Deal prepares criminal justice reform bill

ATLANTA -- In the coming days, Gov. Nathan Deal plans to ask the Legislature to make several changes to how the state treats criminals, with an aim toward reform.

His office is working on a bill following the publication of recommendations from a blue-ribbon panel he appointed to study criminal justice.

What may be the most controversial recommendation from the Georgia Council on Criminal Justice Reform is the idea of lifting the lifetime food stamp ban for felony drug offenders.

The council says about 6,700 otherwise eligible Georgians are denied that benefit every year, a number that includes more than 1,800 children. Granting them food stamps would bring in federal dollars and remove a barrier to helping ex-convicts putting their life back together, the council report says.

But food stamps and drugs are a combustible mix in the Legislature. In a 2014 fight that pit the political parties against each other, legislators passed a Republican-authored bill requiring some applicants for several public benefits to pass a drug test. Critics said the testing for food stamps was probably unenforceable under federal rules, and Georgia backed down on that point after a warning from Washington.

The report also recommends several ways to ease up on people who are on probation for misdemeanors but have a hard time paying their fines. Right now, nonpayment can land an offender in jail. The council recommends a hearing first on why the person is not able to pay.

For juveniles, it recommends keeping first-time offenders age 13 and under out of secure detention except for the most serious offenses.

It's not yet clear whether Deal's bill will propose everything in the report.

Deal spokeswoman Jen Talaber said "the final pieces of the legislation are still being discussed, have yet to be decided upon," but she expects the bill to be filed this week.

"It will reflect careful review of the council's recommendations," she said.

The report also recommends a host of smaller moves, including the reworking of how certain sealed first-offender records are kept in order to make sure those records do not become public or get used as grounds to deny people work. The report also recommends setting up more "accountability courts," which put certain offenders through intensive rehabilitation, supervision and counseling to try and keep them from reoffending. It recommends authorizing such courts for certain DUI offenders and for certain parents who have substance abuse disorders.

The bill will be the latest piece of a yearslong criminal justice overhaul that could prove to be Deal's biggest legacy as governor.

Work started in 2011, during Deal's first term, when one in 70 Georgia adults were behind bars. That was the fourth-highest incarceration rate in the nation, according to the council report.

Prison space was at a premium, and sheriffs complained of the state being slow at picking up would-be inmates, instead leaving them in county jails and paying too little for their keep.

That year, the governor appointed the first panel of experts to study what was driving growth in the prison population and costs. The panel also recommended improvements.

In the years since, various panels have recommended measures like accountability courts to keep certain non-violent adult adults out of prison as well as sentencing alternatives and expanded probation. Deal has generally backed the recommendations, and the Legislature has responded with unanimous approval of key bills.

Georgia's prison population peaked at nearly 55,000 in 2012 and has since dropped to fewer than 52,000 inmates, according to the report.

Some of the recommendations also have been put in place via education for inmates who will one day be released.

Now, about 25,000 state inmates are enrolled in some form of educational, vocational or on-the-job training.

In 2010, Talaber said, that enrollment number was below 800.

She said the changes amount to an official change of mindset about rehabilitation that the state is aiming to pass down to inmates. She said she saw it in a prison visit last year.

"Used to, you would get in (prison), and you didn't start thinking about parole until two weeks out. And now the first day they get in there, they are taught that this is your first step toward re-entry into society," Talaber said.

Nationwide, many states are going down the same criminal justice journey as Georgia.

"It's become one of the few opportunities for policymaking that has proven truly bipartisan," said Rebecca Silber, a senior program associate at the Vera Institute of Justice. The nonprofit has helped several states with its criminal justice reforms, including Georgia.

"That's not to say that everyone across the political spectrum agrees on everything or has the same motivations, but it is a notable area of bipartisan collaboration. You have organizations like the ACLU partnering with the Koch brothers," Silber said.

The council report says the success of the recommendations is reflected in the changing prison population: Expensive prison beds are now more likely to be reserved for the worst offenders. By their calculation, in 2009, some 58 percent of inmates were violent or sex offenders. Now about 67 percent of them are in for those kinds of crimes.

The Southern Center for Human Rights, an Atlanta-based public interest law firm, supports this year's recommendations wholeheartedly, said the center's attorney Sarah Geraghty. Over the past few years, one of her firm's targets has been the practice in some places of jailing people simply because they cannot pay fines.

She said it would be better if Georgia follows the report's recommendation for probation officers to first bring a misdemeanor offender to court for failure to pay a fine instead of simply seeking an arrest warrant.

"That's a much better practice. There's no public safety reason why someone should be sent to jail immediately on an arrest warrant when the only allegation is failure to pay," she said.

To contact writer Maggie Lee, e-mail mlee@macon.com.

This story was originally published February 6, 2016 at 8:21 PM with the headline "Deal prepares criminal justice reform bill ."