Under two new laws signed Thursday, young offenders and adults arrested for minor offenses in Georgia will no longer be sent to prison. Instead, they will be directed into community-based rehabilitative programs meant to address underlying problems.

After January 1, young people arrested for minor offenses will enter social service programs, skipping the criminal justice system entirely. Those arrested for low-level crimes like drug possession will be diverted into community-based rehab programs. Teenagers who have committed felonies in which no one is hurt will face a maximum of 18 months in prison plus intensive probation for a year and a half. If someone is harmed, the juveniles could be sent to prison for up to 5 years.

The youth law is expected to save $85 million over five years and reduce the juvenile prison population by 640 teenagers, at a rate of $91,000 a year per bed. Currently, there are 1,820 minors in juvenile facilities in Georgia. The youth recidivism rate, now at 65 percent, is also supposed to drop.

Georgia’s school to prison pipeline is among the worst in the nation, with schools frequently using the criminal justice system to discipline kids for minor infractions. A juvenile court judge from Georgia testified last year that one-third of the cases before him were school-related minor offenders who had been arrested by campus police. He also noted an “appalling” racial disparity in the arrests, which were 80 percent African American. As arrests increase, high school graduation rates have plummeted.

The other new law establishes alternative program options for adults arrested for non-violent crimes. As of July 1, judges will be given more discretion over drug-related cases, which often have mandatory minimum prison sentences. Instead, expensive prison beds will be reserved for the most violent criminals, while less serious offenses like drug possession, burglary, forgery, or shoplifting will have less severe penalties depending on the scale of the crime.

Gov. Nathan Deal (R) has made a more humane and effective prison system a top priority. At the bill signing, Deal choked up as he described how families have “been cast aside by the system that was in place.” Now that he has signed these two cornerstone bills into law, the governor is already working with community groups on legislation to smooth the transition of inmates back into society and reduce recidivism rates. He has also pledged $10 million in funding for “accountability courts” to make sure defendants work, seek treatment and stay sober.

Sentencing reform has attracted rare bipartisan support all over the country, as conservatives look for ways to cut costs while liberals oppose excessively harsh and ineffective sentencing. In the past two years, 35 prisons have shuttered in 15 states. However, other states have embraced the private prison industry, which has an abysmal record for security and inmate abuse, and may actually increase incarceration rates.

The Constitution forbids executing intellectually disabled people. As the Supreme Court explained in Atkins v. Virginia, using an unfortunate and antiquated term, “death is not a suitable punishment for a mentally retarded criminal.” Moreover, Georgia death row inmate Warren Lee Hill is intellectually. disabled. At least, that’s what all seven mental health professionals who evaluated Hill have said about him. Yet, thanks to a federal law enacted in large part for the purpose of making it easier for states to kill people, a federal appeals court held yesterday that Hill may be executed.

Courts previously deemed Hill’s death sentence valid based on the testimony of several experts who claimed he was not, in fact, intellectually disabled. Yet, as Judge Rosemary Barkett explains in a dissenting opinion, “all three experts who previously testified for the state of Georgia in 2000 that Hill did not meet the criteria for mental retardation have recently come forward and said they made a grievous mistake. They explained that their earlier conclusions were unreliable and that it is now their professional opinion that Hill is mentally retarded.” So Hill’s death sentence is rooted in unreliable evidence that has since been overcome by new information, and he asked the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit to overturn the death sentence that mentally health experts now unanimously agree is unconstitutional.

Except that there’s one big problem, a 1996 law known as the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) generally does not allow what are known as a “second or successive habeas corpus application,” meaning that a prisoner typically gets one chance to challenge their conviction or sentence in federal court, and that’s it. Prior to when the witnesses against him recanted their testimony, Hill sought a federal court order invalidating his death sentence on the grounds that he is intellectually disabled, and lost. And, while AEDPA does contain an exception for newly discovered information establishing a prisoner’s innocence, this exception does not allow a guilty person to challenge an unconstitutionally excessive sentence based on new evidence.

