I went to southeast Atlanta on Tuesday to visit two Republican members of Congress at the federal penitentiary. It’s not what you think. They were visiting, too.
But apparently just what they were visiting is very hush-hush.
U.S. Rep. Doug Collins, R-Gainesville, is knee-deep in what could become the biggest bipartisan accomplishment to come out of the current fractured Congress: A rewrite of the nation’s laws that determine who gets locked up, for how long, and how they’re treated on the inside.
With Collins was Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash. Given that Rodgers is chairman of the House Republican caucus, and the ranking woman on Speaker John Boehner’s team, her presence was an important signal of support.
In an era of government shutdowns, nuclear options, and scorched-earth tactics, there is much irony in the fact that unwinding the Clinton-era, tough-on-crime laws of the 1990s is the one topic that can unite the Koch brothers and the ACLU, House Republicans and President Barack Obama.
“It’s a moral and a money issue,” Collins said after he and his colleague had passed to the less intimidating side of the razor wire. “Are we locking up the ones we’re scared of – which we need to do? Or are we locking up the ones we’re just mad at?”
Now in his second term, Collins, in a sense, has inherited the issue from one of his Hall County constituents – Gov. Nathan Deal, who has blazed a similar path in Georgia.
“The eye-opener for me, when I served in the state House, was the budget issue,” Collins said. “We were looking at a corrections budget that was exploding. We were building prisons. We were dealing with the private prison issue.”
New Georgia beds were coming at the expense of things like education. And so Deal has placed an emphasis on “accountability” courts aimed at veterans, drug or DUI offenders, or the mentally ill. With the aim of correcting behavior outside of expensive prison walls.
The idea, Collins and Rodgers said Tuesday, is to see how much of what Georgia is doing can be incorporated into a federal court system. Several pieces of legislation are in motion pushing various ideas.
The two lawmakers said they wouldn’t support the decriminalization of marijuana – an important issue here, given Georgia’s new medical marijuana law. But Collins said some Democrats he’s working with would like to see restrictions on the use of solitary confinement in the prison system.
Another likely topic is mandatory minimum sentences — which many Democrats say lies at the heart of decades of warehousing of men of color.
I asked the Gainesville congressman whether he has heard any objections from constituents. Collins said he has. “But frankly, it’s more about us working across the aisle than it is the program itself,” he said.
Which is why it’s important to note that negotiations have been kept within Congress, and haven’t involved the Obama administration. “It’s a true legislative process here. We’re actually having policy discussions,” Collins said. “We’re having good policy discussions.”
In particular, Collins has introduced a House bill intended to address mental health issues in the federal prison system. His Senate partner, who has introduced identical legislation, is Democrat Al Franken of Minnesota. Physically and ideologically, that’s a Mutt-and-Jeff combination. Collins is the thin, lanky one.
The bill would increase support for mental health courts and authorize the creation of courts for veterans with PTSD diagnoses. In-prison treatment would be increased.
Which is what brought Collins and Rodgers to the Atlanta pen.
“They’ve tried something here that is unique within the whole system, federally, and they’re seeing some positive results,” Rodgers said. Inmates have been shipped in from across the nation to participate in the “experiment,” the two said.
After the two federal lawmakers left the scene, I asked my minders for details of what Collins and Rodgers were talking about. I was advised to call the warden’s office on Wednesday morning. Which I did.
It is late afternoon now, and still there's no returned call. I was ready to dismiss this as a routine case of bureaucratic haughtiness, until I came across a 2014 piece by Andrew Cohen in The Atlantic magazine, sketching out a new "High Security Mental Health Step-Down Unit" at the Atlanta pen.
“It is believed to be the first federal prison program ever designed and implemented to provide substantial long-term care and treatment for high-security mentally ill inmates,” Cohen wrote.
As of 18 months ago, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons had not publicly acknowledged the existence of the “Atlanta Experiment.” It doesn’t seem like that’s changed.
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