ON MARCH 29th 2012, Georgia’s Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted on a criminal-justice reform bill that read like a left-leaning criminologist’s fantasy. It revised sentencing laws to keep non-violent drug and property offenders out of prison, directing them instead toward alternatives—drug courts, day-reporting centres, mental-health courts—designed to treat and rehabilitate rather than punish. It invested millions of dollars in such programmes—not an easy sell in times of tight budgets. And it created graduated scales of punishment, allowing the law to distinguish between someone with a single joint and someone with a pound of marijuana. The House passed the bill unanimously. The Republican-controlled state Senate did the same, and Nathan Deal, Georgia’s Republican governor, signed it into law.

Now Georgia is looking to do something similar for juveniles. The impetus is the same: high costs and poor return on investment. Nearly two-thirds of Georgia’s juvenile-justice department’s annual $300m budget goes to running residential facilities, which cost $91,126 per bed per year for long-term facilities and $88,155 for short-term. By way of comparison, the annual fee for students at Riverside Military Academy, a private boarding school just north of Atlanta, is $29,750.

But while most graduates of Riverside head to college, graduates of Georgia’s juvenile-justice facilities tend to head back inside. Fully 65% of young offenders incarcerated in one of the state’s long-term facilities, and 53% of convicted juveniles not sent to a long-term state-run facility, commit another crime within the next three years. Since 2003 the latter rate has remained steady, while the rate among the former has risen by six percentage points.

And just as nonviolent offenders take up costly space in Georgia’s adult prisons, low-risk juveniles do the same: in 2011 a majority of juveniles in non-secure residential facilities (such as supervised group homes, as distinct from detention facilities) were convicted of misdemeanour or “status” offences (crimes, such as truancy, that would not be considered crimes if committed by adults). Of that share 56% were judged to be low-risk, meaning they are deemed to pose little danger to the general population, as were 39% of those held in long-term secure facilities.

In December, Georgia’s Special Council on Criminal Justice Reform released a series of recommendations designed to improve on these lacklustre results and to save money. The recommendations echo those it made in 2011, which formed the basis of the broad adult reform bill. The council also recommends boosting investments for community-based sentencing options: many rural and less-populous areas of Georgia have no programs available for juvenile convicts, increasing the chances that they will be sent to state-run residential facilities. A programme in Illinois that treats non-violent youth as close to home and non-restrictively as possible has cut the re-incarceration rate to 14.2%, compared with 57.4% among juvenile offenders who did not participate in the programme.

Governor Deal has welcomed the report, and a bill based on its recommendations soon may find its way to the General Assembly. The council predicts that its recommendation will reduce the number of residential juvenile offenders by around one-third by 2018, saving the state more than $88m. On top of that are longer-term savings. Jeanette Moll, a juvenile-justice policy analyst at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, calls juveniles “an eminently rehabilitatable population...if we can fix them now we can avoid a lifetime of crime and costs.”