A "truth in sentencing law" in Georgia could eliminate parole for some offenders. Is this good for the prison system? Tom Bearden reports.
TOM BEARDEN: There are over 37,000 people in prison in Georgia.
SPOKESMAN: All right, gentlemen. Head and eyes straightforward.
TOM BEARDEN: State courts hand down some of the toughest sentences in the country. You can get 20 years here for stealing a lawn mower.
SPOKESMAN: You're here because you made a bad decision, gentlemen, and today is the day to start making the right kind of decision.
TOM BEARDEN: Even so, some people want these inmates to stay in prison even longer than they do now. They want to abolish parole.
Should parole be abolished?
SPOKESMAN: Your voters will respect your opinion much better if you just vote yes, I want to abolish parole, or no, I don't.
TOM BEARDEN: State Senator Sonny Perdue is one of them. He sponsored what he calls a "truth in sentencing" law during the last legislative session.
SONNY PERDUE, State Senator: We think the people of Georgia want truth in sentencing when the judge says five years, that it means five years.
TOM BEARDEN: Georgia now has what's called indeterminate sentencing. The judge sets a sentence within a range of years. For example, an offender might get five to ten years for burglary. Periodically, the state parole board reviews the case. If the board feels the offender has made sufficient progress toward rehabilitation, they can return that person to society under the supervision of the parole officer.
SPOKESMAN: I don't really think it would serve any useful purpose for this man to go back to prison, and so I'm going to let him be released. And he's a free man.
TOM BEARDEN: Perdue's bill would have asked voters to approve a constitutional amendment that would have replaced the current system with one that would mandate specific sentences for specific crimes. A number of gubernatorial candidates plan to campaign on the issue this fall. One, millionaire Republican businessman Guy Millner, is already running radio ads.
GUY MILLNER, Republican Gubernatorial Candidate: As governor, I'll eliminate parole. Criminals will serve their entire sentence.
COMMERCIAL SPOKESPERSON: Listen to Guy Millner.
Do criminals need "tough love"?
TOM BEARDEN: Millner says he believes in tough love when it comes to criminals.
GUY MILLNER: I believe parole sends a wrong message. When you take a criminal and you give ‘em a sentence of fifteen years and they only serve five, or you give ‘em ten years and they only serve three or four, it sends a wrong message to victims' families, to the court, to the judge, to the community. I want that criminal, when they get a sense of 48 months, they serve all 48 months.
TOM BEARDEN: Mario Paparozzi is the president of the American Parole & Probation Association, a lobbying group. He says an inmate who is granted parole is not being released early.
MARIO PAPAROZZI, President, American Probation & Parole Association: We are misunderstanding this whole business about parole. And in our misunderstanding we are fueling the fires of public anger. They're not getting out early if we understand that we've all agreed to the punitive time frame as the first piece of the sentence. What folks need to understand is that the second half of the sentence is beyond the punitive portion. And if we abolish parole, all we're left with is the punitive portion.
TOM BEARDEN: Paparozzi says the first half of the sentence is what the judge expects the criminal to serve. The latter portion is tagged on for two reasons: to provide a supervised transition period from prison to the streets and to keep an inmate in prison if he misbehaves. The man who runs this prison finds the prospect of having no tool other than punishment deeply troubling. Warden Marshall Camp operates the Clayton County Correctional Facility in Lovejoy, Georgia. It's a medium security prison with just over 200 inmates. The prisoners are bussed out each morning to do community service work, like restoring and painting recreational facilities for the town.
Parole as an incentive.
MARSHALL CAMP, Warden, Clayton Correctional Facility: We rely on parole to be the incentive for good behavior and for work motivation. This is an institution that's run with a minimum of staff. It has a work mission, and I don't think we'd be able to accomplish what we do now under the circumstances of not having any parole.
TOM BEARDEN: Without parole, do you think a significant number of these people would refuse to work?
MARSHALL CAMP: Already, there are some cases that come here that the parole board refuses to release any earlier than the time that their sentence expires, and they often decide and often tell me very honorably:" ain't workin' here no more if I ain't going to get parole."
TOM BEARDEN: Inmates at the maximum security Diagnostic & Classification Center say they see the same attitude among fellow prisoners who aren't eligible for parole now. John Counts is doing twelve years for burglary and has served two years. He could get out on parole four years from now.
JOHN COUNTS, Inmate, Diagnostic & Classification Prison: There's a lot of people with life without parole. They don't have anything to lose at all. They don't have anything to work towards.
TOM BEARDEN: Do they follow the program? Do they behave?
JOHN COUNTS: Most of them that I've seen don't. But I mean they're mad at everybody.
TOM BEARDEN: So taking that hope away would make a difference?
JOHN COUNTS: I think so, yes, sir.
Abolishing parole: A "scary thought."
TOM BEARDEN: Counts said abolishing parole is a scary thought.
TOM BEARDEN: What scares you?
JOHN COUNTS: Having to spend 12 years in here. I mean, I've already learned my lesson. I don't know what I'd be like after 12 years.
