By Lee Shearer
Athens Banner-Herald
ATLANTA — Seven years ago, a special council created by Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal studied the rapidly growing number of people in state prisons and called for a halt.
Georgia was among the national leaders in convicting people of felonies during a time in which incarceration had risen dramatically in most states.
Noting that most were being jailed for property or drug crimes and posed little threat to public safety, the blue ribbon Special Council on Criminal Justice Reform recommended dozens of changes to slow and reverse that growth, which had fallen most heavily on the poor and African Americans.
The recommendations had three broad goals: to halt the growth of the state’s prison population, to improve public safety by investing in strategies to reduce crime and recidivism, and “hold offenders accountable by strengthening community-based supervision, sanctions and services.”
Some were as simple as changing the amount of a theft that qualifies as felony rather than misdemeanor from $500 to $1,500. Some were more complex, such as expanding a statewide network of “accountability” courts, meant to provide both supervision and treatment for people whose criminal offenses are tied to issues such as drug abuse.
The approach was actually pioneered in Clarke County by former State Court Judge Kent Lawrence, who started the state’s first DUI court, and they proved effective, said State Court Judge Charles Auslander.
Clarke now has six such courts, including a drug court and one specifically for veterans. Last year, Athens-Clarke’s DUI/drug accountability court was named an “academy” court, a model system for other jurisdictions to learn from.
Earlier this year, just before the council’s charter expired, the council issued a follow-up report. The state Legislature had authorized many of the council’s 2011 recommendations, and the reforms were having an effect, they wrote.
“Georgia has profoundly reshaped its adult and juvenile correctional systems, earning widespread acclaim,” the authors wrote.
Georgia’s prison population was about 53,000 at the end of 2017, down from nearly 55,000 at its peak in July 2012.
More than two-thirds of those people, 68 percent, were behind bars for violent crimes, up from 57 percent in 1999.
There was also less racial disparity, the reported noted. In 2009, about 67 percent of the Georgia prison population was African-American; in 2017, that had declined to 60 percent.
The change in the juvenile justice system was even steeper: The number in “youth confinement” was down 36 percent, and new commitments was down 46 percent.
Meanwhile, the recidivism rate had declined slightly, from about 30 percent returning to confinement down to 28 percent.
Other statistics indicated that prison populations could drop more.
Admissions to prison last year declined to 17,616, down nearly 20 percent since 2009. And while the overall number of new prison admissions was down, the rate for violent offenders was actually up.
Other states are reporting similar reductions from criminal justice reforms, but progress is slow, according to University of Georgia sociology professor Sarah Shannon, who detailed the rise in U.S. prison populations and felony conviction rates in a 2017 article published in the academic journal “Demography.”
“The United States’ decades-long ‘grand experiment’ with mass incarceration may be at a crossroads, but at current rates of decline, some estimate it would take 80 years to return to 1980 levels nationwide,” Shannon and her co-authors wrote in 2017.
Georgia still has a long way to go to correct the excesses of earlier years, agreed the governor’s special council in its February 2018 report.
Of those 17,616 new Georgia prison inmates, 5,000 were low-risk, people doing time for offenses such as burglary or drug possession, the council wrote.
The commission recommended more changes and further study of additional measures to reduce prison and jail populations and the burden of felony convictions without increasing community risk, such as not requiring bond for any offense where jail is not an authorized sentence, and making it explicit that judges should take into account a person’s financial condition when setting a bail amount.
The state should consider sealing and expunging some criminal records, to help those who’ve been through the corrections system to re-enter society, the council also recommended.
The Legislature followed through on some of those recommendations, but some await the votes of future legislatures and governors, as Deal gives way to either Republican Brian Kemp or Democrat Stacey Abrams.
The 2018 report called for changes that would not only further reduce prison numbers, but the numbers of people in the state’s county and city jails, most of whom are awaiting trial for nonviolent crimes
To help reduce those numbers locally, the Athens-Clarke County Commission next year might consider eliminating the requirement for cash bail in many instances. That is something Atlanta has already begun trying, and something a number of current and incoming Athens-Clarke commissioners say they favor.
Requiring cash bail can be a devastating blow for the poor, as a jail stay of even a couple of days may mean missing work and then the loss of a job.
Athens could also join Savannah, Atlanta and a few other jurisdictions in decriminalizing marijuana possession, adopting ordinances that would authorize Athens-Clarke County police to issue citations based on local law rather than state criminal laws.