Nine contributors describe what daily survival requires inside Georgia custody: boots worn into the shower, lunch carried back from breakfast, a fire alarm ringing into an empty post, and medication missed behind a locked door. Much of what keeps people alive is done by other prisoners.
Four Baldwin State Prison officers face a federal jury over the 2024 killing of Vincent Dyer — a death the complaint says they were warned about in writing the day before. GPS’s registry corroborates every homicide the lawsuit lists. Discovery is open, and GDC’s records are under subpoena.
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.
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.
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.
Torrey Wayne Forrester died at 41 in a Georgia prison of cirrhosis caused by chronic hepatitis C — a disease curable since 2014. The Justice Department found Georgia treating roughly ten percent of the people it knew were infected. Georgia’s own profile shows it has not tested more than half the people in its custody.
Georgia’s 2024 prison mortality report has a column headed “Cause of Death.” It is empty for all 330 people. For one month in January 2025 the state filled it in — and 41 percent of the deaths were homicides. Then the column disappeared.
In Georgia’s prisons, the surest way to become a target is to use the system as designed — file a grievance, sign a lawsuit, report an assault, talk to a lawyer. A review of Georgia Prisoners’ Speak’s own case files shows retaliation isn’t a series of accidents. It is a system, and its purpose is silence.
Georgia’s constitution contains a clause no other state has: a ban on abusing any person “in being arrested, while under arrest, or in prison.” Written by Reconstruction delegates in 1868, cited only ten times since, it may be the most powerful untested legal tool against the prison crisis.
Georgia has commanded its prison system to separate dangerous inmates since 1897, and the legislature declared every person’s right to be safe from gang violence — yet the state enforces neither. The fix isn’t a new law. It’s finishing the one already on the books.