In the hours before Gov. Nathan Deal vetoed a bill last month that would have allowed private probation companies to keep secret some details of their operations, large e-mail campaigns were waged by powerful voices on both sides to sway the governor.
Other emails, mostly from state judges and solicitors, predicted doom if the bill was not signed.
“If defendants sentenced in misdemeanor case(s) who disappear are not subject to tolling, these defendants will be able to completely avoid their responsibility to the courts,” Atlanta Municipal Court Judge Gary Jackson wrote. “Every court order that is disobeyed …(is) a ‘slap in the face of justice.’ If misdemeanor sentences cannot be enforced in Georgia, then our judicial system will cease to exist on a realistic level.”
But records reviewed by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution earlier this year show some in the industry have pocketed large fees while, in at least some cases, doing little to supervise those under their watch. And despite promises that taxpayers would pay nothing to supervise the offenders, they have footed the bill when the probationers are arrested and jailed because they owe money to the company, not the courts.
A string of lawsuits argue the system effectively criminalizes poverty and that some companies have illegally forced offenders to pay for things, such as electronic monitoring and drug testing, beyond what was ordered by the courts.
But the urgency to make changes in the industry came after Judge Daniel Craig ruled state court judges, who hear misdemeanor cases, did not have the constitutional authority to toll a sentence, or stop the clock from running on a sentence of a probationer whom the private companies had said stopped reporting. Craig also ruled the private companies did not have the legal authority to conduct electronic monitoring of the probationers they supervise.
“Public stuff needs to stay public,” Viveca Famber Powell wrote in an email to Deal. “Otherwise, these [private probation companies] will be nothing more than 21st Century financial chain gangs.”
Judges and prosecutors had hoped to fix the problem with the legislation before the Supreme Court weighs in. The Supreme Court will hear in September an appeal of Craig’s ruling in the lawsuits against Sentinel Offender Services, one of the 32 private probation companies operating in Georgia.
C.R. Chisholm, the prosecutor in Athens-Clarke County State Court and president of the Georgia Association of Solicitors General, said the original bill would have fixed the flaws Craig found in the law, but after HB 837 had moved through the House and the Senate there “was a dog pile on that bill. We understand that’s where the problems occurred and why we don’t now have a law in place.”
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