales of desperation centered on their inability to break cycles of addiction.

One served five stints in prison without receiving treatment for a cocaine habit. Another, who started dealing drugs in high school, had been arrested seven times.

Graduate JoAnne Smith said the program enabled her to beat a 23-year crack cocaine habit.

“I have a new way of life,” said Smith, 53. “When the drug comes back in to my mind, I know what to do to get it off me.”

Smith had two children and a job when she discovered crack. Within a year, she and her husband lost their house and she left her children with her mother. She earned money as a prostitute and lived on the streets.

Smith said her children worry she’ll relapse, but she can’t imagine going back. “I know I am for real,” she said.

Drug court allows offenders to bypass criminal court and enroll in a program of outpatient drug treatment, frequent drug tests and regular appearances before a Superior Court judge who monitors their progress. They get help earning GEDs or getting mental health care if needed. Participants help pay their own way.

Graduates of the nine- to 24-month program can have charges dismissed and avoid jail time.

Fulton’s drug court is an ambitious one that takes long-term drug users, many of whom are homeless and have multiple felony convictions.

According to the Administrative Office of the Courts, there are about 50 drug courts in the state. Increased federal and state funding is needed to start courts across Georgia, said Superior Court Judge Robert Castellani, who has presided over DeKalb County’s drug court for eight years.

“Punishment through incarceration just doesn’t work,” said Castellani. “You can get people off drugs for a long time while they’re in prison, but you don’t change the way they think.”

By targeting repeat offenders, drug courts provide more bang for the taxpayer buck, said Fulton Superior Court Judge Doris Downs, drug court judge since 2002. Of 624 graduates of Fulton’s drug court, 70 percent have not been convicted of another crime, she said.

“You not only help individuals improve their lives tremendously, your community becomes so much safer,” said Downs.

--------------------

Sentencing reform

$1 billion

Cost yearly to house Georgia’s criminal offenders

$31 million

Savings yearly from shaving 
one month off average sentence

Sentencing ranges in Georgia law give judges much discretion, allowing them to impose strikingly different punishment for nearly identical offenses.

This makes it difficult to manage a swollen and expensive prison population and often flummoxes parole board members deciding when to let an inmate re-enter society.

“We can see a death-penalty case and we’re like, ‘This is not as heinous and gruesome as the one I looked at yesterday that was given 25 years to serve [in prison],’ ” said Gale Buckner, chair of the state Board of Pardons and Paroles. “We face that in every category of case we look at.”

Burglars, for example, can get probation or 20 years in prison. This means someone who breaks into a garage can get more time than someone who enters an occupied house.

Sentencing guidelines could help eliminate the disparities, criminal justice officials say. Another solution is to rewrite Georgia’s criminal code to prescribe punishment that more closely fits the crime.

“It’s now time for us to do this, and I think we can do it, from a public safety standpoint and on behalf of the validity and integrity of the justice system,” said Bob Keller, parole board member and former Clayton County district attorney.

Corrections Commissioner Brian Owens said it would make sense for judges to consider slightly shorter sentences — say 55 months instead of the commonly imposed five years.

“Does the public really care if it’s 55 or 60 or 65 months?” Owens said. “He’s being punished for a long time.”

Shaving just one month off every sentence could reduce Georgia’s prison population by about 1,750 inmates and reduce costs by $31 million.

Research shows guidelines “are quite effective at improving fairness and controlling prison growth,” said Adam Gelb, director of the Public Safety Performance Project at the Pew Center on the States. “They help make sentences more consistent and steer appropriate low-risk offenders into mandatory supervision and other non-prison alternatives.”

Georgia has tinkered with sentencing guidelines in pilot programs. U.S. Supreme Court decisions that struck down mandatory sentencing guidelines stalled momentum to employ them statewide.

--------------------

Parole

$49

Cost per day of incarceration

$4.43

Cost per day of parole supervision

As parole chief on Atlanta’s Southside, Ken Morrow is part social worker and part cop.

He manages a team of parole officers who help those just released from prison become productive members of society. They get parolees into jobs and treatment programs when needed. They keep tabs on parolees, using drug screens and unannounced visits. Some are followed even more closely through electronic monitoring.

“Repairing these families and this community is job one,” Morrow said.

More than eight in 10 of the parolees coming through Morrow’s office will complete their parole terms. It’s a rate to be proud of. Nationally, just 49 percent of parolees completed parole in 2008 without a return to prison, according to federal statistics. Georgia’s success rate was much higher: 64 percent in 2008.

Constant improvement pushed that rate up to 70 percent in the most recent quarter.

Georgia is known for running a top-flight, data-driven parole operation, which now manages about 23,000 parolees.

“There’s nobody in this country who is doing it better than we are,” said Danny Hunter, director of field operations for Georgia’s Board of Pardons and Paroles.

An improvement of 6 percentage points in the parole completion rate between 2005 and 2009 saved Georgia an estimated $39.7 million in incarceration costs, according to parole board statistics.

Many in criminal justice circles say Georgia should expand its parole program. Parole releases have remained flat even as the prison population exploded, due to bans on parole for some offenders and more conservative parole decisions across the board.

Parole board members say they place public safety at the forefront when making parole decisions, but that the rehabilitative possibilities of parole are important too — not just for the offenders, but for the public.

“They are coming back to our communities,” said Gale Buckner, parole board chair. “They are changing your brake pads and putting the roofs on our houses and cooking the food at our restaurants. We want them to be successful.”

--------------------

Day reporting center

$49

Cost per day of incarceration

$16.40

Cost per day of program

In a set of classrooms in a scruffy section of southwest Atlanta, 100 men and women are learning how to let go of their bad habits.

They are low-level criminals who would otherwise be in prison after failing to abide by the terms of their probation sentences. But the Atlanta Day Reporting Center and 12 like it across the state take another approach.

Offenders assigned to the center sleep in their own homes but spend their days learning to walk the straight and narrow while confronting the temptations of past lives.

They spend up to a year in the program, first in an intense detox phase and later in classes and meetings and tutoring sessions that help them kick their drug habits, deal with mental health issues and get GEDs while holding down jobs.

The Georgia Department of Corrections hopes to soon have 25 centers statewide, primarily in high-crime areas.

But the savings are expected to exceed simply avoiding the incarceration cost.

The centers’ programs have proven effective with other offenders, thereby reducing the chances of repeat offenses and another round of costly punishment.

Brian Owens, commissioner of the Georgia Department of Corrections, says the centers work by helping people change their habits, but also holding them accountable — officers show up unannounced to give surprise drug tests and make sure offenders are home by curfew.

“These are the kind of behavior-changing alternatives we need in the communities where the crime is occurring,” Owens said.