{"id":2483,"date":"2011-01-23T10:14:00","date_gmt":"2011-01-23T15:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/01\/state-needs-to-rethink-locking-up-nonviolent-offenders-nathan-deal.html"},"modified":"2011-01-23T10:14:00","modified_gmt":"2011-01-23T15:14:00","slug":"state-needs-to-rethink-locking-up-nonviolent-offenders-nathan-deal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/01\/state-needs-to-rethink-locking-up-nonviolent-offenders-nathan-deal.html","title":{"rendered":"State needs to rethink locking up nonviolent offenders –Nathan Deal"},"content":{"rendered":"Conservative Georgia governor Deal wants fewer people in prison,\ndiscovering, like Texas before, that Georgia can’t afford it.\nJim Galloway reported in the AJC 17 Jan 2011,\n\nGeorgia Gov: Drug court offers good alternative\nCost of crime and punishment is high on new governor Nathan Deal’s list<\/a>:\n
\nGeorgia Governor Nathan Deal has said that violent offenders will remain\nbehind bars, but the state needs to rethink the costs of locking up\nothers, like nonviolent drug offenders.\n<\/blockquote>\nLast May we noted that \nGeorgia spends a billion dollars a year to keep the fourth-largest\nnumber of prisoners of any state.<\/a>\nNow that the state is cutting every other budget,\nincluding huge cuts in education, we just can’t afford\nto lock so many people up.\n

\n\n<\/a>\nThe number of people locked up\n\nhas grown way faster than violent crime since 1980.<\/a>\nThe U.S.,\nwith 5% of the world’s populatioon now has 25% of\nthe world’s prison population<\/a>:\nmore than any other country total and per capita:\nmore than China, more than Russia, more than Cuba.\nAs Sen. James Webb remarked in 2009:\n\n\n

\n“Either we’re the most evil people on earth, or we’re doing something wrong.”\n<\/blockquote>\nMost of that prisoner growth since 1980 has been in the states,\n\n<\/a>\n\nand most of that has been in the south.<\/a>\n

\nTexas has already hit the financial prison wall,\nand now leads in treatment “to cut costs and crime at the same time”,\n\naccording to Cindy Horswell in the Houston Chronicle, 15 Dec 2009<\/a>:\n

\nNow, Texas has a new swagger that comes from a recently released\nU.S. Justice Department report showing the growth of the state’s prison\npopulation is slowing to the extent that three new prisons slated for\nconstruction have been scrapped. At the same time, the state is becoming\nthe unlikely new role model for a prison reform movement spreading across\nthe country.\n

\nState Rep. Jerry Madden, R-Plano, and state Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston,\nworked across partisan lines to implement the \u201creinvestment movement\u201d\nin 2007, which they say is just starting to show results. The program\ninvests state funds in drug, alcohol and mental health programs to treat\noffenders rather than just prisons to house them.\n

\n\u201cTexas is showing the rest of the country that if you look at research\nyou can find ways to cut costs and crime at the same time,\u201d said Adam\nGelb, director of the Pew Center’s public safety performance project,\na nonprofit think tank. \u201cJust this week the work that Texas has done\nwas featured prominently at the national conference on state legislatures\nin San Diego. States are learning that they just can’t build their way\nout of crime.\u201d\n<\/blockquote>\nWhat if \ninstead of building a private prison<\/a>\nwe\n\ninvest in getting people jobs when they get out of jail?<\/a>\nWe could get out in front of this prison reduction movement\ninstead of continuing down a known dead end.\nProducing a local industry of preventing incarceration\nand reducing recidivism could provide local jobs that\ncould possibly even generate training revenue as other states\nrealize they can’t keep spending their children’s education money\non locking them up instead.\n

\n-jsq\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Conservative Georgia governor Deal wants fewer people in prison, discovering, like Texas before, that Georgia can’t afford it. Jim Galloway reported in the AJC 17 Jan 2011, Georgia Gov: Drug court offers good alternative Cost of crime and punishment is high on new governor Nathan Deal’s list: Georgia Governor Nathan Deal has said that violent […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[14,15,49,2,72,21,22,178],"tags":[2153,77,8705,8701,2129,8730,727,5154,46,75,4574,4370],"class_list":["post-2483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy","category-education","category-elections","category-government","category-incarceration","category-planning","category-politics","category-vlcia","tag-children","tag-drugs","tag-education","tag-georgia","tag-governor","tag-incarceration","tag-jail","tag-minor-offenses","tag-nathan-deal","tag-prison","tag-recidivism","tag-ronald-reagan"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-E3","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2483\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}