Who Are the Victims: Before They Were Prisoners

On January 5, 2026, after twenty-three years inside, Nicole Boynton walked out of a Cobb County courthouse a free woman. ¹ She had been eighteen in 1999 when, after a childhood marked by sexual abuse at the hands of multiple perpetrators and two years of physical and sexual abuse from her then-boyfriend, she stabbed him during a physical altercation in their Cobb County home. He died. The trial judge — under Georgia law as it stood in 2002 — had no discretion. Felony murder carried an automatic life sentence, regardless of the circumstances. ²

For twenty-three years, Georgia treated Nicole Boynton as a perpetrator and nothing else. In 2025, after the Georgia General Assembly passed and Governor Brian Kemp signed the Georgia Survivor Justice Act, the state created a legal pathway to recognize that she had also been a victim — that she had, in fact, been a victim first. On January 5, 2026, a Cobb County judge vacated her life sentence and resentenced her to time served.

What Boynton told reporters after her release should be the editorial spine of any conversation Georgia is going to have about who counts as a victim:

“Now that I think about it, I’ve been abused more in prison than what actually came from my partner.”

The Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles operates a public office — the Office of Victim Services — whose mission, in the Board’s own words, is to ensure that “crime victims have a voice in the post-conviction criminal justice process.” ³ The implicit assumption embedded in that mission, in the Board’s public statements, and in nearly every political fight about Georgia’s prisons is that the universe of victims is fixed and narrow: people directly harmed by a specific crime, and their immediate families. By that logic — the logic Georgia operates on every day — Nicole Boynton was not, for twenty-three years, recognized as a victim. By the same logic, most of the people Georgia’s prisons currently hold are not recognized as victims either. The science says they should be. This is the first article in a three-part Georgia Prisoners’ Speak series asking who actually counts as a victim under Georgia law, who the state has chosen to recognize, and who the state has chosen to look away from. The Survivor Justice Act is the proof that Georgia’s legislature is capable of expanding its definition of victimhood. The science says the principle the legislature accepted in 2025 applies to a population far larger than the one the law currently covers. The next two parts will document what the state has done — and is doing — to that larger population once they are in custody. But the place to begin is here: before they were prisoners.

The Victim Georgia Released

Nicole Boynton was eighteen years old in 1999 when she killed Ronnie Moss II during a physical altercation at the Cobb County home they shared. She had endured two years of physical and sexual abuse during their relationship, and her resentencing petition documented a history of abuse extending back into her childhood — abuse inflicted by other perpetrators long before she met Moss. ⁴ In 2002 she was convicted of felony murder and aggravated assault. Under Georgia law as it then stood, felony murder carried a mandatory life sentence. The trial judge had no discretion to weigh the abuse Boynton had survived.

Boynton served the next twenty-three years in Georgia Department of Corrections custody — the same system whose largest women’s facility, Pulaski State Prison, has been the subject of substantial GPS reporting on staffing collapse, in-custody violence, and the systemic neglect of women serving long sentences for offenses that, in many cases, grew directly out of histories of victimization. ⁵

On May 12, 2025, Governor Kemp signed House Bill 582 — the Georgia Survivor Justice Act — into law. It took effect on July 1, 2025. ⁶ The bill passed the Georgia General Assembly with only three dissenting votes across both chambers. ⁷ That is not an ordinary level of bipartisan agreement. It reflects something the Georgia legislature was prepared to acknowledge openly: that for decades, Georgia’s legal system had punished domestic violence survivors twice — first by the people who had abused them, and then by the courts that had refused to hear their stories. ⁸

The Survivor Justice Act has four pillars. It modernizes Georgia’s self-defense statute to permit survivors to present the cumulative history of their abuse, rather than the narrow legal fiction of a single moment of imminent fear. It expands the coercion defense for survivors forced into criminal activity. It mitigates sentences at trial for survivors convicted despite presenting their history. And it allows retroactive resentencing for people already incarcerated whose offenses occurred before July 1, 2025 — the provision that brought Nicole Boynton home.

