![](\"http:\/\/www.ajc.com\/multimedia\/dynamic\/00605\/justice_0425_BH130_605138l.jpg\")
<\/a>\nCarrie Teegardin and Bill Rankin\u2028write in the AJC about\n<\/a>\nCarrie Teegardin and Bill Rankin\u2028write in the AJC about\n\nA billion-dollar burden or justice?\nAJC investigation: Georgia leads nation in criminal punishment<\/a>:\n\nGeorgia taxpayers spend $1 billion a year locking up so many criminal offenders that the state has the fourth-highest incarceration rate in the nation. When it comes to overall criminal punishment, no state outdoes Georgia.\n<\/blockquote>\nThey note that scare tactics made that happen.\n\nBut today, many public figures with strong anti-crime credentials are asking if that expenditure is smart, or even if it\u2019s making Georgians safer. The debate about crime and punishment, once clearly divided along party lines, is now a debate in which conservatives often lead the charge for change.\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\nAs Georgia\u2019s dire budget outlook required lawmakers to make painful cuts to virtually every state program, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigated whether the state\u2019s gigantic corrections budget offered opportunities for savings.\n\nMany states, including tough-on-crime Texas, have concluded they can spend less and keep the public safer by sentencing some offenders to proven treatment and supervision programs outside of prison.\n
\nTexas spends more than $3 billion a year on prisons. In 2007, facing the need to spend $540 million to construct three new prisons expected to cost another $1.5 billion to run, the state looked for alternatives. Instead, Texas spends a fraction of that on new probation and parole programs, halfway houses and specialty courts for drug offenders, veterans, drunk drivers and the mentally ill.\n<\/blockquote>\nSo, in a time when Georgia is cutting education budgets, should it keep\nspending monumental amounts to build and maintain monuments of incarceration?\n
\n\u201cWe have proven that we can be tough on crime and that we can spend $1.2 billion a year doing it,\u201d said Brian Owens, the silver-haired former parole officer who now runs Georgia\u2019s prison system. \u201cBut I think it might be time to transition to being smart on crime.\u201d\n<\/blockquote>\nGeorgia already leads the nation in locking people up:\n\nOne in 13 Georgians is behind bars, on probation or on parole, according to the Pew Center on the States. That\u2019s the highest rate of correctional control in the nation and more than the double the national average: 1 in 31.\n\nBy far the most costly segment of corrections is locking someone up. About 1 in 70 Georgians is behind bars, according to the Pew study.\n
\n\u201cIt makes no intuitive sense that Georgia is the ninth-most populous state with about 9.5 million citizens but has a prison population the same as New York state with 19.5 million citizens,\u201d Owens said. \u201cIt\u2019s not because we\u2019re committing more crime in Georgia.\u2019\u2019\n<\/blockquote>\nMaybe it’s time for Georgia to lead the nation in\nfinding smarter ways to deal with crime,\nranging from not locking people up for trivial drug offenses<\/a>\nto finding ways like Texas did to get people back into society after being\nin prison, so they don’t get locked up again.\n
\nSure, there are real criminals who need to be locked up to protect society.\nBut does Georgia really have twice as many criminals per capita as New York\nstate?\nIf not, maybe Georgia can lead the way in saving money by not locking people up.\n
\nWhat does this have to do with Lowndes County? Stay tuned.\n
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