THERE MUST BE A BETTER WAY

The 50,000 inmate "milestone" Georgia passed this year is just a number.
Here is some context:

Georgia is the 10th-largest state, but has the nation's sixth-largest
prison system and the one that has grown faster over the last four years
than any other. In just four years, from 1998 to 2002, the state Department
of Corrections' budget swelled by 31 percent, from $738 million to $968
million. Perhaps worst of all, we have a higher percentage of people behind
bars, on probation or on parole than any other state. This is not something
anybody aspires to rank first in.

The mandatory sentencing laws so politically in vogue in the flush 1990s,
when the economic consequences were something both taxpayers and
politicians could conveniently ignore, aren't necessarily a problem in the
case of brutal criminals who need to be locked up for the long haul under
any circumstances. But the result of some of these "three strikes"-type
laws has been to swell prison rolls with nonviolent offenders, especially
drug offenders.

And the prison population is aging, just as the general population is
aging. According to Department of Corrections figures, there were 570
convicts 50 and older in Georgia prisons in 1979; by June 1999 there were
3,050. At the current rate of growth, that number is expected to top 5,000
by next year, and 9,000 by 2010. With aging come familiar health issues --
worse for the average prison inmate, whose lifestyle choices were probably
not healthy ones even before incarceration. Health care, as we know all too
well, is a staggering expense; in the case of prisons, it's a staggering
public expense.

Something's got to give.

Muscogee is currently the only county in Georgia to offer job training and
GED opportunities to inmates; it might be a wise investment -- especially
in the face of Georgia's 37 percent recidivism rate -- for the state to
offer incentives to local governments to follow Muscogee's example. Gov.
Sonny Perdue has suggested more emphasis on education and on reinstituting
parolees and former inmates into society at the state level as well.

At the front end, it now seems clear that taking discretion from courts and
parole boards was not the solution, however strongly officials may have
felt that abuse of that discretion was abetting crime. That taking up
prison time and space with petty offenders does not serve the public
interest is by now well beyond obvious.

Creative and responsible ways of keeping people out of prison has to be
better than coming up with more and more circumstances for putting them
there. Even if we could afford a prison construction boom, surely this is
not what we want Georgia's growth industry to be.