Policy & Advocacy

The Cost of Incarceration: Extraction, Waste, and Misplaced Priorities

Georgia's correctional budget reached $1,913,888,054 in actual expenditures (FY2025, GDC Budget Baseline FY2025–FY2027), yet per-meal food spending lingers at approximately $0.60 (The Marshall Project, 2026)—just 16.4% of the American Correctional Association's recommended $3.66 per meal. To meet the ACA standard, GDC would need to increase food funding roughly sixfold; instead, the food line item remains frozen around $31 million annually while the total budget grows by hundreds of millions. This misalignment extends to healthcare: states spend six times more on prison medical care than on food (Prison Malnutrition Crisis: Health Costs, Violence, and Economic Impact), a ratio that masks the fact that nutritional deprivation itself drives chronic disease—prisoners with diabetes cost 2.3 times more to treat, yet prison diets deliver 303% of recommended sodium and 156% of cholesterol.

Meanwhile, the system extracts wealth from families. Nationally, families spend $5.6 billion annually on commissary, phone calls, and basic necessities (Families as the Hidden Tax Base), with markups reaching 600%. In Georgia, GDC pockets over $8 million per year in kickbacks from Securus Technologies at a 59.6% commission rate (Follow the Money: Georgia Prison MAS Vendors). The state allocates approximately $50 million for contraband technology contracts with three vendors (Trace-Tek/ShawnTech, CellBlox/Securus, Hawks Ear), a sum that dwarfs many programming budgets. Private prison contracts add a further layer of extraction: a 2018 audit found that state-run facilities cost an average of $44.56 per offender per day, while private prisons cost $49.07—a 10% premium (Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts, FY2018). Yet Georgia pays CoreCivic and GEO Group approximately $140 million annually for roughly 7,800 beds, and the Governor’s FY2026 budget adds another $13.6 million in per-diem increases for the four private facilities (HB 68). With 191,000 people on felony probation—the largest such population in the nation (Georgia Probation & Community Supervision)—Georgia's corrections apparatus is simultaneously an engine of fiscal extraction and a driver of mass supervision that falls hardest on communities with the least political power.

Violence, Neglect, and the Collapse of Institutional Safety

The consequences of underfunding basic needs are stark. Assaults on staff rose 77% and assaults on inmates rose 54% between 2019 and 2024 (Staffing Crisis & Correctional Officer Turnover). Prison homicides surged from 8 in 2018 to over 100 in 2024 (The Case for Decarceration in Georgia). These numbers coincide with a staffing catastrophe: nearly 50% of budgeted corrections officer positions—2,985 out of 5,991—are vacant (GDC Staffing Crisis). Violence becomes a self-reinforcing cycle when facilities are too dangerous to staff, further reducing officer presence and supervision. The scale of the crisis is further illustrated by more than 1,400 reported incidents of violence across 24 close‑ and medium‑security prisons from January 2022 through April 2023 (Nobody Watches the Watchmen), and 456 documented allegations of sexual abuse between incarcerated people in 2022, of which only 35 were substantiated (ibid).

The financial toll of institutional failures is captured in settlements: GDC paid out at least $50,633,556 across 261 claims (Nobody Watches the Watchmen). Litigation costs arising from deaths, assaults, and unconstitutional conditions represent a recurring liability that is not budgeted for but continuously borne by taxpayers.

Nutrition and environmental conditions deepen the crisis. A double-blind, placebo-controlled RCT in a UK young-offender institution found that supplementing diets with vitamins, minerals, and essential fatty acids at recommended daily levels produced a 35.1% reduction in violent offenses and a 26.3% reduction in disciplinary infractions (Peer-Reviewed Evidence Linking Prison Nutrition to Violence). Georgia feeds incarcerated people at approximately $0.60 per meal—a real-terms decline of roughly 60% since 2015 (GDC Budget Baseline FY2025–FY2027; Marshall Project, 2026). In parallel, heat exposure compounds health and behavioral risks: only 3 of GDC's 35 prisons were fully air-conditioned as of February 2024, and in nine of eleven prisons in the hot Southwest region, dorms have broken AC units (Heat, Cooling, and the Eighth Amendment). Non-optimal temperatures account for an estimated 9.43% of all

The Legislative Pipeline: ALEC, Model Bills, and Private Profit

Behind Georgia’s correctional expenditures lies a powerful, corporate-backed conveyor belt of legislation. The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a 501(c)(3) organization that brings together state legislators and private-sector interests, reported total revenue of $10,918,816 in FY2024—87.1% of which came from contributions (ALEC IRS Form 990, FY2024). ALEC CEO Lisa B. Nelson received $507,409 in compensation that year. For decades, ALEC has served as a conduit for model bills drafted in closed-door task forces; an investigation in 2011 exposed over 800 such model bills (Center for Media and Democracy/The Nation). Subsequent computational analyses identified more than 10,000 copycat bills introduced across legislatures, with over 2,100 enacted (USA TODAY/CPI “Copy, Paste, Legislate”; University of Chicago Legislative Influence Detector, 45,405 bill-to-bill reuse instances and 14,137 model-to-bill instances).

Georgia has long been embedded in this network. As of 2026, ALEC’s official state chairs are Rep. John Carson and Rep. Soo Hong, and Rep. Carson sits on ALEC’s national Board of Directors (ALEC board roster, May 2024; IRS Form 990 FY2023/2024). Private prison corporations have historically played direct roles: Corrections Corporation of America (now CoreCivic) co-chaired ALEC’s Criminal Justice Task Force in the early 1990s (In These Times, 2010), and GEO Group (then Wackenhut) was a member during the push for truth-in-sentencing and three-strikes laws. Both companies left ALEC during the 2011–2013 corporate exodus, which saw the organization lose nearly 400 legislator members and over 60 corporate backers (The Guardian, 2013). The American Bail Coalition remains an executive member of the successor criminal justice task force, and its representative is listed as ALEC’s 2026 National Chairman.

Despite the loss of some high-profile members, ALEC’s legislative imprint endures. Georgia’s 2011 immigration law, HB 87, was explicitly modeled on Arizona’s SB 1070—the most heavily documented ALEC-linked bill in the country. While Georgia’s foundational 1994 sentencing laws (the “seven deadly sins” statute and two-strikes provision) predate the leaked ALEC model-bill corpus and cannot be directly tied to it, the broader pattern of policy diffusion is evident. CoreCivic operates three Georgia facilities (Coffee, Wheeler, and Jenkins) and GEO Group one (Riverbend), for which the state pays a collective $140 million annually—even though the 2018 audit found the per-diem cost to be roughly 10% higher than comparable state-run facilities.

The process is further obscured by statutory opacity. The Georgia General Assembly and its offices are exempt from the Open Records Act (Institute for Justice v. Reilly, 2019), and communications between the Office of Legislative Counsel and legislators are shielded by O.C.G.A. § 28-4-3.1. Legislators are not required to disclose gifts on annual financial statements, and the statutory definition of a “gift” applies only to transfers over $100. ALEC, as a 501(c)(3), does not register as a lobbyist principal, and its scholarship-funded trips for legislators may fall outside lobbyist-expenditure reporting requirements. An IRS whistleblower complaint filed in 2012 challenging ALEC’s tax status remains unresolved. Together, these mechanisms allow corporate-written model legislation to enter Georgia law with minimal public scrutiny, channeling hundreds of millions of dollars to private interests while the basic needs of incarcerated people remain unmet.