Cohort 2025
Atlanta Community Support Project
Understanding Disparities in Homicide Prosecutions and Outcomes
Fulton County, GA
In 2006, Georgia increased the mandatory minimum time served on life sentences before parole eligibility to 30 years, and the parole board has required people to serve more time on those sentences each year since. In addition, Black people, poor people, women, and trans people who are charged with homicide face disparities in outcomes at several stages of the criminal legal process, including plea negotiations, charging decisions, sentencing, and parole, which often result in their serving disproportionately longer sentences. Although several studies have examined racial disparities in the prosecution of homicides at the national level, there has been little research on the causes and consequences of these disparities in Fulton County, Georgia.
With Catalyst grant funding, Atlanta Community Support Project (ACSP), a nonprofit using community-based research and resource development to empower people affected by poverty and incarceration, will partner with Igniting Hope Georgia and the Georgia Coalition Against Domestic Violence to research disparities in conviction, sentencing, and parole outcomes for people prosecuted for homicide in Fulton County. This effort is part of a larger research initiative by ACSP examining these issues in the state of Georgia. For its research in Fulton County, ACSP will establish a community research team, obtain and review court records, train researchers on data collection techniques and data privacy best practices, develop secure data input and storing methods, and determine incarceration and parole statuses and outcomes for people convicted of homicide before and after the implementation of Georgia’s 30-year minimum life sentence law. ACSP will use Microsoft PowerBI to manage, analyze, and visualize de-identified court data. Through its efforts to gather and analyze comprehensive court data in Fulton County, ACSP hopes to increase transparency and give advocates and people whose lives have been affected by the criminal legal system the data needed to inform policy and practical change. ACSP will also produce a step-by-step guide to support similar research efforts in other counties in Georgia.
