BlUF: This Must Stop
A mother says she has paid over $2,000 since June to protect her son at Wheeler Correctional Facility, after he told her he would be harmed if she didn’t send money via Cash App. She demands the extortion stop.
A mother says she has paid over $2,000 since June to protect her son at Wheeler Correctional Facility, after he told her he would be harmed if she didn’t send money via Cash App. She demands the extortion stop.
Georgia’s parole board granted release to just 93 of 2,046 lifers in FY2024 — 4.5%. GPS compiled all 24 of the Board’s own annual reports: a generation ago it granted one in five. The collapse was never announced, never explained, and never published as a rate — until now.
Arthur Wimbush was killed at Phillips State Prison thirty days from release. The Chief of Security says every segregation bed was full, so there was nowhere to put a man who needed protecting. The medical examiner certified homicide. Georgia’s bed math is the mechanism.
In 1994, 81% of Georgia voters gave the parole board constitutional authority to parole anyone 62 or older — an exception written into the same amendment that created life without parole. Thirty-two years later, the Board has no rule, no process, and no record of ever using it once.
Corey July had twenty months left on a Floyd County sentence when he was chased across the Hancock State Prison yard and cornered at a locked gate. His killer got life without parole. But Georgia built the gate, locked it, and left no one watching the corridor between.
Georgia’s own death investigators recorded what happened to four men at Washington State Prison. A man locked alone in a shower stall to cool down. A cell unchecked for fourteen hours. A tray at 10:19 nobody rose for. In each case the response to a medical crisis was a placement, not treatment.
On July 25 we sent the same eight questions on Georgia’s prison crisis to both nominees for governor. One campaign answered all eight in writing. The other has not responded. We publish the answers we received, without endorsement, and the same offer stands.
Georgia ended direct family packages and funneled families to one vendor: Union Supply. Single T-shirts at $4.55–$9.25 plus shipping and tax, packed by incarcerated women at Arrendale — and the state has never disclosed its cut.
Georgia’s Chief Justice told a new House study committee that the state’s post-conviction system is broken — and that the courts broke much of it. Inside the first meeting of the Blue-Ribbon Study Committee on Criminal Post-Conviction Litigation, and what to watch as it shapes the 2027 session.
Georgia Correctional Industries took $325.7M from GDC over eight years — a mandatory, no-bid “preferred source” running farms and factories on $0 wages. Its books don’t show the food split, its workforce is also its consumer, and the law wrote it that way.