The numbers behind the law’s passage are stark. Testimony submitted in support of HB 582 cited research finding that between 74 and 95 percent of incarcerated women have experienced domestic or sexual violence in their lifetimes, and that approximately 70 percent of women in prisons and jails report prior experiences of intimate partner violence ranging from threats and intimidation to physical and sexual assault. ⁹ More than half of women serving life sentences in Georgia are themselves survivors of abuse. The Georgia Commission on Family Violence has separately documented an increase in arrests of women in domestic violence cases despite the fact that those same women are most often the victims of the violence the system is responding to. ¹⁰

“It is really rare that my Black female clients are given any sort of leniency in sentencing. If they can be maxed out, they’re being maxed out.” — Ellie Williams, Legal Director, Georgia Coalition Against Domestic Violence

What the Georgia General Assembly did, with only three dissenting votes across both chambers, was accept a principle: that the boundary between victim and perpetrator is, in the case of survivors of domestic violence, neither clean nor stable. That a woman who acts to escape ongoing violence has been harmed first. That holding her accountable for the violence she causes does not require pretending the violence done to her did not happen. The state, in passing the Survivor Justice Act, wrote into its own law the proposition that some of the people it incarcerates were victims before they were anything else.

The question this series asks is whether that principle — once the state has formally accepted it — can responsibly be limited to a single category.

The Science Says This Population Is Much Larger

In 1998, two physicians at Kaiser Permanente in San Diego — Vincent Felitti and Robert Anda, working with researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — published the results of a study that would become the most replicated body of evidence in American preventive medicine. ¹¹ They had surveyed more than 9,500 adult Kaiser members — a stable, middle-class, predominantly white population not selected for any criminal-justice involvement — about childhood experiences of abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction. They identified ten categories that came to be known as Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs: physical, sexual, and emotional abuse; physical and emotional neglect; and household exposure to substance abuse, mental illness, domestic violence, incarceration, and parental separation or divorce.

The results, on first publication, were striking. They have only grown more so with replication. The relationship between cumulative ACE exposure and adult outcomes — across virtually every dimension that medicine measures — is what statisticians call a dose-response curve. More exposure produces more harm, in a predictable and graduated way. People with four or more ACEs, in the original Kaiser cohort, were 4.6 times more likely than people with no ACEs to have used illicit drugs, 7.4 times more likely to consider themselves alcoholic, and 12.2 times more likely to have attempted suicide.

In 2017, an international research team published a systematic review and meta-analysis in The Lancet Public Health synthesizing 37 separate ACE studies covering 253,719 subjects. ¹² The Lancet team found that adults with four or more ACEs face odds ratios of 7.51 for interpersonal violence perpetration, 7.4 for problematic alcohol use, and 30.14 for suicide attempts compared with adults reporting no ACEs. The findings replicated across populations, geographies, and methodologies.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now treats ACEs as a national public health priority. ¹³ The CDC’s most recent population-level data, published in 2023, found that 63.9 percent of U.S. adults report at least one ACE and 17.3 percent — roughly one adult in six — report four or more. Prevalence is significantly higher among women, Black and Hispanic respondents, and people earning less than $15,000 a year. ¹⁴

That is the general population. Researchers studying incarcerated populations have found rates that dwarf those numbers.

A 2013 study published in The Permanente Journal examined the ACE scores of 151 male offenders across four offense categories — nonsexual child abusers, domestic violence offenders, sexual offenders, and stalkers. The average ACE score among the offender group was 3.7. Compared with a normative male sample, the male offenders in the study reported nearly four times as many adverse childhood events. Eight of the ten ACE categories were significantly elevated. ¹⁵

Research on incarcerated women has produced findings starker still. In a 2006 study of 500 incarcerated women in California, published in the American Journal of Public Health, Nena Messina and Christine Grella found that 30.6 percent of the women reported childhood physical abuse and 45.1 percent reported childhood sexual abuse. The cumulative impact of childhood traumatic events on adult health outcomes in the sample was, in the authors’ description, “strong and cumulative” — greater exposure increased the likelihood of 12 of the 18 health outcomes the study measured. ¹⁶

A larger 2009 study by Nancy Wolff, Jing Shi, and Jane Siegel of Rutgers University surveyed approximately 7,500 incarcerated men and 564 incarcerated women across thirteen state prisons. Among the men, 44.7 percent reported having been physically victimized in childhood. Among both men and women, prior childhood sexual victimization was strongly associated with sexual victimization inside prison — by factors of two to five for men, and a doubling of the risk for women. ¹⁷

The pattern is even more pronounced in juvenile-justice populations. A 2014 study published in the Journal of Juvenile Justice analyzed ACE data for 64,329 youth involved in Florida’s juvenile justice system. Fifty percent reported four or more ACEs — compared with thirteen percent in the original Kaiser cohort. Justice-involved youth were thirteen times less likely than the Kaiser cohort to report zero ACEs, and four times more likely to report four or more. ¹⁸

