For three years, Jamariel Hobbs was confined to Georgia, unable to travel freely or move where he wanted to. At the beginning, a probation officer showed up at random times of night to test him for drugs. The soft-spoken Hobbs, now 29, was among almost 176,000 Georgia residents on probation, the largest per capita population in the United States. Then he got lucky. Because of a new law, the court slashed what was supposed to be nine years of probation to three.
He was free. “Probation feels like a leash,” he said. “I have my future back.”. People are often put on probation for low-level crimes such as drug possession or nonviolent theft. Georgia refuses to cap sentences the way many other jurisdictions do.
The practice of long sentences persisted for years despite research suggesting that the likelihood of people reoffending drops after three years on probation. In short, longer probation may do little to improve public safety. “You’re talking about folks who have often been through a lot of trauma and feel like they are constantly walking around with a weight on their shoulders, a cloud over their head, where the smallest little thing could completely derail all the work they’ve put in,” said Wade Askew of the Georgia Justice Project.
People on probation also have to pay fees to help offset the cost of monitoring them, a particular burden for low-income people. Previous attempts to free people from probation stalled. Under state law, a lot more people like Hobbs could have been free. In 2017, Georgia lawmakers passed a bipartisan bill designed to reduce the number of people on probation by letting some off early. According to a study by the Urban Institute, the measure could have translated into roughly one-third of the men and women on felony probation being offered sentences with the opportunity for time off their probation after three years at most, providing they stayed out of trouble.
