Washington takes look at Georgia's justice playbook

Over the first five years of Gov. Nathan Deal's administration, Georgia has been a leader in reforming a criminal justice system whose corrections component had swollen to unmanageable (and unaffordable) size. Past legislatures had approved, with sometimes reckless disregard for eminently foreseeable consequences, mandatory sentencing laws that provided short-term political gain at a chronic public cost.

Now a former state lawmaker in Congress is among lawmakers looking at whether, and to what extent, Uncle Sam can follow the lead of Georgia and other states that found the status quo unsustainable.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution "Political Insider" Jim Galloway reported Wednesday that U.S. Rep. Doug Collins, R-Ga., and House colleague Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., who chairs the House Republican caucus, paid a recent visit to the prison in Atlanta to look at the federal sentencing and incarceration situation first hand.

"It's a moral and a money issue," Collins told Galloway. "Are we locking up the ones we're scared of, which we need to do? Or are we locking up the ones we're just mad at?"

Collins alluded to his own state legislative experience as a House member from Hall County in explaining his familiarity with the costs of ill-conceived tough-on-crime politics: "The eye-opener for me, when I served in the state House," he said, "was the budget issue. We were looking at a corrections budget that was exploding. We were building prisons. We were dealing with the private prison issue." And the cost, he said, was taking its toll on such critical state needs as education.

The inevitability of such retrograde budgeting -- spending less for education and more for incarceration -- was perhaps easy to deny in the flush economies of the 1990s when those laws were passed. But it became increasingly tough to ignore when corrections costs soared as the result of inevitable prison crowding, and impossible to deny when recession tanked the economy.

Maybe the most encouraging (and unlikely) thing about this effort is that it is genuinely bipartisan. Many Republicans and Democrats agree about restricting solitary confinement, and about the need for critical scrutiny of mandatory minimum sentences. "It's a true legislative process here," Collins said. "We're actually having policy discussions."

Collins has already submitted a bill to increase mental health court and in-prison mental health treatment funding, and to establish courts for veterans whose troubles with the law are likely related to post-traumatic stress. His upper-chamber sponsor of that legislation is Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn.

One discouraging note can be written off to the tone of the times: When Galloway asked Collins if there had been any objection from constituents, the congressman said there had. "But frankly, it's more about us working across the aisle than it is the program itself."

This story was originally published September 3, 2015 at 6:18 PM with the headline "Washington takes look at Georgia's justice playbook ."