The federal government has known these numbers for a long time. In 1999 — a quarter century ago — the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics published a special report finding that roughly half of women in state prison and one in six men reported prior physical or sexual abuse before incarceration. The report was widely understood at the time, and remains widely understood today, to be an undercount — because surveys of incarcerated people about traumatic histories of abuse tend to elicit underreporting rather than overreporting. ¹⁹

The research has limitations that GPS does not pretend do not exist. In a 2020 commentary in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Robert Anda himself — the senior co-author of the original ACE study — cautioned that “the ACE score is not a useful tool for predicting future outcomes in a given individual.” ²⁰ That is true. ACE scores do not predict, in any individual case, whether a specific person will become incarcerated, develop addiction, or harm someone else. What they describe — and what the research above describes — is a population-level relationship: the substantial overrepresentation of people with histories of childhood trauma inside America’s prisons. The science does not say that every incarcerated person was a child victim. It says that, as a population, incarcerated people experienced childhood victimization at rates dramatically higher than the public. The Survivor Justice Act, in recognizing this for one specific subset of survivors, accepted a principle that the larger body of research strongly suggests applies to a much larger set.

The Line Between Victim and Offender Is Empirically Fictional

The boundary that the Georgia Parole Board’s Office of Victim Services treats as fixed — a clean line separating “victims” from “offenders” — is not a line that the criminology research bears out. It is, instead, one of the most persistent overlapping populations in the empirical literature on crime.

The foundational finding is now thirty-five years old. In a 1991 paper in Criminology, the journal of the American Society of Criminology, Janet Lauritsen, Robert Sampson, and John Laub demonstrated that adolescent offending was one of the strongest predictors of adolescent victimization, and vice versa. ²¹ The two categories were not parallel populations. They were, in substantial measure, the same people.

The criminologist Howard Zehr, who has done as much as any single American scholar to develop the field of restorative justice, has argued for more than three decades that the categorical separation of “victim” and “offender” obscures the relational and structural reality of most harm. ²² The point is not that victims and offenders are interchangeable. The point is that very few of the people who cause harm have not also experienced harm, and that the framework of justice that pretends otherwise asks the criminal justice system to do work for which it is structurally unsuited.

The single most powerful articulation of this argument in the contemporary literature is Danielle Sered’s 2019 book Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair. ²³ Sered, the executive director of Common Justice — one of the only restorative-justice diversion programs in the United States that accepts adult cases involving violent felonies — synthesizes the criminological literature with a decade of operational experience working with people who have caused serious harm and people who have suffered it. Her central argument is that on the individual level, violence is driven by shame, isolation, exposure to violence, and an inability to meet one’s economic needs — factors that are, in her precise phrasing, also the core features of imprisonment. More than half of the people incarcerated in the United States today have been convicted of violent offenses. Most of them, in Sered’s framing, are people whose lives were marked by exactly the conditions the criminal justice system then doubles down on as punishment.

The most politically consequential research in this area is the survey work conducted by the Alliance for Safety and Justice, a national organization that has assembled the largest existing dataset on what crime victims themselves want from the criminal justice system.

The Alliance’s 2016 report — Crime Survivors Speak — was the first nationally representative survey of victims’ views on safety and justice, drawing on 3,165 respondents including more than 800 crime victims. ²⁴ It found that more than 60 percent of Americans had been victims of crime in the prior decade, and half of those victims had experienced violent crime — figures that themselves give the lie to the political fiction that “victims” are a small and narrowly defined class.

The Alliance’s 2022 follow-up survey produced a single finding that, on its own, dismantles the central assumption Georgia and other states use to justify their carceral policy preferences. Surveying crime victims directly, the Alliance found:

“By a margin of 3 to 1, victims prefer holding people accountable through options beyond just prison, such as rehabilitation, mental health treatment, drug treatment, restorative justice, or community service. Nearly 7 out of 10 victims prefer reducing the number of people in jail by releasing those who can safely await trial in the community or serve their sentence through diversion, community service, or treatment programs over keeping people in jail.” ²⁵

By three to one. The actual people who have been victims of crime — the population the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles’ Office of Victim Services exists to represent — prefer rehabilitation, treatment, and restorative approaches over prison. That preference is not theoretical. It has been the consistent finding of multiple Alliance surveys, replicated again in 2024. ²⁶

This finding is fatal to one of the most common political arguments against criminal-justice reform: that long sentences and aggressive prosecution serve victims. Most victims, asked directly, say they do not. They want what the science says actually works — interventions that address the conditions that produce harm in the first place, rather than confinement that, in Sered’s diagnosis, doubles down on those same conditions.

