Posts tagged ‘Forsyth County’

Sep 28

Gauging the Gap between Metro Atlanta and the rest of the state on premature death rates

I’ve spent a good part of the summer taking a deep dive into several pots of economic and education data with an eye toward fleshing out a couple of chapters in the book version of TIGC. As a result, I’ve been neglecting the blog.

Then, in mid-August, I got a call asking me to make a presentation to this year’s opening session of the Georgia House Rural Development Council (HRDC) on September 1st. Over the years, I’ve given more than 50 presentations on my TIGC work, and generally I’ll update or amend my PowerPoint with whatever new data I’ve been working on. The result has been that the presentation has devolved, in my view, into a bit of mishmash.

Now I’ve been asked to speak in mid-November to a symposium on the state’s urban-rural divide and, with about six weeks to work, I’ve decided to do a major overhaul on my presentation — and to write an occasional post as I do so.

This is the first of those posts. My plan right now is to create a series of slides built around the theme of “gauging the gap” between Metro Atlanta and the rest of the state.

I started this process yesterday by updating my research and analysis of the state’s county-level premature death rates. I use premature death rates — formally known as “Years of Potential Life Lost before Age 75,” or YPLL 75 — as a proxy for community health status.

I’m sure I can get a fair argument that this approach is insufficient or an oversimplification, but, as an old public health friend once explained to me, “Premature death is the Dow Jones Industrial Average of population health.

“If you want to look at one number and get a feel for a community’s health status, look at premature death,” he said. Backing up that assessment is the fact that County Health Rankings & Roadmaps uses premature death rates as a key component in evaluating health outcomes for more than 3,000 U.S. counties.

Another reason I like using YPLL 75 rates is that they’re simple to calculate. Working with age data mined from death certificates submitted to the state, the Georgia Department of Public Health (DPH) keeps track of all the years of potential life lost before age 75 for all the counties in the state on an annual basis and posts this data to its excellent public health database.

If a 50-year-old Macon man dies, he contributes 25 years to Bibb County’s bucket of years of potential life lost before age 75. A 74-year-old woman up in Clayton, Ga.? That’s a year on Rabun County’s tally. A six-month-old infant in Decatur? That goes down as 74-and-a-half years for DeKalb County. And so on.

The DPH database also includes annual population estimates generated by the U.S. Census Bureau, and that’s really all you need to calculate YPLL 75 (or Premature Death) Rates. The formula is:

(YPLL 75/YPLL 75 Population) X 100,000 = YPLL 75 Rate

As a couple of examples, Forsyth County had Georgia’s best YPLL 75 rate in 2020 and Clay County had the worst. In fast-growing Forsyth County, the total number of years of potential life lost before age 75 was 9,970. Divide that by the county’s YPLL 75 population (the number of people 75 or younger) of 238,043 and multiply the result by 100,000 and you get a YPLL 75 rate of 4,188.3. I haven’t double-checked this, but I’ll guarantee you that premature death rate is among the best in the country.

Tiny, poverty-stricken Clay County, located hard on the Alabama line in southwest Georgia, turned in true third-world numbers for 2020 — a YPLL 75 Rate of 22,180.6 (basically five times worse than Forsyth County).

(Its data also generated something of a riddle. With a YPLL 75 population of just over 2,500 people, its YPLL 75 total more than doubled from 2019 to 2020 — jumping from 253 to 562.5.

(When I saw that big increase in years of potential life lost, my first reaction was that Clay County had gotten clobbered by Covid-19. Adding to that line of speculation was the fact that the total number of deaths in the county actually dropped to 45 in 2020 from 57 in 2019, and I immediately figured the virus had claimed a number of relatively young people in the county. That wasn’t a crazy notion. Clay County has little if any healthcare infrastructure and isn’t that far from Albany, which at one point last year was the global ground zero for the virus.

