and the judges he visited were no exception. They answered his
questions, but what they told him may not have been what he and his
colleagues wanted to hear.
First, any
alternative to prison would have to be tough and, in keeping with
the tenor of the times, look tough so as to protect judges from
charges of coddling criminals. That is, criminals would have to be
punished for their deeds in a way that let the public know they
were being punished, not detained in country-club environments.
Second, the alternative would have to protect the public from
violent criminals and the judiciary from charges of unleashing them
on innocent victims. Third, it would have to exact justice from the
criminal. Fourth, it would have to be cheap.
The list did
not include two objectives important to Vince Fallin and other
experts in penology and probation: providing justice to criminals,
as well as exacting justice from them, and rehabilitating them.
These goals were important to Vince Fallin. Georgia's alternatives
to incarceration would make it easier for these goals, too, to be
met.
"GRADUALLY INCREASING BANDS OF
CONTROL"
It is
tempting to think of Georgia's alternatives to incarceration as
parts of a well-crafted plan that sprang full blown from the
collective brow of its creators, especially since these programs
have become what Billie Erwin, the department's chief of
evaluation, calls "a continuum that could be described as gradually
increasing bands of control." But the program didn't start that
way.
The process
of innovation was not intentional, Vince Fallin cheerfully admits.
It progressed as people and time were available to carry it along.
What Fallin and his colleagues did is what a private-sector
research and development team might have done. They undertook to
design workable programs, but they also concentrated on finding
programs that would meet market demand.
Since they
worked in probations, it is not surprising that the first program
they devised was a new, tougher kind of probation. Called
"intensive probation supervision," it was specifically designed to
please the judiciary. Gradually, the group developed other
sentencing options to fill the continuum between no punishment on
one extreme and prison on the other. In ascending order of
severity, these alternatives are basic probation, community
service, intensive probation supervision, diversion centers,
detention centers, and special alternative, or shock,
incarceration.
BASIC
PROBATION. In 1988 almost 121,000 Georgians were sentenced to
probation. Roughly 33 percent were sentenced for misdemeanors; 7
percent for failure to pay child support; and the remaining 60
percent for felonies.