STUDY: GEORGIA PRISON SYSTEM IS MONTHS AWAY FROM CRISIS

Report Also Claims That One In 10 Adult Georgians Can Expect To Spend Time
In Prison.

ATLANTA -- Georgia's crowded prison system is just months away from a
crisis unless the state develops more uniform sentencing guidelines and
alternatives to prison, according to a new study.

The study -- produced by former state senator and corrections commissioner
Wayne Garner for the state parole board -- says only the federal prison
system added more inmates than Georgia in 2000, despite a declining crime rate.

The study concludes that Georgia must find alternatives to prisons and then
help inmates ease back into society so they don't resume criminal behavior.
Otherwise, the state will be forced to start building more prisons.

"The state needs to begin looking at some bed space, trying to figure out
something to do," Garner told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which
obtained a copy of the report after an open records request.

The findings were disputed by the Department of Corrections.

"We are not in a crisis," spokesman Scott Stallings said.

Stallings said although there are almost 1,650 convicts waiting in county
jails for space in the state prison system, the backlog was larger in the
mid-1990s.

"It's trending in the right direction," he said.

The study by Garner, who was paid up to $48,000 for his work, found that
Georgia had the ninth-largest state prison population and the fifth-highest
rate of incarceration behind Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi and Oklahoma.

The report said one in 10 adult Georgians can expect to spend time in
prison, twice the national average.

For black men, the proportion is 38 percent, compared to 9.3 percent for
whites. And rural judges are almost a third more likely than urban judges
to send people to prison.

While Georgia's population increased 78 percent from 1970 to 2000, the
prison population grew 417 percent, Garner said. In 10 years, the state
added 20,282 inmates, 6,000 of them in 1999.

Sentences of life without parole and mandatory prison terms put in place in
1995 are among the major reasons.

"Everybody has voted for all these laws to incarcerate everybody," said
Rep. David Lucas, D-Macon, who is chairman of the House State Institutions
and Property Committee. "Everybody doesn't have to go to prison."

Lucas is an advocate of diverting some criminals into less secure
facilities that allow them to work and pay part of the cost of their
detention. He also supports home arrest and electronic monitoring of parolees.

Bob Keller, district attorney in Clayton County and co-chairman of a
governor's task force creating sentencing guidelines, said hard-line
sentencing is not necessarily bad.

"One could say we're a more punitive state, or you could say we take a firm
stand on people who violate the law," Keller said.