(But no. A quick check of DPH’s Covid-19 data reveals that Clay County suffered only four Covid-19 deaths in 2020 (and none so far this year) — and only two of those victims were under the age of 75. Together they contributed only 28 years to the county’s total YPLL 75 pot of 562.5 years.

(So what was killing younger people in Clay County? A review of the cause-of-death data in DPH’s OASIS database didn’t turn up many significant differences over 2019 — until I got down to the External Causes category. In 2019, the county reported no suicides or poisoning deaths. In 2020, there were three poisoning deaths and four suicides, all under the age of 75. Indeed, four were under 50; that’s at least 100 years of potential life lost before the age of 75 right there.

(Were the suicides or poisoning deaths some sort of collateral damage from Covid-19? I don’t know, but I’m curious enough to check and see if similar patterns turn up other counties.)

I have, however, meandered. To tie off this incredibly laborious math explanation I started about a half-dozen paragraphs up, here are the numbers for Georgia’s best and worst YPLL 75 counties.

Now back to my original objective — a comparison of premature death rates between my TIGC 12-county Metro Atlanta region and the state’s other 147 counties. (I should probably acknowledge that I’ve waffled on the question of how best to analyze the data I’ve collected. I’ve looked at using a basic North Georgia/South Georgia split as well the five regions I created early on in this process. At times I’ve analyzed county data based on their political leanings. For the purposes of this upcoming presentation (and these blog posts) I’ve decided to try to keep it simple and just compare Metro Atlanta to the rest of the state.)

This chart shows the YPLL 75 performance for TIGC’s 12-county Metro Atlanta region versus the state’s Other 147 Counties from 1994 (the earliest year for which DPH has data) through 2020. With YPLL 75 Rates, the lower the number, the better, so Metro Atlanta’s blue line at the bottom of this chart signifies the better peformance.

There are several important takeaways from this chart. The first is that the gap between Metro Atlanta the rest of Georgia has been widening throughout the 26-year period. In 1994, Metro Atlanta had what might be described as a 15.8 percent premature death “advantage” over the rest of the state; by 2020, that “advantage” was up to 41 percent. As I’ll get into in future posts, these differences have implications both for healthcare costs and for economic productivity.

A second takeaway has to do with what began happening in about 2011. Up until then, both Metro Atlanta and the rest of the state had generally been gaining ground, if somewhat unevenly. But that pretty much came to a halt in 2010, and in 2011 the entire state’s YPLL 75 Rate ticked up (that is, got worse). Metro Atlanta regained some ground in 2012, but then saw its YPLL 75 Rate deteriorate a little or flatline every year for the next five years before finally posting some improvement in 2018 and 2019.

The Other 147 Counties fared worse over that same period. If Metro Atlanta’s YPLL 75 Rate performance produced a five-year plateau from 2013 through 2017, the rest of the state generated a couple of uphill climbs before finally finding a downhill slope and producing three straight years of (slightly) improving numbers. But then came 2020 and Covid-19 — and the YPLL 75 Rates took off like moonshots.

Back to the takeaways. Back in 2011 and ’12, as I was starting work on Trouble in God’s Country and just beginning to dig into the premature death data, I remember noticing the sudden uptick in YPLL 75 Rates but didn’t know what to make of them. Over time — and in combination with similar adverse trends in other data — I’ve come to believe that what I was seeing amounted to aftershocks from the Great Recession. It showed up in economic, education and even birth and death data, and in every case, the Other 147 Counties suffered a harder blow than Metro Atlanta.

What to make, then, of the modest gains that began showing up in 2017 and ’18? As it happens, I’m seeing similar patterns in other datasets. I discussed those in my HRDC presentation a few weeks ago, but hadn’t yet started this review of YPLL 75 Rates. In isolation, I wouldn’t attach much significance to any one instance of improvement, but in combination I think they signal that my Great Recession aftershocks may finally be playing themselves out.

Now, though, we have Covid-19, and its impact across a range of societal sectors — health, economics, education — is already profound. The question is whether it will generate its own wave of aftershocks that will be with us for years to come.

