Based on historical data, nearly 100 new “lower-risk” inmates may be processed into Georgia’s prison system this week. They’re the petty criminals who are a costly nuisance to society, not raging threats to public safety.
Yet Georgia taxpayers will spend about $18,000 a year to warehouse each of them. Common sense and experts agree this costly practice does nothing to reduce crime. Conservatives and liberals find common ground on this point, and polling by this newspaper and other groups shows solid support for reform .
Georgia can’t afford to keep paying $1 billion a year for such a counterproductive strategy. Not when we can likely get better results for the same, or even less, money.
Which brings us to Georgia House Bill 1176, a first-cut blueprint for criminal justice reform. It’s expected to arrive on the House floor this week after some tweaks. The General Assembly should pass this bill this session. Public safety is too important to do otherwise.
There may be those who think that locking away fewer criminals will put law-abiding society at greater risk. Yet the message of criminal justice professionals could not be clearer: Crime should not spike if reforms are enacted. That hasn’t happened elsewhere. Texas, which beat us to similar changes, in 2010 saw crime at its lowest level since 1973.
In her 2012 State of the Judiciary address, Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice Carol Hunstein remarked: “If we truly want to be tough on crime, we must figure out how to reduce it. We now know that being tough on crime is not enough. We must also be smart about crime and criminal justice policy. If we simply throw low-risk offenders into prison, rather than holding them accountable for their wrongdoing while addressing the source of their criminal behavior, they merely become hardened criminals who are more likely to reoffend when they are released.”
To which we’d ask, are we any safer because, in 2010, Georgia imprisoned more than 5,000 “lower-risk” offenders? We’d argue no. Not when Georgia already has the nation’s highest rate of people imprisoned, on probation or parole.
And no one fearful of violent crime suggests that Georgia should lighten up on those who well deserve long prison terms. Violent, or repeat, felons should be marched behind razor wire and kept there.
One bonus of justice reform is that finding better ways to steer nonviolent criminals back onto the honest path will free up costly prison space for those most deserving of incarceration.
That alone makes it worthwhile to enact reform’s key tenets of:
● Revamping prison sentences to make the range of punishment better fit the crime.
● Redirecting some of the savings from reducing prison head counts toward bolstering community-based reform programs.
The latter point is a non-negotiable necessity to make this all work. Steering people away from prison is a recipe for public safety disaster if improved probation and parole supervision and alternatives such as drug courts are not made more widely available.
This important work should not stop with adults. The state’s juvenile justice system is likewise in need of reform, as recent reporting by the AJC has shown. Legislation to address this problem is before the Legislature. As Chief Justice Hunstein said in her January address, “In Georgia, we are throwing children into youth prisons. ... Many are behind bars because juvenile judges have nowhere else to send them; because no one intervened before it was too late.”
Doing a better job of reforming nonviolent and juvenile offenders will make us all safer. Let’s make it happen — now.
Andre Jackson, for the Editorial Board.
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