When Georgia legislators passed a law intended to keep more nonviolent criminals out of prison, they promised millions in savings and called it a financial windfall for the state.
County sheriffs call it passing the buck.
“The bill was intended to save state dollars on the (state prisons) budget when essentially it pushed a lot of these costs, we fear, to local taxpayers,” said Terry Norris, executive director of the Georgia Sheriffs’ Association.
The reform law, which went into effect in July, means that some crimes that were once considered felonies and got offenders stints in state prison may now be misdemeanors, meaning an offender will serve out his time in a county jail. And that means county taxpayers will solely bear the costs.
For urban counties like Fulton, that is probably not much of an issue, where an overcrowded criminal court docket means that many smaller felony thefts are pleaded out to no additional jail anyhow. "We're still getting the hard core," said Fulton Sheriff Ted Jackson said. "There are very few misdemeanors in our jail."
But in counties with smaller criminal dockets, prosecutors and judges are sometimes tougher on lawbreakers, which can mean jail time. The bar is higher, however, for what lands a person in state prison. Thefts of items valued at more than $500 used to be felonies. Now, it must be an item valued at more than $1,500 to be considered a felony.
“Fifteen hundred dollars, that’s a lot of money— forgery amounts went way up, too,” said Maj. Karen Johnson, administrator of the Cherokee County jail. “That will definitely keep the county jails fuller… when I am already overcrowded.”
State Rep. Rich Golick, R-Smyrna, one of the leaders of reform, said he was sensitive to the sheriffs’ concerns but that sentencing reform was long overdue.
“Those are reasonable concerns, but we need to wait and see what the effect may be on state courts and local jails,” Golick said. “That concern in all fairness and all honesty would not have stopped us from updating the theft statute.”
The $500 threshold was set in 1983, Golick said.“I don’t think it passes the straight-face test to say we should not have updated those felony theft thresholds after 30 years,” he said.
Already neighboring states had increased the financial threshold for felony theft, Golick said. That is true in North Carolina and South Carolina, which increased the threshold to $1,000 and $2,000 respectively but not true in Alabama or Tennessee, where the felony threshold remains at $500, or in Florida where the threshold is $300.
State Rep. Wendell Willard, R-Sandy Springs, said jails benefit from the reform because there should no longer be a backlog of state prisoners being housed.
Norris noted that turning felonies into misdemeanors will undoubtedly diminish the backlog, which means the state is no longer reimbursing jails for housing what had been state prisoners. “We fear those inmates are going to be replaced with misdemeanors —they’re the same people,” he said.
Under the new law, the maximum sentence for the burglary of a non-residence, such as a business, is four years and it’s a misdemeanor to forge a check for less than $1,500 unless it’s a third offense.
Golick said unfortunately the sheriffs’ association didn’t raise objections during the sentence reform passage last year. Putnam County Sheriff Howard Sills, president of the Georgia Sheriffs’ Association, complained lawmakers slipped the legislation through with little debate and focused most of the conversation on non-violent drug offenders, drug courts and mental-health courts.
“I find it truly incredible and absolutely amazing that such drastic changes could happen so quickly, especially since the vast majority of the citizens of this state have no knowledge of the consequences that will follow these changes in our laws,” Sills wrote in an open letter just before the state senate approved the reforms. “Every thief, burglar, check forger, and hoodlum from Trenton to Tybee, from Bainbridge to Blue Ridge, will be grinning from ear to ear.”
Sills complained that even the mental-health and drug courts established by the reform to reduce incarceration will overburden the counties because they must bear part of the cost.
Jackson, the sheriff in Fulton, and Johnson, the jail administrator in Cherokee, both supported speciality courts — because of the huge number of mentally ill inmates languishing in jails at taxpayer expense, often for nuisance crimes directly related to their illness.
“I would love to have a mental-health court in Cherokee County,” said Johnson, who said the county already had a drug court. “Treatment courts are fabulous.”
Walton County Sheriff Joe Chapman said his county commission had already elected not to set up a drug court because it would drain money from law enforcement. But Newton County, which is in the same Alcovy Judicial Circuit, was establishing one, which Chapman said would provide a comparison to how well the new drug courts worked.
He noted the historical high failure rate for criminals diverted to drug court, which he said would mean more filled jail beds. “When they don’t complete the program, where do they go? The county jail where in the past they would go to the state prison,” Chapman said.
Willard said the sheriffs opposed to the reforms are bellyaching about doing their job. Reclassifying certain felonies as misdemeanors did push the cost back to the county but that didn’t make it improper. The treatment courts and the state courts can put the former felons on intensive probation — a much cheaper alternative to incarceration, Willard said.
“This has been tried in other states and it has worked out all right,” he said.”If they are arrested again, that would be a violation of their probation and they’ll be back in jail. That is what a sheriff’s office does. What do they want to do?”
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