Nov 2

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Will 2020 be rural Georgia’s last stand?

This year’s presidential election — and tomorrow’s election-day voting — is shaping up as another rematch in the long-running political war between urban and rural Georgia. The big question is whether rural Georgia can hold off Metro Atlanta’s rising urban and suburban tide one more time.

While demographics are clearly working against the state’s rural regions, they have managed to hang on at least until now; in 2018, rural voters turned out in bigger droves than their urban counterparts and dragged Brian Kemp across the finish line and into the governor’s office.

There’s little evidence in this year’s political tea leaves to suggest that rural Georgia’s task has gotten any easier. One of the biggest clues has been President Trump’s own campaign strategy. The fact that he’s been here twice in the past two weeks makes it clear that Georgia is indeed in play (as do virtually all the recent state polls), but it’s the way he’s campaigned here that’s the dead give-away.

Instead of making a public play for the suburban women whose votes he publicly covets, he’s gone instead to Macon and Rome, regional communities that anchor surrounding rural areas that gave him overwhelming majorities in 2016. Clearly, Trump’s strategic objective is to juice his rural base and maximize its turnout, not to try to reclaim suburbs that may be slipping away.

Beyond Trump’s own campaign tactics, the most attention-getting data point I’ve found is that the 29 counties that voted for Democrat Stacey Abrams in 2018 have cast 345,304 more absentee and in-person early votes than voters in the 130 largely rural counties that sided with Kemp. I mined that figure from the excellent georgiavotes.com website, which pulls data from the Georgia Secretary of State’s website and organizes it for easy public consumption.

It’s difficult (for me, at least) to read those numbers in any way except that the Democratic presidential nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden, has probably built up a pretty good advantage in the early vote and will begin tomorrow morning with a fair Georgia lead over Trump. The question for Trump’s rural Georgia supporters is whether they can replicate the 2018 turnout advantage and overcome what looks like an early Biden wave.

In 2018, the 130 largely rural counties that went for Kemp produced higher turnouts than the Abrams counties in both the early vote and the total vote. In the early vote, the Kemp counties produced 34.3 percent of their eligible vote versus 31.7 percent for the Abrams counties; by the time all the votes were tallied, the Kemp counties’ turnout was 62.1 percent versus 60.6 for the Abrams counties. That difference was arguably decisive.

So far this year, the Democrats appear to be doing a good bit better: the early vote turnout in the 29 Abrams counties (driven no doubt by Covid-19 concerns as well as heightened interest in the presidential race) is 51.8 percent versus 52.4 percent in the Kemp counties — a mere half-point difference.

Even with the improved numbers, Biden and the Democrats face some notable soft spots. One problem that seems to be repeating itself is the turnout performance difference between Metro Atlanta’s white north side and black south side.

For example, in the 2018 governor’s race, heavily white and overwhelmingly Republican Forsyth County, on Metro Atlanta’s northern edge, turned out 64.9 percent of its registered voters and gave Kemp 70.6 percent of those votes; the south side’s Clayton County, heavily black and Abrams’s strongest county, delivered only 54.4 percent of its available vote.

This year, the divide is even bigger so far: 67.6 percent of Forsyth’s registered voters have cast their ballots versus only 43.6 percent Clayton County’s. Other heavily-black, Democratic counties also seem to be under-performing in the early vote: Bibb County at 46 percent; Dougherty, 33.5 percent, and Richmond, 43.8 percent, among others.

A final question is whether the state will continue the red-to-blue shift that has been taking place over the past several election cycles, and all these challenges are, of course, intertwined. Democrats lost Georgia by five points in the 2016 presidential race and by less than two in the governor’s race in 2018. If they can gain that much ground again this year, Biden will carry Georgia and win its 16 electoral votes. Pumping up those turnout percentages in Bibb, Dougherty and Richmond, et al, is probably key to that.