TOM BEARDEN: How do you think you might be?
JOHN COUNTS: I don't know. It's already affected me. I mean--you forget a lot of things out there. Like, I've lost touch with all of my friends. The only contact I have is from my family.
SPOKESMAN: You all have to get your mind right, get your attitude right--
Parole isn't the only motivation.
TOM BEARDEN: But Counts' warden, Tony Turpin, is less concerned than Warden Camp. He says there are other methods than parole to motivate inmates.
TONY TURPIN, Warden, Diagnostic & Classification Prison: We also work off of disincentives. You know, if guys aren't going to participate in the programs, then we will keep those people segregated. They will not have as many privileges as other people in the system. So it would work more for the disincentives, things such as visitation privileges, store privileges, those kinds of things would be affected.
TOM BEARDEN: Critics of the parole system argue it's not often used as an incentive anyway, but, rather, a way to clear out crowded prisons. Parole board member Jim Wetherington says that is true to some extent. When Wetherington was the chief of police in Columbus, Georgia, he used to hate the fact that criminals were paroled. But now he says he understands it isn't just early release. Parole rewards good behavior and also keeps the prisons from overflowing.
JIM WETHERINGTON, State Board of Pardons & Paroles: We try to keep violent offenders as long as we can, but because of the bed space problem that Georgia faces, some folks are going to have to be released.
TOM BEARDEN: Abolishing parole has been tried before by 17 states since the 1970's. In several it had unintended consequences. In Connecticut, for example, the state was forced to release people early after parole was ended, because the prison populations had exploded. The average time served by offenders dropped to only 13 percent of the original sentence, because of a need to make room for new offenders.
MARIO PAPAROZZI: In a parole system, people tend to do more time than in systems where it's an automatic truth in sentencing mandatory model. In an automatic release or a truth in sentencing state, everybody gets out on that day. Where there's a review by a board, not everybody gets out. Clearly, most of the people or half of the people stay in.
TOM BEARDEN: In Connecticut, as well as in Colorado and Florida, prisons became so overcrowded after parole was abolished that the system was reinstated. In Georgia, prisons are at full capacity now. Wetherington says there'd be only one solution.
"If you want folks to serve more time, give us more prisons..."
JIM WETHERINGTON: My position is--and I want to speak for me, not the board--but my position is if you want folks to serve more time, give us more prisons, and we'll let ‘em serve more time.
TOM BEARDEN: Any idea how much that might cost?
JIM WETHERINGTON: Well, it's going to cost big bucks, obviously it is, when you start building prisons.
TOM BEARDEN: Cost estimates vary wildly from one to twelve billion dollars. Those estimates don't impress Candidate Millner.
GUY MILLNER: Think about the cost, if you will, of a human life, human pain, human suffering. I believe that you can do it cheaper than we're doing in our state today. People have a right to feel safe, and somehow or another we have this liberal influence in our country that says we can't afford to keep people in prison. I don't agree with that one bit.
TOM BEARDEN: And State Senator Perdue says if his version of a bill to abolish parole were to pass, it wouldn't cause overcrowding, because it wouldn't apply to all crimes.
SONNY PERDUE: I think that some people felt like that we wanted to totally abolish parole for all crimes. That was never the intention. The intention was to allow the people of Georgia to vote on a provision that would have abolished parole for certain crimes that would be defined by the general assembly.
TOM BEARDEN: That's what North Carolina did recently. And Perdue says that so far it appears to be working. But Mike Light warns that abolishing parole for certain violent crimes will mean non-violent offenders will serve less time. Light is a spokesperson for the Georgia Department of Corrections.
MIKE LIGHT, Department of Corrections: Voters will have to realize in some cases offenders will serve less in Georgia than they do already. Do they want to make that tradeoff? Yes, rapists, and murderers and pot offenders will be serving longer, will be there. But, again, the public has certain fears of property and drug offenders as well. Do they want them incarcerated longer, or do they want to make the tradeoff to keep that certain core group of bad offenders locked up longer? That's the question.
Less time for crime?
TOM BEARDEN: A fundamental part of the argument over parole is whether keeping people in prison longer prevents crime. Millner thinks there's no doubt about that.
GUY MILLNER: The longer time the criminal serves in prison, the less time they're going to have on the street to commit a crime. I believe crime is down in this country over the last six years. And it's down because of the fact that the prison population is up.
TOM BEARDEN: Paparozzi says that argument just doesn't hold water, that crime continued to soar back in the 70's and 80's in the states that eliminated parole.
MARIO PAPAROZZI: It may prevent them from committing a particular crime on a particular day, because they will have been in custody. But the likelihood of committing a similar crime with a different victim at a later date will always be there.
TOM BEARDEN: Even both political parties sense great public support for abolishing parole in Georgia, the two houses of the legislature couldn't agree on the wording of a final bill this session. They'll take up the issue again this fall, and most observers have little doubt that state voters will eventually get the chance to decide the issue at the ballot box.
A RealAudio version of this segment is available.
