GPS gathers the public record on Georgia’s prison system into one place and publishes it as data, so that any figure can be checked against its primary source and cited directly. A footnote can point at the data itself rather than at GPS prose.
Everything here is built the same way. A figure comes from a government document, an agency’s own published report, a statute, or a court record. The row carries the source it came from, usually with a verbatim quote and a retrievable URL, so you can go and read what we read. Where GPS had to interpret or extract something, the row says so and keeps the agency’s original wording alongside.
Read the caveats before you aggregate anything. Every download carries a meta block with the methodology, a per-field data dictionary, and explicit warnings, and every data page carries the same warnings in its header. They aren’t boilerplate: several raw columns deliberately differ from the citable headline figures, some counts are floors rather than totals, and the caveats record how each dataset is commonly misread. If a number here contradicts one you have seen elsewhere, the caveat usually explains why.
There are three ways in: downloadable files (JSON and CSV), live data pages on this site, and a public server your AI can query directly.
Connect an AI directly: the GPS public MCP server
If you work with Claude, ChatGPT, or any other client that speaks the Model Context Protocol, you can point it at GPS and ask questions of the data without scraping anything:
https://data.gps.press/mcp
It is open, read-only, and needs no key or account. Eighteen tools cover population and system statistics, facilities and their state health inspections, staff rosters, parole decisions, mortality, settlement payouts, length of stay, drug admissions, contraband incidents, the O.C.G.A. mirror, the published quote collection, and site search, plus tools that read any page on gps.press as clean Markdown and list the per-facility and per-issue intelligence briefings.
Every result comes back wrapped with its source URL, a citation line, and that dataset’s caveats, so an assistant using it carries the qualifications into whatever it writes. Ask it to call get_gps_guide() first: that returns GPS’s own orientation file, including the canonical figures and the claims GPS has publicly corrected.
The server exposes public data only. It holds no credentials and has no access to individual incarcerated-person records, confidential sources, case files, or submissions, and no such tool will be added.
Datasets you can download
Research GPS built itself, published as files. Machine index of this section: index.json.
Post-Conviction Procedure in All Fifty States
The full evidence table behind GPS’s fifty-state survey: 750 cells, fifteen questions asked of every state in three passes. The first seven cover procedure (time limits, counsel in a first post-conviction proceeding, where an ineffective-assistance claim must be raised, bars on successive petitions, how self-represented petitions are screened, venue, and whether the trial judge hears the challenge). Two more cover what a felony trial leaves behind on the record and whether any court weighs the evidence a second time. The last six cover appointed counsel for a person under sentence of death. Every cell terminates in a primary citation with a verbatim quote and a retrievable URL, and records whether it passed the quote re-fetch gate. 734 of 750 cells are verified; cells marked unverified are not citable.
JSON · CSV · Human-readable: the survey · the full record
State Habeas and Post-Conviction Limitations Periods
A deadline-specific pass across all fifty states that names the operative legal instrument before the number, because a limit on the writ of habeas corpus is not the same instrument as a post-conviction-act limit, and comparing them raw produces wrong rankings. Each state’s row carries both routes with authority, verbatim quote, and URL. The meta block reproduces the two citable headline figures with their caveats: eleven states impose no limitations period at all, and only four states run a period that cannot be excused. Do not re-derive those counts from the flag columns; the meta explains why naive column arithmetic over-counts.
Suicides in Georgia State Prisons: Source-Verified Claim Series
Twenty-three quote-checked claims tracing Georgia prison suicides from 2001 through the end of public reporting, built from the Bureau of Justice Statistics mortality collections and the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project, including the cross-validation between them (74 = 74 for 2015 to 2019, counted independently). Each record carries the verbatim quote, the published source, a retrievable URL, and re-check results. The meta block states the floor semantics plainly: no complete count of Georgia prison suicides exists after 2021. The federal collection closed, its successor doesn’t publish state figures, and Georgia stopped carrying cause of death in its public records in March 2024.
Live data on gps.press
These pages rebuild on a schedule from GPS’s working databases, so they move as the underlying record moves; each page states when it was generated. Every one of them has a plain-text twin: add .md to the URL (for example /mortality-data.md) to get it without any page furniture. Several also return JSON, noted below.
People in custody, and deaths
- /mortality-data/ : the GPS custodial-death registry in aggregate. Deaths in GDC custody since 2020 by year and by month, average age at death, manner and cause where it is known, and cause of death broken out by facility. Counts are floors, never totals: GDC reports deaths roughly two months late and stopped publishing cause of death in March 2024, so the per-facility share of deaths with no recorded cause is itself part of what the page shows. How we count.
- /statistics-data/ : the headline statistical reference for the system. Current population and demographics, mortality summary, parole and length-of-stay figures, and drug admissions, compiled from GDC’s own reports in one structured file.
