Justice is served in sentencing, jury pool bills

Ledger-Enquirer.com 05/02/2011 Justice is served in sentencing, jury pool bills:
"Two bills passed in the waning days of Georgia’s 2011 regular legislative session will both advance the cause of criminal justice in the state, and both are years overdue.

The first and probably more important is one Gov. Nathan Deal signed into law last week. It creates a state panel to study and overhaul Georgia’s sentencing laws. Those laws have been misshapen by years of short-sighted get-tough politics, resulting in a system that too often gets tough on the wrong people and sucks away money and capacity the state needs for cracking down on the right ones.

It has been an expensive and irresponsible miscalculation: Georgia has the nation’s highest incarceration rate, and its taxpayers pour a billion dollars a year into prisons. The Associated Press reported last week that Georgia annually spends $3,800 per child in public schools, and $18,000 per inmate in state correctional facilities. That’s a warped statistic by any reasonable measure."