…and the bill keeps climbing

By the state’s own payment records, Department of Corrections spending has risen by roughly half since 2018 — and the enacted budget for the years ahead holds near its all-time high.

In $ billions. Scale starts at $1.0B (not zero) so the increase is visible. FY2018–2025 = actual payments recorded in Open Georgia; FY2026–2027 = the state’s GDC budget (Governor’s Budget Report FY2027, via our GDC budget breakdown). By the state’s own books, FY2025 actual spending across all fund sources reached a record $1.91 billion.

The budget, by program

Here is how the enacted Amended FY2026 budget divides up — the state’s own categories. More than half goes to running state prisons; the next-largest single line is health care; and for-profit private-prison companies take a slice of their own.

Follow the payments: who GDC paid, FY2018–2025

Every figure below is an eight-year total from the State of Georgia’s transparency portal (open.ga.gov) — the state’s own record of what the Department of Corrections paid each recipient.

What the state buys — and what it withholds

Eight years of actual payments, by category. The contrast is the whole story: the state spends billions on staff and on private healthcare companies, and a rounding error on feeding people.

The vendors the state doesn’t pay — because families do

Two of the biggest names in prison profiteering are nearly invisible in the state’s payment records. Securus — the prison phone-and-tablet company — shows just $2.2 million from the state across eight years. The commissary vendor shows essentially nothing. That is not because they make little money. It is because the state does not pay them — prisoners’ families do, through per-call charges, tablet fees, and commissary markups. Inside a Georgia prison, a 20-cent pack of ramen sells for about ninety cents — a markup of roughly 350% on the cheapest staple in the store. The state underfunds the basics, then sells them back to families at a markup. (See our prison-food investigation.)

When the system fails, the taxpayer pays again

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s investigation, Georgia has paid nearly $20 million since 2018 to settle prisoner death and injury lawsuits — and all of it is State of Georgia (self-insured) money, not the contractors’. Recent payouts include $5 million (a mentally ill man left in a burning cell), $4 million (a man beaten to death by his cellmate after ignored pleas), and $3.2 million (Juan Carlos Ramirez, left in an outdoor cage in 105° heat at Telfair State Prison — a death GDC first called “natural causes”).

And the underfeeding shows up downstream in the medical bill. By GPS’s analysis of the GDC budget, the Department’s medical line ($432 million) has grown 33% in four years while its food line ($31 million) grew 1% — a roughly fourteen-to-one ratio between treating people and feeding them. The state under-feeds at about $0.53 per meal, then pays for the diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular disease that follow. (Full analysis: Georgia Prison Food Crisis.)

The money is public. The choices are political.

Follow the money and the same shape appears at every turn: Georgia spends big on staffing and on private companies, hands the most sensitive job — medical care — to a rotating cast of for-profit contractors, underfunds food and basic care, shifts the cost of phones and commissary onto prisoners’ families, and then bills the taxpayer once more for the medical fallout and the lawsuits.