As Andrew Cohen explains, there are some aspects of the court’s analysis that are highly doubtful, even if the court ultimately reads AEDPA correctly to say that it more important to prevent someone from challenging their death sentence twice than it is to halt unconstitutional executions. Cohen also points to what may be the most stunning statement in the court’s majority opinion:

If all that was required to reassert years later a previously rejected claim was a change in testimony, every material witness would have the power to upset every notion of finality by simply changing his testimony. And, as this case illustrates, opinion testimony can be changed with great ease (indeed, even without seeing Hill in 13 years, administering any new tests, or reviewing new documents, three witnesses pivoted their positions 180 degrees). Moreover, there is no reason to limit the change in evidence theory to changes in testimony of previous witnesses. New witnesses could be rounded up, and every new witness would transform the same old claim into a brand new one (citations omitted by me).

The first sentence of this passage is simply breathtaking. Imagine, the court demands, how terrible the world would be if death sentences could be overruled just because the facts supporting those sentences turn out to be false!

At the end of the day, we can have a justice system that favors truth, or we can have a justice system that favors finality. AEDPA forces us to choose the later.

Georgia Governor Nathan Deal has finally decided how to handle a campaign by four Georgia students to hold their school’s first integrated prom: just walk away. Deal, who previously brushed off requests for him to support integration as a “silly publicity stunt,” told an Atlanta-Journal Constitution reporter yesterday that he thought the campaign was a private matter and not one that needed the state’s intervention:

DEAL: I believe that anything that’s associated with a school should not have the distinction or discrimination made based on race or gender or any other separation, but it appears to me that the parents and students have worked that out on their own, as they should.

We’ve come a long way in the state of Georgia. We don’t need things like this being divisive. We think we have put most of those issues behind us. None of us condone things that would send the wrong message about where we are with regard to race relations. But by the same token, I think that people understand that some of these are just local issues and private issues, and not something that the state government needs to have its finger involved in.

Deal’s comments that the students’ initiative was a local, private issue are in some ways similar to Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-KY) view that the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 violates business owners’ rights to “private ownership” by requiring them to abandon employment discrimination and whites-only lunch counters. It also completely misses the point of civil rights. The reason we have civil rights law is because we understand that certain private actions, such as race and gender discrimination, wound our society so deeply that they cease to be a merely private concern.

In the wake of Brown v. Board of Education a common tactic by white segregationists was to open private academies for white students that, because they were private and not public schools, evaded the Constitution’s ban on segregation. The segregated proms at Wilcox County High School appear to be a relic of a similar tactic. Parents, rather than the school board, sponsor the proms at this school.

To their credit, several Republicans broke with Deal and endorsed an integrated prom. Over the last few weeks, a group of students have raised money locally through food sales and online through their Facebook page, and are still collecting funds. They plan to hold the integrated prom on April 27, and the Wilcox County School Board has released a statement saying they plan to consider holding an official, school-sponsored integrated prom next year. Nevertheless, the students’ progress on this front does little to change the fact that segregation remained alive and well in this school district nearly 60 years after Brown.

During the long fight to end apartheid in the American South, defenders of segregation would frequently dismiss civil rights workers as nothing more than “outside agitators” intruding on communities that did not want them. Nearly 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, little appears to have changed in the Georgia governor’s mansion. In response to a request to support students in Wilcox County, Georgia seeking to integrate their high school’s still-segregated prom, Gov. Nathan Deal (R-GA)’s office channeled the spirit of George Wallace:

Gov. Nathan Deal won’t take sides in the controversy over some Wilcox County teens’ efforts to integrate their prom.

By email, his spokesman, Brian Robinson, said Deal would have no response to a liberal group’s call for state officials, including the governor to speak out.

He wrote, “This is a leftist front group for the state Democratic party and we’re not going to lend a hand to their silly publicity stunt.”

Better Georgia asked Deal and others “to publicly support the students of Wilcox County who are fighting to end a ‘separate-but-equal’ high school prom.”

To their credit, at least three Georgia Republican lawmakers, including state House Majority Whip Ed Lindsey, do not share Deal’s nonchalance towards segregation and have all issued statements supporting integrating the prom.

Late Monday, Nelson, Georgia passed a law called the “Family Protection Ordinance” that requires every adult in the 1,300-person town to own a gun “for purposes of emergency management and general safety of the city.”

The town’s Police Chief, Heath Mitchell, told the AP that he hopes “having a gun would help residents take their protection into their own hands,” since the town has an understaffed police department and slow response time to 911 calls.

One councilman even used the National Rifle Association’s call for arming all Americans to defend the law, saying “I really felt like this ordinance was a security sign for our city. Basically it was a deterrent ordinance to tell potential criminals they might want to go on down the road a little bit.” Overall, the measure signals that government officials believe residents, not police departments, should be responsible for their own protection and rejects state and federal governments’ efforts to reduce gun violence through increased regulation of firearms.

