By Msgr. Noel Bertenshaw

As we go to press, Jack Potts is being led to that foul electrical contraption. The anonymous hand will reach out and throw the switch. Witnesses will sit and watch as the People of the State of Georgia execute this man of murder. It is the first use of the electric chair in sixteen years.

The family of his victim want it to happen. We can understand the bittersweet taste of vengeance they long to sip. It will be unsatisfactory. It will not bring a son back to a grieving mother or a husband back to a broken wife.

We can understand a frustrated, perplexed public who feel this example of one or some, will stop the vicious wave of violence sweeping across the plains of our society. The public is wrong. The much used execution chambers of the past have not halted the onward march of violent criminals and their detestable deeds.

What we cannot understand is the response of our communities to the facts. And here are the facts.

Seventy per cent of all criminals in our state are shut up behind bars, in chamber-of-horror conditions, for committing non-violent crimes. The experts and the statistics are infallible as they follow the dreadful saga of these unfortunates. They are raving lunatics upon release. Morally and sometimes physically they are destroyed. Almost two thirds of them return at some time to the Big House. The second trip usually involves a violent crime.

This massive number of miserable mistake-makers could have been redirected to a restitution center. They could have been forced to repay the amount stolen, or restore the property destroyed. They could have worked an everyday job at the same time. They would have paid taxes, and received proper counsel. Their prison stay would not have cost the public a cent.

How do we know all this? Simple. The State of Georgia has eleven such centers in operation across the state for men, and one for women. And they work. Eighty per cent of the men released have returned to society healed, without any return journey to an overcrowded cell in Reidsville or Jackson, This state, and we should say it with pride, has proved the restitution route works.

That leaves the dangerous violent thirty percent on our hands. But that if it’s a manageable, if unacceptable, figure. In an atmosphere of calm, with an opportunity for close patient study, away from the numbing, overwhelming pressure of numbers, the experts can work for rehabilitation – and they can succeed.

At a cost of 18 million dollars, a new prison for women is being constructed in Thomaston. “What a waste,” say those who have watched the progress of restitution centers. Put a mere pittance of those pennies into the restoration rather than the destruction of human lives and watch the dividends accrue.

What destroyed Jack Potts? Refusal to see the bare faced facts did. The mad mighty rush to physically chastise rather than responsibly rationalize, did.

And dozens more like him sit on Georgia’s death row.

The growing bulging prison population of this nation is a time bomb. The jaded system of incarceration is bankrupt. It is time to look rationally at the facts.