Mar 28

TIGC Covid-19 March 28 Round-Up

Random Questions and Observations on Covid-19:

Why are the results from Georgia and North Carolina so different? The two states have nearly identical populations — 10.6 million for Georgia versus 10.5 million for North Carolina, according to 2019 Census Bureau estimates — but have very different Covid-19 results so far. I’ve been watching this for a while, thinking the numbers might even out. They haven’t. As of today’s morning report from both states’ public health agencies, North Carolina has tested more than 50 percent more people than Georgia but found less than half as many “positives” as Georgia, and with only a fraction of the hospitalizations and deaths, as this table shows. The question is why. There are obviously a lot of variables at play, but the two states probably have a lot more in common than not. Based on news reports I’ve read, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, seems to have acted earlier than his Georgia counterpart, Republican Brian Kemp — but not that much earlier. We’re probably going to have to wait for the smoke to clear to develop a truly useful analysis of this, but these differences are worth keeping an eye on. It’d be interesting to see the AJC and the Charlotte Observer collaborate on a tick-tock plotting state and maybe major local actions across a timeline.
Like Sherman, Covid-19 continues its march through Georgia. As of today’s late-morning report from the Georgia Department of Public Health, Covid-19 has now been found in 108 of Georgia’s 159 counties. As this map shows, the areas that have so far avoided reporting positive tests are almost entirely rural, including a swath of sparsely populated counties through east-central and southeast Georgia and another group of counties in west Georgia that somehow haven’t yet been pulled into the orbit of the Albany hot spot. While the bulk of the positive tests and deaths are in Metro Atlanta, the rate of infection and Covid-19 deaths is much higher in South Georgia, as the table below shows. Indeed, if you focus on Dougherty County and its six contiguous counties, the Covid-19 infection rate and death rate are, respectively, 6.7 times and 20 times that of TIGC’s Metro Atlanta region.
Using smartphones to gauge mobility in the face of Covid-19. One of the more interesting chunks of data to surface in the Covid-19 pandemic has come from a company called Unacast. Unacast uses location tracking data from smartphones to track how far users travel each day and aggregates that data to see what that can tell us about whether people are following the guidance of their state and local leaders and limiting their local travel. The data seems to lag by a few days and it’s still early, but it’s still interesting. As of today’s report, four of the five best-behaving counties in Georgia are in Metro Atlanta — Forsyth, Dawson, Cherokee and Fulton counties. The other top-five county was Clay County, which ranked second and had slashed its “average distance traveled” by 39 percent. Clay County sits hard on the Alabama line in southwest Georgia, on the edge of the Albany blast zone, but has yet to report a single positive Covid-19 test. You have to wonder if everybody in that county hasn’t gone inside and shut all their doors and windows. You can find the Unacast data here. Scroll down until you find the U.S. map, then click on Georgia and, when that map comes up, click on your county and wait for the data to come up. It’s a little slow and clunky, but still useful.
Covid-19’s economic toll may be tougher on rural Georgia than Metro Atlanta. The great recession hit Metro Atlantans harder than their rural Georgians. That reality showed up first in IRS data and in total personal income data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) and later in a BEA report on county-level gross domestic product. As Covid-19 began to spread, I found myself thinking it might be tougher on rural Georgia. If the Great Recession hit Metro Atlanta harder, it recovered faster and has since widened its economic, education and health gap with rural Georgia; rural Georgia has generally lost population and seen its local economies contract, which, I figured, left it in a weakened position to deal with a global pandemic. Now comes Politico with a really good piece fleshing out my general concerns. It’s worth reading.
While the Covid-19 data is still developing day-by-day, there are already some interesting oddities and riddles that are worth noting and wondering about:
- College towns. One early theory was that college towns would be hard hit, given their population of young people who still think they’re invincible. Well, yes and no. Clarke County, home of the University of Georgia, had 35 cases as of mid-day Saturday, just over half of the 67 reported by Carroll County, home of West Georgia College. Those weren’t all that surprising. The bigger riddles were Baldwin County (home of Georgia College and State University) with only two cases and Bulloch County (Georgia Southern) with a big goose-egg so far. I haven’t found data on the number of tests given in each county, but both Baldwin and Bulloch are large enough that you’d have to think they’d conducted a fair number of tests.
- Bartow County. Other than Albany, Bartow County, just of I-75 north of Metro Atlanta, has emerged as the state’s second-hottest hot spot. As of Saturday, Bartow County, with a population of about 106,000, had reported 116 cases, the sixth-most in the state, and its infection rate was second only to Dougherty County. I am, I believe, reliably informed that the outbreak traced back to a large community gathering in Cartersville, but I haven’t found any published reporting on it and am going to hold off on the details for the time being.
- Taliaferro County. This tiny, impoverished county of about 1,700 people might be considered a prime target for Covid-19. It’s located about a hundred miles east of Atlanta on I-20 and a far piece from any major healthcare facilities. As it’s worked out so far, it’s one of only two counties on that route between Atlanta and Augusta that still hasn’t reported a positive Covid-19 test (neighboring Warren County is the other). One likely reason is a paucity of testing in the county, but another could be an early decision by the local school superintendent, Allen Fort. As Jim Galloway reported nearly two weeks ago, Fort didn’t wait for guidance from Governor Kemp or anybody else; he acted on his own and sent all his students home. In doing so, he may have flattened the curve in his little county.

