Georgia’s Correctional System: Getting Out Alive

The state of Georgia.

Sitting along the coast, right next to South Carolina and Florida, it is one of the hot bed for incarceration in the United States, the country with the highest number of prisoners per 100 000 people in the world (excluding the african country of Seychelles which has a population of just about 90 000).

As I documented before, living inside the walls of Georgia’s prisons is no pleasure. Inmates make it hard on themselves to remain sane. Everyday, the inner frustration in their mind get the better of them and they commit random acts of violence.

I watched Eugene Jarecki’s tremendously well written documentary “The House I Live In” and realized how important was the impact of a person’s past on his future with justice. A lot young kids raised in tough neighbourhoods grow up to have a difficult lifetime where living with a stash of weed under your bed or a gun around your waist is common.

Georgia capital and biggest city Atlanta was listed 8th on Business Insider‘s list of most dangerous city in the United States in 2012. Atlanta is a sort of microcosm of the state. Some say it’s a dangerous city to live in, others don’t think the same. It probably depends on which part of the city you live. Atlanta is known to be the city in America with the largest inequalities, ahead of cities like Miami, New York and Chicago. The city of San Fransisco holds the second spot on the list of cities with the biggest inequality but has a population nearly twice as big.

Based on a research by the Brookings Institution, a “a nonprofit public policy organization”, “the top 5 percent of households in San Francisco make more than $353,000 a year. In Atlanta, it’s about $280,000. But the bottom 20 percent? In San Francisco that income cutoff is $21,313. In Atlanta, that figure is about $6,500 a year less.”

A reason for such a high number of individuals with low income in the state could be due to the fact that there are so many probationers. Finding a job while on probation is a hard task because you need to declare it when filing an application and chances are, whoever is looking at your application may not even look at your resume if you’ve been convicted. Even if you have a degree, it can be tough.  You end up returning in the spiral of doing second hand jobs or selling drugs which can lead you right back to prison.

Georgia has a astonishing ratio of 6 829 probationers per 100 000 person. The state with the closest ratio is Ohio with 2 802 per. Georgia’s rate is 362% higher than the national average. But since companies benefit from probationers, helping out the state’s economy, it doesn’t seem like the state is in any rush of changing their policies.

Sentinel Offender Services, the biggest company of it’s kind in Georgia, is based in California but operates mostly in Georgia. It was stated as one as a “Major Player” in the Humans Right Watch report named “Profiting from Probation”. The company operated in Los Angeles County in 1995, just a couple years after the Los Angeles riots at a time when the nation’s second biggest city was in crisis and revolt. This shows that the company has received the trust from important cases. Sentinel provided “tactical services” for the Los Angeles County Probation Department.

Probationers have to pay monthly fees to companies such as Sentinel Offender Services along with the additional fees for the monitors they have to wear on their ankle. The Georgia Department Management stays passive and simply writes that the GPS is “used best” for “sex offenders”, “domestic violence cases”.

Sentinel was under scrutiny in November 2014 when Georgia’s Supreme Court declared that tracking down “misdemeanour offenders” was constitutional but not to extend the probationer’s sentence.  Private companies make a lot of money since they supervise close to 80% of all probationers. One of the reasons to explain why there is so many of them is because Georgians can be “placed on probation simply to give them time to pay off traffic fines they couldn’t afford on the day they went to court”.

But if you can’t pay the privately-owned company making tons of money of your back, you can be back in prison. The Nation published a report in early August 2014 describing how many Georgians end up in prison simply they are too poor to pay their bills for cases as stupid as traffic offenses. Since 2000, when the state eliminated “county-run misdemeanour probation”, the private companies revenues exploded.

This shows how complicated the state’s correctional system is and how it affects the state’s economy. While politicians will support the safety of all and to condemn people for violence, the economic benefits of putting a monitor on an individual are so huge that they don’t care, so much. It’s similar to the tobacco industry. Nicotine companies profit so much of people smoking that they even though they encourage people to stop smoking, they don’t really wan’t you too because they wan’t to fill up their pockets.

Pockets full of money, and peaches.

 

 

Georgia’s Correctional System: Inside the Walls

Georgia – correctional-wise – is one messed up state.

It is one of the 10 worst states for his correctional system based on the National Institute of Corrections 2013 census. It currently holds up an average of 533 detainees per 100 000 people compared to 395 per 100 000, the average for all 50 states.