- /los-data/ : how long people actually serve. Length of stay and parole data by offence, 6,085 records across 304 offence categories, from GDC’s Length of Stay annual report.
- /admissions-data/ : GDC’s own Profiles of Inmate Admissions and Releases, calendar-year and fiscal-year editions 2015 to 2026, reproduced as printed. 35,656 lines across 44 report editions, every line naming the GDC document it was read from. JSON: gps/v1/admissions-profile.
- /release-statistics-data/ : how people leave. Release type, time served, and offence breakdowns from GDC’s annual Profile of Inmates Released.
- /parole-statistics-data/ : parole decisions from the annual reports of the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles, FY2001 to FY2025, page-indexed and quote-verified (24 reports; the Board doesn’t publish FY2015). Parole is decided by the Board, a separate agency from GDC, so GDC’s release statistics don’t cover Board decisions. JSON: api.gps.press/parole/annual, every value carrying its source report and page.
- /drug-data/ : admissions to Georgia prisons on drug offences, by drug type, from GDC’s Drug Admission Profile reports.
Facilities, capacity, and money
- /facilities-data/ : the facility directory. 114 facilities with location, type, security level, operator, current population, GDC’s own stated capacity, and, for those where GPS has established it from the original architecture, design capacity. The two capacity figures are different things and the page keeps them apart.
- /capacity-utilization-data/ : GDC average daily population, operational capacity, and utilization by facility type, calendar-year and fiscal-year editions 2015 to 2026, 242 rows across 22 report editions with the source document on every row. Capacity here is operational capacity, never design capacity, and the on-hand figure is not the population figure. JSON: gps/v1/capacity-utilization.
- /budget-data/ : GDC appropriations from the Governor’s Budget Report. Nine programs across FY2014 to FY2027 with actual and approved amounts labelled as such, plus 152 budget change line items and the positions attached to them.
- /commissary-data/ : what people inside pay for food and basics. 517 commissary products from the vendor’s own catalogue, 438 of them carrying FY2025 pricing.
- /contraband-data/ : every contraband arrest report GDC has published on its own website, 2010 to the present, split into one row per incident: 599 reports, 1,615 incidents, 2,369 people, 5,250 items. GDC’s wording is kept verbatim and every row links to the GDC page it came from; 265 of the reports were recovered from the Internet Archive after GDC dropped them. GDC publishes no dispositions, so an arrest reported here is not a conviction. JSON: append
?format=json.
Georgia law
- /ocga-data/ : the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, 29,828 sections, indexed by title. Every section also has its own page and Markdown twin, for example /ocga/9-14-42/ and /ocga/9-14-42.md.
- /rules-data/ : Georgia court rules in one file. 327 entries covering the Uniform Superior Court Rules, the Code of Judicial Conduct, and the Rules of Professional Conduct, with official comments. These are promulgated by the Supreme Court of Georgia and are not part of the O.C.G.A.; they must not be cited as Code sections.
- /sop-topics-data/ : what GDC’s own written policy says, organised by subject. Twenty-four cross-cutting topics (medical care, use of force, visitation, and the rest) built from the GDC Standard Operating Procedures corpus, each citing the specific SOPs and noting gaps and conflicts between them. Human-readable: the policy library.
GPS research and reporting
- /research-data/ : the GPS research library. 142 published collections of structured research, from academic and government studies to agency document sets, each with its sources. JSON: append
?format=json. - /research-topics-data/ : synthesised topic pages drawing across those collections. 23 topics built from 639 collections and 53,018 datapoints, each aggregating findings on one issue area.
- /intelligence-data/ : the GPS intelligence wiki as structured data. Briefings on 118 facilities and 25 issues, 1,983 tracked events, and the settlements ledger of what Georgia has paid to resolve prison death and injury claims. JSON: gps-intel/v1/topics.
- /quotes-data/ : the GPS quote bank. 3,688 published quotes from incarcerated people, families, officials, and court records, categorised by subject. JSON: gps/v1/quotes.
- /articles-data/ : GPS’s own journalism in full text, 275 articles, with content type and sourcing recorded for each.
- /gps-news-data/ : a curated index of reporting on Georgia’s prison system by other outlets, 210 articles from 22 sources. Index and attribution only; the articles belong to their publishers.
- /post-conviction-fifty-states-data/ : the fifty-state survey above as a readable page, every cell with its quote and citation, alongside the methodology and what could not be verified.
Using it
It’s all free to use for journalistic, research, and policy purposes with attribution to Georgia Prisoners’ Speak (gps.press). Where GPS is republishing an agency’s own document, cite the agency; the row will tell you which document and link to it.
Questions, corrections, or a dataset you need in a different shape: contact us. If you spot an error, tell us. Every figure here is built to be checked, and we would rather hear it from you than leave it standing.