Stay tuned. I’ll follow up with more early next week.

Jun 14

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Putting the divide between Georgia’s rural and urban counties into perspective

One of the hard things about telling the “Trouble in God’s Country” story is figuring out how to explain the magnitude of Georgia’s urban-rural divide in ways that are actually useful – to the general public as well as policy makers. It’s not exactly news that Metro Atlantans are more prosperous economically, better educated and healthier than their country cousins.

And, we’ve long had various types of county rankings, and one county is always No. 1 and another is No. 159. (Right now, Forsyth County ranks first in most categories you can come up with, and we have something of a barroom brawl amongst a fair-sized group counties to see which is at the bottom of the heap in Georgia. More later on this.)

But rankings don’t give you a real sense of the gap between Georgia’s best and worst, or whether that gap is getting bigger or smaller. Lately I’ve been wallowing around in various piles of national and 50-state data to see if I could find anything that might be helpful. I’ve still got more work to do, but herewith a few nuggets from my wallowing to date:

The gap between Georgia’s best-off and worst-off counties is probably bigger than in just about any other state. I’ve got a couple of sources on this. One is from a Washington think tank called the Economic Innovation Group (EIG). EIG has pulled together several tons of economic, educational, poverty and housing data on all 3,000-plus counties in the country and generated what it calls a “Distressed Communities Index,” or DCI, for each county. Then it used those index scores to create national rankings. The best possible DCI is 1 and the worst is 100. For 2017, the top Georgia county in EIG’s rankings was Oconee County, with a DCI of 1.1 (Forsyth County came in second with a DCI of 1.6). Oconee ranked 34^th nationally; Forsyth, 49^th. At the very bottom of the EIG rankings, in 3,124^th place, was Stewart County, with a DCI score of 99.9. That’s about as big a divide as you can find. Also worth mentioning: Stewart County had some real competition for that last-place finish. Five other Georgia counties were nipping at its heels in a race to the bottom: Macon, Hancock, Calhoun, Wheeler and Taliaferro counties all had Distressed Community Indexes of more than 99.
My second pot of data on this comes from the folks at County Health Rankings & Roadmaps. Because their data is presented on a state-by-state basis, it takes a little work to build a national picture. Their report includes premature death rates for 2,900 counties (a couple of hundred had such small populations that they couldn’t generate reliable rates). Premature death rates – known formally as Years of Potential Life Lost before Age 75, or YPLL 75 – are sort of the Dow Jones Industrial Average of population health. It’s the best single number to watch to get a feel for the general health of a community. (EIG, by the way, doesn’t include any health data in its DCI calculations, so this is a useful complement to its work.) In these rankings, Forsyth is the top-ranked Georgia county and Oconee came in 2^nd; their national ranks were 55^th and 185^th, respectively, and their respective YPLL 75 rates were 4265 and 5283 (with YPLL 75 rates, the lower the number, the better). At the bottom of this list of 2,900 counties, we find a somewhat different list of Georgia counties. Miller County came in 2,866^th with a YPLL 75 rate of 15646; Warren County did a little better, finishing 2,862^nd with a rate of 15422. Twiggs County came in 2,850^th with a score of 15001 and Quitman County finished at 2,841^st with a rate of 14,797. These are truly third-world numbers and obviously among the worst in the nation.