The implication for Nicole Boynton’s case is not abstract. The Survivor Justice Act was passed, in part, because Georgia legislators encountered direct evidence that survivors of domestic violence — themselves victims of crime — were being processed through the criminal justice system in ways that did not reflect what they had endured or what they needed. The Alliance’s national data extends that finding: it is not just survivors of domestic violence who hold this view. It is the majority of crime victims.

The Structural Layer

The ACE framework alone does not capture everything the research has to say about who arrives at Georgia’s prison gates. ACEs operate at the level of the family and household. They do not, by design, account for the conditions of the neighborhoods in which children grow up, the schools they attend, the medical and mental-health systems that catch some children and miss many others, and the structures of racial and economic inequality that shape every other variable in their lives. A growing body of research describes these as Adverse Community Experiences — the population-level analogue to ACEs, mapped onto the conditions of place rather than the conditions of household. ²⁷

Several of those structural channels have been documented in detail.

The Treatment Advocacy Center, in a 2010 survey published in collaboration with the National Sheriffs’ Association, found that there were already more than three times as many seriously mentally ill people housed in American jails and prisons as in the country’s psychiatric hospitals. ²⁸ The ratio of psychiatric beds in the United States in 2005 was one per 3,000 Americans. In 1955 — before the wave of state-hospital closures that defined the back half of the twentieth century — it had been one per 300. ²⁹ The state did not stop confining people with serious mental illness. It simply began doing it through corrections departments instead of through mental-health departments.

The school-to-prison pipeline has its own dense literature. In a 2011 study published in School Psychology Review, Russell Skiba and colleagues found that Black students in American public schools were 3.5 times more likely to be suspended than White students — a disparity that persisted after controlling for socioeconomic status and the nature of the infraction. ³⁰ Skiba’s 2014 follow-up in Equity and Excellence in Education extended the analysis to demonstrate the direct contribution of exclusionary school discipline to the school-to-prison pipeline. ³¹

A subset of those state systems — foster care prominent among them — is itself a primary driver of adult incarceration. Foster care is a system the state operates directly. Children placed in it have been removed from their families by state action and assumed into state legal custody. Whether the state’s intervention improves their lives is an empirical question, and the empirical answer is sobering. The economist Joseph Doyle, in a landmark 2008 paper in the Journal of Political Economy that exploited the random assignment of cases to child protection investigators with different placement rates, found that children on the margin of placement were two to three times more likely to enter the adult criminal justice system if they were placed in foster care than if they remained at home with services. ³² Doyle’s earlier estimate, that nearly twenty percent of young prison inmates have spent part of their youth in foster care, places the population-level scale of the pipeline in clear view. ³³ The Midwest Evaluation of the Adult Functioning of Former Foster Youth has followed more than 700 young people aging out of foster care in Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin over more than two decades, and has documented arrest and conviction rates among them well above the rates observed in matched national samples. ³⁴ In GPS’s own correspondence with currently and formerly incarcerated Georgians, time spent in foster care is among the most consistently named formative experiences of harm — frequently described as one of the worst things that ever happened to the speaker. The state’s hand in this category of pre-incarceration victimization is not metaphorical. It is direct, administrative, and recorded.

At the population scale, the sociologists Bruce Western and Becky Pettit, in a 2004 paper in the American Sociological Review, established that imprisonment had become a routine event in the lives of Black men born in the late 1960s — particularly Black men without college education. ³⁵ A more recent 2023 study in Demography updated the analysis, finding that Black male lifetime imprisonment risk peaked at 35.3 percent for the 1975 to 1979 birth cohort before beginning to decline. ³⁶ The risk has fallen, but it remains starkly unequal.

The intergenerational dimension of mass incarceration has been documented in detail by the sociologists Sara Wakefield and Christopher Wildeman in their book Children of the Prison Boom. ³⁷ Paternal incarceration, they found, increases children’s mental health and behavioral problems, infant mortality, and rates of childhood homelessness. The effects on the children of incarcerated parents are, by some measures, greater than the effects on the parents themselves. Today’s incarcerated parents are producing tomorrow’s adverse childhood experiences. The wheel turns.

