REAL JUSTICE IS SANE, AFFORDABLE

Sometimes necessity is the mother of enlightenment.

For the last 20 years and more, corrections officials, parole
officers, judges, social workers and sometimes police -- in Georgia
and the rest of the country -- have been trying (mostly in vain) to
make the case that get-tough "two strikes," "one strike," etc.,
mandatory sentencing laws beloved by chest-pounding politicians have
created more problems than they have solved.

For one thing, harsh and appeal-proof criminal sentences for
nonviolent offenses, mostly drug related, have turned formerly
salvageable lives into irreversibly criminal ones. Among the
proponents of that argument is a former police chief, state
corrections commissioner and Columbus mayor named Jim Wetherington.

More to the immediate point: People have warned, since well before
the first of these ridiculous exercises in political machismo were
signed into law by governors knee-knocking scared to be branded "soft
on crime," that the ultimate cost of stuffing prisons with nonviolent
offenders would be prohibitive.

The bill has now come due, with interest. And lo and behold, what
sensible appeals to basic justice and long-term fiscal responsibility
couldn't accomplish, a state budget crisis very well might.

New Gov. Nathan Deal has begun pushing to reduce Georgia's swollen
prison population, and its attendant crippling costs, by diverting
nonviolent offenders into alternative programs, according to a
Tuesday interview in the Savannah Morning News.

Alternative sentencing. What a novel idea.

That's not to make light of Deal's plan, especially if he actually
manages to implement what a generation of his predecessors in both
parties failed to achieve -- a common-sense approach to crime,
punishment and rehabilitation.

Deal mentioned the problem in his inaugural address, noting that with
one out of 13 Georgia residents "under some form of correctional
control," it costs about $3 million a day to operate the prison
system. The governor said in his SMN interview that among the
approaches he has in mind are DUI and drug courts (which have shown
considerable promise here), probation and parole reporting centers,
and -- perhaps most important in the case of drug offenders -- more
mental health and substance abuse treatment services.

He acknowledges that his approach will "require some start-up money,"
but insists that the initial expense will be "more than compensated
for in the reduction in our prison population."

Deal's plan has attracted broad bipartisan support, including that of
Sen. Vincent Fort, D-Atlanta, who called it "sort of a convergence of
liberal and conservative ideas ... fiscally sound as well as socially
responsible."

Sentencing laws that remove all discretion from courts and make
individual circumstances legally irrelevant have always been an
affront to justice and fiscal sanity, even in prosperous times. Now
it's obvious -- as it should have been all along -- that such laws
are not just unconscionable, but unaffordable.