Photo by Elijah Nouvelage
In August, a stabbing on the Beltline’s Eastside Trail left Ramon Harris, 29, dead, and 54-year-old Johnathan Hamby in custody as the suspect. The murder, in a busy part of Atlanta, sparked local debates about mental illness and crime—a conversation that was further complicated by a public statement published by Hamby’s family. In the letter, the family apologized to Harris’s loved ones and said that Hamby—a mentally ill, unhoused man who’d been arrested more than 30 times—had been failed by a “broken system” and caught in a “revolving door of short-term incarceration rather than long-term structural intervention.”
The highly publicized horror of Harris’s death, paired with the grim statement expressed by Hamby’s family, has shed stark light on Georgia’s frayed social safety net, which is struggling to serve thousands trapped by the forces of poverty, homelessness, incarceration, mental illness, and substance-use disorders.
In Georgia, no one has more power to fix these systems than the governor. Right now that’s term-limited Brian Kemp; on November 5, voters will choose between Keisha Lance Bottoms and Rick Jackson to replace him. So far, their campaigns have focused more on issues such as affordability and the economy–but both have offered some policy proposals that speak to their approach to homelessness, mental healthcare, and other social-welfare topics.
We asked both candidates to share their thoughts on how to better serve Georgians struggling with these issues.
Contrasting solutions
In Georgia, there is wide disagreement over how to address issues of homelessness and crime, but there is bipartisan support for improving access to mental healthcare.
In 2022, the state joined the nationwide 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, which connects callers and texters experiencing mental health, substance use, or suicide crises with trained counselors, who can dispatch mobile crisis teams when needed. The state also operates 24-hour mobile crisis services that send clinicians into communities to assess and de-escalate behavioral-health emergencies and connect people with follow-up care.
And in 2022, the Republican-led General Assembly passed the Mental Health Parity law, which requires insurers to cover mental-health and addiction treatment as they would physical healthcare. The law strengthened state requirements that insurers comply with federal mental health parity standards, though state insurers say compliance has been spotty.
Where the parties often disagree, however, is how best to provide that care for mentally ill people who are also poor, homeless, or suffering from a substance-use disorder.
Democrats have generally emphasized expanding access to subsidized healthcare and providing community-based services before resorting to institutionalization at psychiatric hospitals. They are also largely supportive of the “Housing First” model for addressing homelessness, which prioritizes placing people into stable housing without first requiring sobriety, treatment, or employment.
Republicans, for their part, have emphasized treatment and institutional capacity, including psychiatric beds, assisted outpatient treatment, and, under the Trump administration, greater use of civil commitment, a judicial order for treatment or hospitalization. They have also often promoted requirements that tie public assistance to treatment and recovery.
Georgia’s candidates for governor largely reflect these wider party platforms. Republican gubernatorial nominee Rick Jackson, a billionaire who founded Jackson Healthcare, has framed homelessness primarily as a mental health problem during his campaign. In a press conference Jackson held with military veterans on September 25, he said, “Most homeless people do have a mental health issue.” Calling Georgia a “severely underserved market” for mental healthcare, he vowed to expand treatment capacity, including through tele-mental health services.
He also says he wants the state to shift from defaulting to incarceration in mental health cases, believing the practice has thrust responsibility on corrections agencies that are not equipped to handle it.
In a statement, Jackson campaign spokesperson Garrison Douglas told Atlanta, “Rick has said that Georgia’s jails and our sheriffs were never built to be Georgia’s mental health system, and he will not keep asking them to pretend they are, which is why he will treat the shortage of psychiatric beds and mental health providers as the crisis it is and expand real treatment capacity in the communities that have none.”
Democratic candidate Keisha Lance Bottoms, the former Atlanta mayor, has also highlighted the connection between mental health and other social issues: “What I hear from young voters repeatedly are concerns about access to mental healthcare [and a] lack of resources,” Bottoms told supporters in Augusta last month.
In a statement, she told Atlanta she would “strengthen the connections between Georgia’s housing, healthcare, and community-based support so that homelessness and mental health crises are addressed before they become emergencies.”
Bottoms has endorsed Medicaid expansion in Georgia, criticizing the work requirements of the state’s existing Pathways program, an alternative to Medicaid expansion launched in 2023 by Governor Brian Kemp. She has also called for expanded investment into behavioral mental health services: Her campaign website states that, as governor, she would prioritize “making sustained investments to improve 988 [hotline] coordination, expanding mobile crisis teams to keep Georgians safe, and ensuring insurance companies cover mental healthcare services just as they cover other healthcare services.” Her housing agenda, meanwhile, calls for expanding affordable housing options and rental assistance without mandating treatment.
‘We see this happen all the time’
There is wide agreement that Georgia’s social-welfare system needs improving. The care that currently exists consists of a patchwork of underfunded programs, overburdened providers, and thinly staffed crisis systems. The holes are perhaps most visible in the overlap between mental health and the criminal justice system.
The state’s forensic hospitals, where defendants who need psychiatric treatment are held before their legal cases can proceed, have about 670 beds across the state; as of April, more than 700 people were in jail waiting for admission to those hospitals. Meanwhile, the Georgia Department of Corrections reports that more than 13,700 people in state prisons are currently receiving some level of mental-health treatment, including more than 1,800 classified as needing inpatient care or crisis stabilization within the corrections system itself.
The result is a system in which jails and prisons have become major providers of psychiatric care, even as people ordered into treatment can spend months waiting for specialized help. In many cases, “All the police can do is take you to jail,” says Natasha Taylor, the head of the National Alliance on Mental Illness’s Georgia chapter. “And all the jail can do is put you back on the street.”
This was the case for Johnathan Hamby, accordingly to his family, who said in their public statement that a bureaucratic breakdown in treatment for his dangerous episodes over the years left his family with only two “extreme” options: “Brief jail stays that treat psychiatric illness as a crime, or total guardianship, which is incredibly difficult to secure and often resisted by the courts.”
Tammy Greer, a Georgia State University political scientist, says this is common. “The criminal justice system catches everyone when every other system fails,” she says.
Whoever wins in November, Greer says Georgia’s next governor will have ample power to repair Georgia’s frayed social safety net: The state’s top executive has vast budgetary discretion, especially over the Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities, as well as outsized influence over the state legislature.
“Housing, food, healthcare, policing—these are functions of the state,” Greer says. “We have the opportunity to do better. The question is: Are we going to be better?”