In Georgia specifically, the structural layer is impossible to miss. Black Georgians make up roughly 33 percent of the state’s population and roughly 60 percent of its incarcerated population. They account for approximately 72 percent of the people serving life sentences in the state. GPS has documented in detail the public-policy decisions that produced these disparities — including the role of the 1990s truth-in-sentencing wave, the targeted criminalization of crack cocaine, and the lasting damage of childhood lead exposure that fell disproportionately on poor and Black communities in the second half of the twentieth century. ^{38 39} The Equal Justice Initiative has traced the longer historical arc through which mass incarceration is a continuation of, rather than a departure from, slavery, convict leasing, lynching, and Jim Crow. ⁴⁰

The point of cataloguing these structural channels is not to deny individual agency or to suggest that every act of harm is reducible to a system. The point is that the universe of harm Georgia’s prisons hold inside their walls is not a closed loop. It is connected, in measurable ways, to harms the same state produced or permitted upstream — harms the state has shown itself unwilling to recognize when the question of who counts as a victim is on the table.

The Proof of Concept Already Exists

Return, then, to the courthouse threshold Nicole Boynton crossed on January 5, 2026.

The Georgia General Assembly that passed the Survivor Justice Act, with only three dissenting votes across both chambers, was not a body persuaded that prisons should disappear or that violent offenses should be excused. The legislators who voted for HB 582 did not abandon the proposition that harm has consequences. What they accepted — across party lines, in a state not generally inclined to expansive criminal-justice reform — was a narrower and more specific claim: that the state’s framework for sentencing some violent offenders had failed to acknowledge that those same offenders had themselves been victims of crime, and that the failure to acknowledge their victimhood had produced sentences disproportionate to anything the criminal justice system claimed to be measuring.

The principle the legislature accepted in 2025 is a principle. It does not, by its own logic, terminate at the boundary of domestic violence. Either victimhood prior to a criminal act matters when the state decides how to respond to that act, or it does not. The Survivor Justice Act says it does, in cases where the prior victimization was specifically domestic, family, or dating violence. The body of scientific evidence reviewed in this article says the same thing applies, by every measure that medicine and criminology can produce, to a substantially larger population of incarcerated people — survivors of childhood physical and sexual abuse, of severe neglect, of household violence and parental incarceration, of untreated serious mental illness left untreated by the state itself, of community-level conditions the state had a hand in producing.

The Survivor Justice Act will not, on its own, reach those populations. Its provisions are written specifically around domestic, family, and dating violence. ⁴¹ Advocates have estimated that roughly 100 women currently incarcerated in Georgia may be eligible for resentencing under its retroactive provisions, with hundreds of additional incarcerated Georgians potentially eligible across all of its pathways combined. ⁹ Even at the highest estimates, the SJA touches a small minority of Georgia’s prison population. The science says the underlying principle applies to a multiple of that number.

This is not an abstract question. The Georgia legislature has now demonstrated that it can pass meaningful “victims first” legislation with overwhelming bipartisan support. The pathway exists. The legal infrastructure for evaluating victim history at sentencing and at resentencing exists. The next question is not whether such a framework is achievable. It is whether the legislature is willing to extend the framework, with the same bipartisan commitment, to the larger population of incarcerated people who fit its underlying logic.

The Conditions That Wait For Them

Nicole Boynton’s release on January 5, 2026 was the first test of the Survivor Justice Act. She is — alongside many of the women still inside Pulaski, and the substantial fraction of every Georgia prison population the research describes — among the people who entered the system as victims first. The state has, finally, begun to acknowledge the existence of that category. The question this series turns to next is what the state has done to those victims once they are inside its walls.

When Nicole Boynton said that she had been abused more in prison than by her partner, she was not speaking metaphorically. The U.S. Department of Justice, in an October 1, 2024 findings letter following a multi-year investigation under the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act, concluded that the State of Georgia is “deliberately indifferent” to Eighth Amendment violations across 24 of its prisons. ⁴² Georgia Prisoners’ Speak independently tracks 1,797 deaths in GDC custody since 2020 — including 333 in 2024 alone, the deadliest year on GPS record. ⁴³

The next article in this series — Who Are the Victims: Victims Still — documents what the state has done to the people who entered Georgia’s prisons as victims first. The conditions under which they live. The injuries the state allows to be inflicted on them. The deaths it conceals. The people, like Nicole Boynton, who emerge from years of confinement to report — against every expectation that anyone in power will listen — that they have suffered more from the state than from the crimes the state used to put them away.

