For thousands of Georgians, freely traveling for an abortion is not an option.

[Celerity]

For Georgia residents on parole and probation, the state’s six-week abortion ban leaves few choices—and effectively deputizes parole and probation officers to make decisions about their reproductive care.

https://boltsmag.org/georgia-abortion-ban-probation-parole-travel-restrictions/



Being on probation and parole is becoming a uniquely challenging situation for pregnant people in Georgia following the Supreme Court’s recent Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade. Last week, a federal appeals court allowed a 2019 law prohibiting abortion after six weeks—before many women even know they are pregnant—to immediately take effect. The near-total ban will severely constrict the reproductive choices of Georgians on probation and parole. Residents in this category who need an abortion will be faced with an impossible choice: giving birth and caring for a baby they do not want and likely cannot afford to raise, or traveling out of state for an abortion and risking a violation of their parole or probation conditions, which could land them back in prison.

Amy Ard, the executive director of the Atlanta-based Motherhood Beyond Bars, works with expectant mothers in prison, on probation, and on parole. The organization also supports their former clients in transitioning out of prison. “I’ve talked to a few of them about the restriction on travel,” Ard said, “and how frustrating it is for them to hear you just have to go to another state, like that’s no big deal, like you get in a car and you drive to another state and stay with friends. That’s not the way it works for them. And you know, no one seems to understand that.” Around 666,400 women are on parole or probation at any given day in the U.S., according to a recent Prison Policy Initiative report. In Georgia, the rate of people under probation is the hightest in the nation, affecting hundreds of thousands. Around one in 25 adults are under “community supervision.”

This stems from a law that forced judges to give the maximum sentence to people convicted of a second felony, Andrew Fleischman, an appellate lawyer at the Atlanta firm Ross & Pines, told Bolts. “What this ends up meaning is that people who have relatively minor second offenses end up getting 20 years probation,” he said. And though Georgia enacted a 2021 reform that allows people to request early termination of their probation after three years, it’s too early to tell whether that will substantially reduce these numbers. Fleischman noted that many people simply don’t have the means to challenge their probation. “If you fix the rules but don’t give people automatic counsel or an automatic hearing, it’s not always going to get fixed,” he said.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Georgians are living with this sword of Damocles hanging over them. Probation’s intended status as a community alternative to incarceration is “definitely complicated by the number of people who go back to prison for violating probation,” said Page Dukes, the communications associate at the Southern Center for Human Rights. “There’s so many restrictive conditions.” And being on probation often costs more than people can afford. In 2015, probation revocations accounted for an astonishing 55 percent of all prison admissions in Georgia. Over 1,100 people in the state were sent back to prison for technical parole violations in 2019—just over three people a day. A 2017 Harvard Kennedy School report on probation concluded that “the largest alternative to incarceration in the United States is simultaneously one of the most significant drivers of mass incarceration.”

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