One of the things that becomes clear from studying the EIG and County Health Rankings data is that it’s not just rural areas that are in trouble. Just about every major population center outside Metro Atlanta ranks poorly nationally on just about every metric available. Worst-off is Albany, which posted a 2017 EIG Distress Score of 99.1 and finished 8^th on EIG’s list of America’s most-distressed small cities – just barely ahead of Flint, Michigan. But most of Georgia’s other regional cities didn’t fare a lot better. On EIG’s list of cities with populations of more than 50,000, Athens-Clarke County, Augusta-Richmond County, Columbus and Valdosta all finished in the bottom quintile nationally, and Savannah just barely avoided falling into the lowest grouping. (For some reason, EIG didn’t include Macon on its list of Georgia cities, but Bibb County was the second-worst major Georgia county on EIG’s county list, not far ahead of Albany’s Dougherty County.) The City of Atlanta was in the middle of the pack nationally, with a DCI score of 59.6. At the top of the Georgia pile was the City of Alpharetta, which ranked 21^st nationally with a Distress Score of 2.6 (again, contrast that with Albany’s 99.1 and you find about as big a divide as possible between otherwise comparable Georgia cities). I won’t go into detail here, but the same is generally true with the County Health Rankings data; Muscogee, Bibb, Richmond and Dougherty all finish in the bottom 500 of the 2,900 counties it ranked nationally.

I think this is important because I’ve long believed that any effort to improve Georgia’s rural areas has to include – and probably start with – the regional hub communities. Whether they like to admit it or not, rural areas depend on those major populations centers for a wide range of support systems, including employment, healthcare, education and shopping. If the Macons and Augustas are allowed to slip past some hard-to-discern tipping point, it may well doom dependent rural areas for multiple generations. As a practical matter, it may already be too late for Albany and much of Southwest Georgia, where the population that isn’t already packing up and leaving is among the least-educated and least-healthy in the nation (if not the world).

——————–

Following are four tables showing the top and bottom 10 Georgia counties in the Economic Innovation Group’s 2017 Distressed Communities Index scores and rankings, and premature death rates as published by County Health Rankings & Roadmaps. The national rankings shown with the premature death data were developed by the writer by assembling a spreadsheet combining County Health Rankings & Roadmap’s from all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

*EIG Top 10 Georgia Counties – 2017*
County	Region	EIG Distress Score	EIG National Rank
Oconee	North Georgia	1.1	34
Forsyth	Metro Atlanta	1.6	49
Cherokee	Metro Atlanta	2.9	92
Fayette	Metro Atlanta	4.9	152
Paulding	Metro Atlanta	5.2	163
Coweta	Middle Georgia	5.6	174
Cobb	Metro Atlanta	6.1	191
Harris	Middle Georgia	8.3	261
Henry	Metro Atlanta	11.6	362
Gwinnett	Metro Atlanta	12.0	375

*EIG Bottom 10 Georgia Counties – 2017*
County	Region	EIG Distress Score	EIG National Rank
Jefferson	Middle Georgia	97.8	3,057
Sumter	South Georgia	98.1	3,065
Lanier	South Georgia	98.4	3,075
Telfair	South Georgia	98.9	3,093
Macon	Middle Georgia	99.1	3,099
Hancock	Middle Georgia	99.5	3,110
Calhoun	South Georgia	99.7	3,117
Wheeler	South Georgia	99.8	3,119
Taliaferro	North Georgia	99.8	3,120
Stewart	South Georgia	99.9	3,124