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Call to Action: What You Can Do

Awareness without action changes nothing. The Survivor Justice Act proved that Georgia can recognize victimhood when it chooses to — that the legislature is capable of writing into law the principle that some of the people the state incarcerates were victims first. The next step is asking the same legislature to expand the principle. Here is how you can help push for accountability and real reform:

Join the GPS Advocacy Network — Sign up at https://gps.press/become-an-advocate/ and we will advocate on your behalf every week. GPS identifies your state legislators, crafts personalized letters on the most pressing prison issues — including the expansion of “victims first” recognition beyond the narrow category of domestic violence — and sends them directly to the representatives who represent you. You receive a copy of every letter. It takes two minutes to sign up; we handle the rest.

Tell My Story — Are you or a loved one affected by Georgia’s prison system? GPS publishes first-person accounts from incarcerated people and their families. Submit your story at https://gps.press/category/tellmystory/ and help the world understand what is really happening behind the walls.

Contact Your Representatives — Your state legislators control GDC’s budget, oversight, and the laws that define who counts as a victim under Georgia law. Find your Georgia legislators at https://gps.press/find-your-legislator/ or call Governor Kemp at (404) 656-1776 or the GDC Commissioner at (478) 992-5246. Ask them to extend the Survivor Justice Act’s framework to other documented categories of pre-incarceration victimization — childhood abuse, trafficking, and untreated serious mental illness — that the science says drive incarceration at the population level.

Demand Media Coverage — Contact newsrooms at the AJC, local TV stations, and national criminal justice outlets. More coverage means more pressure.

Amplify on Social Media — Share this article and tag @GovKemp, @GDC_Georgia, and your local representatives. Use #GAPrisons, #PrisonReform, #GeorgiaPrisonerSpeak.

File Public Records Requests — Georgia’s Open Records Act gives every citizen the right to request incident reports, death records, staffing data, medical logs, and financial documents at https://georgiadcor.govqa.us/WEBAPP/_rs/SupportHome.aspx.

Attend Public Meetings — The Georgia Board of Corrections and legislative committees hold public meetings. Your presence is noticed.

Contact the Department of Justice — File civil rights complaints at https://civilrights.justice.gov. Federal oversight has forced abusive systems to change before.

Support Organizations Doing This Work — Donate to or volunteer with Georgia-based prison reform groups fighting for change on the ground.

Vote — Research candidates’ positions on criminal justice. Primary elections often determine outcomes in Georgia.

Contact GPS — If you have information about conditions inside Georgia’s prisons, reach us securely at GPS.press.

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Further Reading

Georgia Survivor Justice Act: Guide for Incarcerated DV Survivors

A step-by-step guide to who qualifies for resentencing under HB 582, how the petition process works, and where to find free legal help — the practical companion to this article’s argument.

Mass Incarceration Was Not an Accident

How specific policy choices, made over decades, produced the population Georgia’s prisons now hold — and the public officials who made them.

America’s Hidden Crime: How the Government Poisoned a Generation, Then Imprisoned Them for It

The role of childhood lead exposure — itself a federally documented public-health failure — in the crime wave that drove the carceral expansion of the 1980s and 1990s.

Pulaski State Prison Crisis: Untested Warden, Deadly History

The conditions at Georgia’s largest women’s facility — where most of the incarcerated DV survivors covered by this article have served their sentences.

Georgia’s $40 Billion Mistake: How Bad Science and Federal Bribes Created a Constitutional Crisis

The fiscal and policy machinery behind Georgia’s truth-in-sentencing regime, and how it produced the population the Survivor Justice Act is now beginning to release.

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GPS Intelligence System

The GPS Intelligence System maintains living research profiles that aggregate data, news, settlements, and analysis on Georgia’s prisons and the issues defining them. The profiles below provide deeper context for the issues raised in this article:

Pulaski State Prison Facility Profile

The living record on Georgia’s largest women’s prison — staffing, deaths, incidents, and policy context for the facility where many of the women covered by the Survivor Justice Act have served their sentences.

