Policy and election-year politics mixed into new Georgia laws

Policy and election-year politics mixed into new Georgia laws

Georgia news, in the news, current events, Georgia happenings, GA happenings

Policy and election-year politics mixed into new Georgia laws

Flush with cash and facing an election year, Georgia lawmakers prioritized bills that cut taxes, stoke political emotions and touch voters’ lives in some way.

Legislators left the Capitol early Friday morning after making their mark on the state over the past three months, with the Republican majority pushing both practical spending bills and sparking debates over partisan issues including immigration and transgender people.

“I think they were looking for things to show their constituents that they’re doing something,” said Buzz Brockway, a former Republican state representative who now works at the Georgia Center for Opportunity, a nonprofit organization dedicated to reducing poverty. “I would call it a ‘medium session.’ Some things got done that are important and move the ball forward, but nobody got everything they wanted.”

Read the full article in The Herald

Read the full article in Atlanta Journal-Constitution 

 

Policy and election-year politics mixed into new Georgia laws

Shackled by Freedom: How Workplace Licensing Holds Back Ex-Convicts

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Shackled by Freedom: How Workplace Licensing Holds Back Ex-Convicts

After years of drug abuse and crime, Rudolph H. Carey III began to get his life back on track in 2007 when he checked himself into rehab and eventually drew on his experience to become a substance abuse counselor in Virginia.

Then it was all taken away from him. After his company was taken over, his new employer fired him in 2018 due to his 2004 conviction for assaulting an officer while trying to run away from a traffic stop. State law prohibits former offenders like him from working as substance abuse counselors.

Joshua Crawford, Director of Criminal Justice Initiatives for the Georgia Center for Opportunity, acknowledged that the formerly incarcerated are often an unsympathetic group. But he said growing evidence shows that occupational licensing laws fail to improve public safety and sometimes even make communities less safe and less prosperous. “It’s not about benefiting that person as much as leveling the playing field and the benefits to public safety and more productive members of society,” he said. 

Read the full article in Real Clear Investigations 

Read the full article in The Epoch Times 

 

Policy and election-year politics mixed into new Georgia laws

Is the tide turning on Larry Krasner?

Georgia news, in the news, current events, Georgia happenings, GA happenings

Is the tide turning on Larry Krasner?

Hate to say I told you so, but real is real. Back in 2018, three months into Larry Krasner’s revolution in ultra-lenient prosecution, I wrote these prophetic words:

Ive written before that many of Krasners reforms — as with those of many of the other Soros DAs — are long overdue. Cash bail does criminalize poverty; mass incarceration, thanks to an ill-conceived war on drugs, has decimated communities of color; the death penalty is disproportionately applied based on race and class. All true. But one has to wonder if Krasner — even more than the other Soros-funded reformers — has over-corrected, and laid the groundwork for an existential assault on law enforcement from within that, by extension, could amount to a jihad on public safety itself.

The piece, like others that have followed through his tenure, diagnosed what was already apparent: Krasner’s inexperience and incompetence as a manager, his unwillingness to work with others, and his tone deafness (like when he showed up for his first meeting with the then-Council president with a documentary camera crew in tow) — all of it jeopardized even then the most righteous aspects of his cause. You know what happened next. His “best and brightest” ADA recruits came and promptly fled in droves, fed up with the mismanagement and ideology. They wanted to be reformers, yes, but most didn’t sign up to be refuseniks when it came to, say, actually prosecuting gun crimes.

“Consider how Philadelphia has fared in the years since progressive prosecutor Larry Krasner was elected in 2017,” Penn Law’s Paul Robinson and Joshua Crawford, Director of Criminal Justice Initiatives at the Georgia Center for Opportunity wrote last year in Newsweek. “Krasner has filed the fewest cases in his city’s modern history and reduced sentencings by an astounding 70 percent. Meanwhile, homicides are skyrocketing.”

It’s time for Georgia lawmakers to lead and pass legislation like the Promise Scholarships

It’s time for Georgia lawmakers to lead and pass legislation like the Promise Scholarships

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It’s time for Georgia lawmakers to lead and pass legislation like the Promise Scholarships

The Alabama legislature has passed a bill that phases in universal Education Savings Accounts over time. It now goes to the desk of Gov. Kay Ivey for her signature. The ESA will be worth up to $7,000 for each student to be used for approved educational expenses.

The Georgia Center for Opportunity’s (GCO) take: “Georgia is now on the cusp of being surrounded by states with universal school choice, or near universal school choice,” said Buzz Brockway, GCO’s vice president of public policy. “That means our state is now an outlier in the southeast when it comes to educational options. We shouldn’t be satisfied to maintain a status quo on this issue that leaves thousands of schoolchildren behind each year. It’s time for Georgia lawmakers to lead and pass legislation like the Promise Scholarships bill that expand educational opportunities across the state to students and families trapped in a system that doesn’t work for them.”

For more on the ways ESAs would help kids in Georgia, check out these resources:

Policy and election-year politics mixed into new Georgia laws

Amanda Kieffer: WV has too many laws preventing former criminals from working

Georgia news, in the news, current events, Georgia happenings, GA happenings

Amanda Kieffer: WV has too many laws preventing former criminals from working

How long should the consequences of your mistakes follow you in life? This is a question that the West Virginia State Senate is considering with SB 493: Relating to the use of criminal records as disqualification from authorization to practice a particular profession. SB 493 raises the standard of disqualification for prior criminal offense from a “rational nexus” to “directly related.” In cases where the offense is related, the bill requires the board to consider evidence of rehabilitation or treatment undertaken by the individual.

Criminal justice reform researchers and experts agree that helping formerly incarcerated individuals find meaningful employment is not only important for a state’s economy but also an important part of reducing recidivism and improving public safety.

Joshua Crawford is the Director of Criminal Justice Initiatives at the Georgia Center for Opportunity. He says, “The criminal justice system is at its best when it has two simultaneous north stars: accountability and redemption. You want a system that holds offenders accountable, punishes wrongdoing, and removes from civil society those who would do others harm. At the same time, you want people to exit that system better off and to re-enter in a more meaningful way. A major hurdle to this is obtaining a job. We’ve known for a long time that having a job reduces recidivism upon release.”