*County Health Rankings & Roadmaps* *Top 10 Georgia Counties for Premature Death (2015-2017)*
County	Region	Premature Death Rate	National Rank
Forsyth	Metro Atlanta	4265	55
Oconee	North Georgia	5131	185
Gwinnett	Metro Atlanta	5283	223
Fayette	Metro Atlanta	5521	278
Cobb	Metro Atlanta	5605	299
Cherokee	Metro Atlanta	5654	315
Columbia	North Georgia	6084	466
Harris	Middle Georgia	6104	476
Wheeler	South Georgia	6384	581
Echols	South Georgia	6476	633

*County Health Rankings & Roadmaps* *Bottom 10 Georgia Counties for Premature Death (2015-2017)*
County	Region	Premature Death Rate	National Rank
Crisp	South Georgia	11837	2,639
Emanuel	Middle Georgia	11862	2,645
Clinch	South Georgia	12262	2,694
Clay	South Georgia	12341	2,706
Jeff Davis	South Georgia	12805	2,742
Candler	South Georgia	13551	2,792
Quitman	South Georgia	14797	2,841
Twiggs	Middle Georgia	15001	2,850
Warren	Middle Georgia	15422	2,862
Miller	South Georgia	15646	2,866

Aug 9

2 Comments

A Data Mash-Up: University System of Georgia vs. Georgia Department of Corrections. It’s not pretty.

Spend much time sifting through reams of data about Georgia counties and sooner or later you’ll stumble across an interesting factoid you weren’t even looking for.

Here’s one example: Georgia convicts more people of crimes than it sends to college.

Maybe that’s not surprising, but it still seems a little troubling, and it may be one reasonable indicator of the overall social health of a community.

I was pursuing two different lines of research – one with University System data and the other with Department of Corrections statistics – when I noticed the contrast.

Ten years ago, in 2006, 36,202 Georgians matriculated as freshmen at one of the state’s colleges or universities, according to University System of Georgia data. That same year, a total of 66,255 were either convicted or pled guilty to crimes, according to Georgia Department of Corrections (DOC) data. This group included 44,762 who were placed on probation and another 21,493 who were sent to prison. That works out to 1.83 convicts for every college freshman.

Ten years later, by 2015, that ratio had improved. The number of college freshmen was up to 42,908 and the number of total convicts was down to 59,111, giving us about 1.38 new people entering the corrections system for every new college freshman.

That improvement was not, however, spread evenly across the state. In 2006, all five of our Trouble in God’s Country regions – Metro Atlanta, Coastal Georgia, Middle Georgia, North Georgia and South Georgia – were cranking out more convicts than college freshmen.

By 2015, Metro Atlanta had turned that around and was producing a few more college freshmen than total convicts – 22,903 college freshmen to 22,042 convicts. The other four regions still had negative college freshmen-to-convict ratios.

The key driver in that change has been a gradual but steady shift in where Georgia’s college freshmen come from.

What might be called a “regional share of criminals” went largely unchanged between 2006 and 2015. Every single region finished the 10-year stretch within a single percentage point of where it started. Metro Atlanta’s share of new convicts was exactly the same in 2015 as it had been in 2006 – 37.3 percent. Coastal Georgia and Middle Georgia saw their shares drop by a fraction of a point, while North Georgia and South Georgia each eked up by less than a point.

But the distribution of college freshmen did change significantly. In 2006, 46.2 percent of Georgians enrolling at the state’s colleges and universities came from our 12-county Metro Atlanta region; by 2015, that number was up to 53.4 percent. All four other regions saw their share of college freshmen decline at least slightly, with our 56-county South Georgia region taking the biggest hit; it was down from 14.1 percent of college freshmen in 2006 to 10.6 percent in 2015.

