Justice reform paying off sooner than expected

When Gov. Nathan Deal prompted the Georgia General Assembly to undertake sentencing reform for the adult criminal justice system (to be followed the next year by juvenile justice reform), he acknowledged that he didn't expect to see any substantial changes for a few years. In terms of the state prison population, that's certainly the case so far. In fact, the state inmate count actually rose slightly from the end of 2010 through last year.

At the county level -- for many offenders, the entry point to the criminal justice system -- it's a different story, the kind of story Deal and the legislature hoped the reforms would tell.
According to a Tuesday report by Walter C. Jones of Morris News Service, the state's overall county inmate population has decreased by almost 10 percent, just in the year since sentences for many nonviolent crimes were reduced.

Even the jails that are crowded beyond their intended capacity are fewer in number -- from 31 in 2010 to just 19 last month.

The sentencing reforms were a post-recession response to a corrections system that had swollen beyond the state's ability to afford it. Years of mandatory minimum sentencing laws, passed by politicians who wanted to look tough on crime and didn't think very long about the consequences, had put more people behind bars than the state could handle.

And the overflow, of course, spilled down to the county jails, where state inmates are often held for years. (In 2010, the report notes, 14 percent of county inmates were awaiting transfer to state prisons; that's down to just 8 percent today.)

Deal's idea, and the whole philosophy behind sentencing reform for adults and juveniles alike, was to divert those convicted of less serious crimes to local supervision, especially in the case of drug- and alcohol-related offenses, and spend that money on treatment rather than incarceration.

In many cases, alternative sentencing is a judgment call. Rep. Jay Neal, R-LaFayette, who chairs the House State Properties Committee, was quoted in the Morris report as saying the evaluation of offenders before sentencing is a key to success of the program: "When you're able to match the sentence with the offender, you're going to get better outcomes."

The long-term outcomes will be measurable not just in jail and prison populations and their effects on budget lines, but also in overall crime and recidivism rates. The first obligation of criminal justice is public safety, and sentencing overhaul is not really reform if its prevention and/or deterrent value doesn't eventually work its way to street level.

That said, these earlier-than-expected returns suggest common-sense corrections to our corrections system were long overdue. What a shame that it always seems to take an economic crash or some other crisis to get us there. 

via Ledger-enquirer.com