With an average of 6 829 probationers for 100 000 person, Georgia’s rate is 362% higher than the national average which is 1 479 . The state with the second highest rate is Ohio with 2 802. These puzzling statistics are somewhat hard to understand but if you dig in a little, I found out how strange the situation really was. The second part of this story will explain this societal trend.

On December 5th, the Gwinnett Daily Post by way of the Associated Press published a report of 3 corrections officers sentenced “for beating an inmate and conspiring to cover it up”. The 3 individuals, all men, are Ronald Lach, Delton Rushin and Sgt. Christopher Hall. During the summer of 2014, 3 other men were cleared of all charges when they were accused of the same crime. Although they were found not guilty, the case shed the light on Georgia’s justice system and penal system. The two articles caught my attention and I wanted to investigate this complicated world.

When I finished reading these two articles, I fell in the awkward hole of boredom and decided to hop on Netflix. It was then that I stumbled on Hard Life, a National Geographic “docuserie” that aired for the first time back in 2009. The first episode gives an overview of what is to come. The viewer gets a sense of what living in a correctional facility in Georgia is like. But more importantly, it depicts the harsh training correctional officers in the state have to go through before they want to become one of them. In a military-style environment, the students learn to earn respect in any way possible, whether it’s using their mental strength the “trainers” wish to implement  or their physical strength. Either way, it has West Point written all over it.

It was funny how I could find a documentary on the very same subject I was previously reading about so I decided to find out more about it. I was happy (sigh) to read in the Department of Corrections’ 2013 Annual Report that their “Vision” was “to be recognize as the best corrections organization in the nation”. We’ll, at least they don’t wan’t to become the best in the World, quite humble. Along with this utopian view, it is their mission to “create a safer Georgia by effectively managing offenders”

How are they creating a “safer Georgia” if all they are doing is putting more and more people in prison? In the same summer in which correctional officers were accused of beating up, the Southern Center for Human Rights published a study called “The Crisis of Violence in Georgia’s Prison” in which they uncover numerous cases of violence between detainees and also those who involve officers of justice. The report doesn’t give the same way the Department of Corrections does. It explains how Georgia has a prison system “in which prison officers have lost control”, it then adds that “men in maximum security facilities have access to lethal weapons including knives, shanks and machetes. Cell door are left broken for years”. Finally the report points out that “protective custody procedures are inadequate, leaving vulnerable prisoners to fend for themselves”. It really goes against their saying that prisons in Georgia are safe.

I found Hard Time ironic in the sense that, while it shows tough training for future officers, it then interviews inmates who explain how they do their own justice. It seems like the two sides want to show that they are the one who manage the prisons. These opposite standpoints stand out in the reports. While the Department of Corrections are saying they are doing things right, the Southern Center for Human Rights reports that inmates really can do whatever they want, creating havoc in the detention institutions.

But there’s not another surreal ambush. How can you keep any man safe if doors can be easily unlocked ? It seems unimaginable that in an institution with thousands of murderers, rapists and burglars, people can roam as they wish. In fact, in 2012, it was reported that in Hays State Prison when 442 locks were tested, 41% could be unlocked without the usage of the guard’s key. When a jail cell is left unlocked, you’re letting someone the freedom he never thought he could have. You’re playing with fire.

Let’s put the state’s money of their annual budget going towards the Department of Corrections and compare it to Florida which has a similar ratio of incarceration, 524 per 100 000, while Georgia holds 533 per 100 000. My theory was there was not enough money spent on the Department. The state of Florida Department of Corrections has a budget of 2,1 billions and has 103 028 inmates so $20 382 is spent on average for each person behind bar. On the other hand, the state of Georgia DOC has a budget of $1 121 908 791 and holds 54 004 prisoners so $20 774 is spent on average. But when I read these numbers, I realized that the budget can not be a excuse for the lost of control since the closest state statistically and geographically, spends just as much.

It seems like the problem is less financial, than human. Are correctional facilities safe enough ? Is the training sharp? It doesn’t seem like it. Since so many murders occurred in Georgia prisons in the past year (from 2010 to July 2014, 33 inmates were killed along with one officer), the problem is surely not only about the budget.

Georgia’s state prisons are a rather rough path to getting out and being just as normal as before. Long lasting effects of living in state prisons have been well documented. In 1990, Georgia hit his all time high in crimes when 768,4 crimes per 100 000 people. From that point on, the Department’s budget sky-rocketed. The number of inmates in the state’s prisons “more than doubled”.

In the next chapter of this story, I’ll go more in depth on the subject such as the case of the probationers.