I mentioned above that the state’s convict population falls into two categories – those who are placed on probation (presumably for lesser crimes and/or plea deals) and those who actually go to prison. Because that overall convict population is larger than the number of college freshmen we produce each year, it follows that most individual counties would fit that profile, and that is indeed the case. Of Georgia’s 159 counties, 141 produced more criminals than college freshmen in 2015.

Of those, 22 actually sent more people to prison than to college. That list of counties earning that dubious distinction is as follows:

Region	County	2015 College Freshmen	2015 Prison Admits
Middle	Baldwin	83	85
South	Ben Hill	51	94
North	Chattooga	47	118
South	Clay	5	9
North	Elbert	45	59
North	Floyd	334	420
North	Franklin	40	61
North	Greene	40	46
North	Hart	44	70
Middle	Jones	69	82
South	Lanier	5	16
North	Madison	59	63
Middle	Meriwether	65	72
Middle	Richmond	531	558
Middle	Spalding	185	212
North	Stephens	50	71
North	Taliaferro	3	6
North	Towns	16	18
Middle	Treutlen	26	27
Middle	Troup	206	267
Middle	Twiggs	19	20
North	Walker	134	173

At the other end of the spectrum, 16 counties produced more college freshmen than total convicts (prison admits and probationers combined). Here’s that honor roll:

Region	County	2015 College Freshmen	2015 Criminal Convicts (Prison Admits & Probationers)
Coastal	Bryan	239	96
Coastal	Camden	241	188
Atlanta	Cherokee	1,117	920
Middle	Columbia	764	588
Coastal	Effingham	306	229
Atlanta	Fayette	784	471
Atlanta	Forsyth	1,268	548
Middle	Glascock	12	8
Atlanta	Gwinnett	5,664	3679
Atlanta	Henry	1,362	935
South	Lee	216	111
North	Oconee	305	65
Atlanta	Paulding	587	346
Middle	Pike	106	20
South	Schley	38	25
South	Turner	45	40

Probably the strongest performer in this category is fast-growing Forsyth County, which also posts some of the state’s strongest economic, educational and public health numbers. Even a decade ago, in 2006, Forsyth County was already sending more people to college than into the criminal justice system, and it’s widened the gap considerably in the 10 years since then, as this chart shows.

In 2006, Forsyth sent 150 more people to college than into the criminal justice system; by 2015, it was sending more than two people to college for each one it convicted of a crime.

Just about the entire Metro Atlanta region performed well in this area, however. Of the 12 counties in our Metro Atlanta region, all but one saw its ratio of college freshmen-to-convicts improve over the 10-year period. The exception was Fayette County. It still finished on the honor roll (above) of counties sending more people to college than into the criminal justice system, but nonetheless finished the 10-year period with slightly poorer numbers.

Mar 26

Forsyth County moves to the top of the 2015 TIGC Power Ratings

With the publication Wednesday of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s 2015 County Health Rankings, we can indeed report that, as expected, Forsyth County has slipped past perennial leader Oconee County and claimed 1st place in the 2015 Trouble in God’s Country Power Ratings. Read more

Mar 24

A new Power Ratings champ?

Every year during the old Partner Up! for Public Health campaign, we built a major part of the annual publicity effort around what we called Power Ratings that paired county health rankings produced by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation with county economic rankings generated each year by the Georgia Department of Community Affairs (DCA).

Throughout the 2010-through-2014 period for which we compiled rankings, Oconee County reigned supreme. For each of those five years, it was No. 1 in DCA’s economic rankings,[1] which are generated by a formula that incorporates local unemployment and poverty rates along with local per capita income. And, it ranked either 2^nd or 3^rd in RWJ’s annual health outcomes rankings, which are based on a formula that includes premature death rates, the percent of the population reporting being in poor or fair health, number of days worked missed for reasons of physical or mental health, and low birthweight. Read more

Connecting the Dots: Health, Education, Economics and Politics in Rural Georgia.