"We asked the legislature for money for two of them, and before we had completed the first two, we got money for 10, one in each of the state's judicial districts," Fallin said. The ten centers (five of which had opened by the fall of 1989) will make an additional 1,500 beds available, which, in the course of a year, could serve as many as 5,000 offenders. The annual cost per offender is about $12,500, slightly less than the cost of a year in prison.

SHOCK INCARCERATION. An outgrowth of the "scared straight" school of behavior modification, shock incarceration—officially called "special alternative incarceration"—is the most dramatic of all the Georgia alternatives and the most questionable. The program is aimed at men between 17 and 25 years of age who have been convicted of a felony, but who have never been sentenced to an adult prison. Its aim is to shock them with a brief exposure to the "harsh realities of prison life" by putting them for 90 days through a regimen very much like basic military training. The program's boot camps are situated on the grounds of two state prisons, but the offenders assigned to them have no direct contact with prison inmates.

Billie Erwin, the department's evaluator, has watched the program since its inception in 1983. Although not enough time has passed for a full-fledged evaluation, what she sees causes her to worry that the effects of shock incarceration, although dramatic at the outset, are too short-lived to cause long-term avoidance of criminal activity. Because the program is highly photogenic, it has drawn more media coverage than all the other alternatives to incarceration combined and, as a result, more inquiries from would-be emulators. Commissioner David Evans said he is concerned that too many may see the program out of context.

In 1989 there were 250 available beds—enough for 800 shock incarceration probationers each year—in the two prisons that house the program. David Jordan said it is impossible to reckon how many more beds the department would need to satisfy judicial demand for this alternative to full-fledged prison. The program "sure is popular with them," he said. At $3,285 per participant, the program costs roughly one-quarter as much as keeping a person in prison for a year.