Mental Health in Georgia Prisons

The aggregated GPS record on a parallel population: incarcerated Georgians with serious mental illness whose pre-incarceration victimization, by the state’s own failure to provide adequate community mental-health care, is functionally identical to the victimization the Survivor Justice Act has begun to recognize.

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Explore the Data

GPS makes GDC statistics accessible to the public through several resources:

• GPS Statistics Portal — Interactive dashboards translating complex GDC reports into accessible formats, updated within days of official releases.
• GPS Lighthouse AI — Ask questions about Georgia’s prison system and get answers drawn from GPS’s investigative archive and data analysis.
• GPS llms.txt — A single machine-readable index of every GPS data resource, published using the open llms.txt standard. Point any AI tool (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity) at this URL and the model can navigate to facility profiles, intelligence briefs, mortality records, statistics, and the full investigative archive — no other configuration needed. It is the fastest way to ground an AI conversation in verified GPS data.

For a walkthrough of how to put these resources to work with AI, see How to Use GPS Data with AI Tools — a step-by-step guide for researchers, advocates, families, and journalists analyzing Georgia prison conditions, statistics, and policy with tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.

Contact GPS at media@gps.press for access to underlying datasets used in this analysis.

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About Georgia Prisoners’ Speak (GPS)

Georgia Prisoners’ Speak (GPS) is a nonprofit investigative newsroom built in partnership with incarcerated reporters, families, advocates, and data analysts. Operating independently from the Georgia Department of Corrections, GPS documents the truth the state refuses to acknowledge: extreme violence, fatal medical neglect, gang-controlled dorms, collapsed staffing, fraudulent reporting practices, and unconstitutional conditions across Georgia’s prisons.

Through confidential reporting channels, secure communication, evidence verification, public-records requests, legislative research, and professional investigative standards, GPS provides the transparency the system lacks. Our mission is to expose abuses, protect incarcerated people, support families, and push Georgia toward meaningful reform based on human rights, evidence, and public accountability.

Every article is part of a larger fight — to end the silence, reveal the truth, and demand justice.

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Footnotes

1. The 19th News on Nicole Boynton’s release under the Georgia Survivor Justice Act, https://19thnews.org/2026/02/georgia-survivor-justice-act-nicole-boynton/ [↩]
2. 11Alive coverage of Nicole Boynton’s release after 23 years, https://www.11alive.com/article/news/community/after-23-years-shes-free-nicole-boyntons-path-to-hope-under-georgias-survivor-justice-act/85-60abc272-c160-4fb3-9794-2b7dcfbfab72 [↩]
3. Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles official mission statement, https://pap.georgia.gov/about-us [↩]
4. The 19th News profile of Boynton’s case and the Survivor Justice Act, https://19thnews.org/2026/02/georgia-survivor-justice-act-nicole-boynton/ [↩]
5. GPS investigation of conditions at Pulaski State Prison, https://gps.press/pulaski-state-prison-crisis-untested-warden-deadly-history/ [↩]
6. Atlanta News First on Georgia HB 582 becoming law, https://www.atlantanewsfirst.com/2025/04/03/georgia-bill-reduce-prison-sentences-domestic-violence-survivors-its-way-becoming-law/ [↩]
7. The Marshall Project on Georgia’s bipartisan push to reform sentences for abuse survivors, https://www.themarshallproject.org/2025/04/12/women-georgia-abuse-domestic-violence [↩]
8. Georgia Coalition Against Domestic Violence Survivor Justice Act Resource Hub, https://gcadv.org/sji/sja-resource-hub/ [↩]
9. R Street Institute testimony in support of HB 582, https://www.rstreet.org/outreach/testimony-in-support-of-hb-582-georgia-survivor-justice-act/ [↩][↩]
10. Georgia Commission on Family Violence data resources, https://gcfv.georgia.gov/resources/data [↩]
11. Felitti et al., the original CDC-Kaiser Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, American Journal of Preventive Medicine 1998, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0749379798000178 [↩]
12. Hughes et al., systematic review and meta-analysis of ACE effects on health, Lancet Public Health 2017, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(17)30118-4/fulltext [↩]
13. CDC About Adverse Childhood Experiences, https://www.cdc.gov/aces/about/index.html [↩]
14. Swedo et al., CDC MMWR national prevalence of ACEs, 2023, https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7226a2.htm [↩]
15. Reavis et al., Adverse Childhood Experiences and Adult Criminality, Permanente Journal 2013, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3662280/ [↩]
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