The law exempts felons and the disabled, and anyone who objects to carrying a gun can refuse to participate with no penalty. Nelson’s city council claims that the requirement will preempt efforts by the government to “confiscate personal firearms,” something no one has proposed doing:

Councilman Duane Cronic, who sponsored the measure, said he knows the ordinance won’t be enforced but he still believes it will make the town safer.[...]

The city council’s agenda says another purpose of the measure is “opposition of any future attempt by the federal government to confiscate personal firearms.”

The mayor said he never dreamed his small city would be the focus of national and international media attention, but he understands it.

“It bumps up against the national issues on guns,” he said.

One resident told the AP that he wasn’t so sure about the measure. “Really, I think it would be more fair to put it to a vote,” he said.

Nelson’s initiative is part of a national backlash to discussions about gun regulations. After the massacre at Newtown renewed conversations about how to promote gun safety, legislatures and city councils around the country proposed similar measures, requiring or suggesting gun ownership for residents or teachers, or hosting gun giveaways to ‘take back‘ the town.

On Thursday, an Augusta, Ga., judge issued the latest rebuke against a private probation firm that is holding poor individuals criminally responsible for their failure to pay fees. This time, Sentinel Offender Services had held open an arrest warrant on an individual whose probation term for reckless driving had expired two years earlier. When William Stephen Carter was pulled over for speeding, he was arrested and put in jail for allegedly owing court fines and probation fees. Carter says he already paid all his fees, but he could not get out of jail until he paid the $655 Sentinel said he owed.

The case is one of many challenging this perverse jailing of the poor after they fail to keep up with mounting fees on offenses like rolling through stop signs and public drunkenness.  In Georgia, a law passed in part through bribes and corruption that later landed a public official in jail authorizes every county to hire its own private probationers. Georgia is also the only state in which traffic violations are criminal infractions. The result is a dangerous system in which private probation firms are using every means they have to extract funds from low-level offenders, including jail time. NBC News explained the system in a 2012 report:

In most cases, the system works like this: A person is issued a summons for a relatively minor crime, such as speeding, driving with a suspended license or public intoxication. Upon conviction, those who can pay the fine at once usually are done with the Georgia justice system. But in Richmond County, where Census data show nearly a quarter of its population of about 200,000 live in poverty, and others, many cannot pay in full.

Those who can’t are put on private probation. For an additional monthly fee of between $25 and $45, they can pay the fine over the duration of their probation term.

Probationers may also find themselves responsible for additional costs, such as a one-time “start-up” fee of $15, a daily fee of $7 to $12 for electronic monitoring, a $25 photo fee required for DUI convictions, among others.

Adding to the cost, defendants in Georgia must pay $50 to the court to apply for a public defender, though the judge can waive the fee if a defendant is unable to pay.

Under Georgia law, an indigent person cannot be jailed for inability to pay a fine, unless the refusal is willful. But critics say neither courts nor probation companies make an effort to determine ability to pay. Instead, they say, companies routinely use the threat of jail against probationers for failing to pay not only court fines, but the private fees generated by what is known as “offender-funded supervision.”

Even though the lawsuits challenging this practice are pouring in, individuals are still fighting these battles one at a time, and they frequently don’t even have access to a free lawyer to defend them against minor infractions like traffic violations. Even those who do eventually win their case are often held in jail in the interim. In another lawsuit, a man living on monthly veterans benefits of $243 a month was fined $270 for public drunkenness and put on probation. The company charged an additional $15 per month and $39 a month for the privilege of paying monthly installations. Over the period of a year, that cost amounted to $700, and the man was ultimately jailed for failure to pay.

This criminal justice “debt” problem does not only affect individuals on private probation. But private probation services, like private prisons, make money off criminalizing conduct, and have an incentive to lobby for policies that land more people on probation and/or in jail. In fact, Georgia’s private probationers law passed after a private probation company paid the head of the state’s Board of Pardons and Paroles $75,000 to lobby for the law. That official was eventually convicted of public corruption, but the law he backed remains on the books. Thanks in no small part to that law, probation firms can and do threaten their debtors with jail when they do not pay — a power debt collectors normally do not have. Moreover, the state House of Representatives is poised to take up a bill next year that would expand the power of private probationers to operate with limited court oversight.