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). The State Board of Pardons and Paroles’ FY2023 Annual Report puts Georgia’s incarceration cost at $59.14 per day, compared with $2.67 per day for community supervision (BOPP Annual Report FY2023). The Board estimates that parole supervision produced more than $319 million in annual cost avoidance in FY2023 relative to prison housing (BOPP Annual Report FY2023). 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.

Parole and Clemency: FY2023 Outcomes and Fiscal Leverage

In FY2023, the State Board of Pardons and Paroles released 5,863 offenders from prison to parole supervision—382 fewer than in the previous year—and discharged 5,276 people from parole. The parole population under active supervision fell from 17,744 on July 1, 2022, to 16,369 on June 30, 2023 (BOPP Annual Report FY2023). Georgia’s parole success rate was 70%, compared with a national average of roughly 57%, and of the 1,552 parole revocations during the year, less than 1% were for technical violations alone (BOPP Annual Report FY2023). The Board’s workload included 17,151 parole-eligible cases considered, 62,969 Board votes, 21,974 offender files initiated, 8,401 final reviews completed, and 34,568 clemency investigations completed (BOPP Annual Report FY2023).

Life-sentence review remained restrictive: the Board considered 2,254 life-sentence cases, granted parole in 110, and denied 2,144; 83 lifers serving for a serious violent felony were granted or released (BOPP Annual Report FY2023). The average time served on a life sentence before release was 28 years in FY2023, compared with less than nine years in 1973 (BOPP Annual Report FY2023). In clemency matters, the Board received 1,059 pardon and restoration applications (BOPP Annual Report FY2023).

FY2020 Comparison: Board Workload and Pandemic-Era Release Patterns

According to the BOPP Annual Report FY2020, the Board considered 21,790 individual parole-eligible cases and cast 75,522 clemency votes that year (BOPP Annual Report FY2020). It released 10,429 people from prison through all forms of clemency—974 more than the prior year—including 918 additional releases tied to COVID-19 population management (BOPP Annual Report FY2020). Georgia’s parole completion rate was 73%, compared with a national average of about 60%; 7,130 people were discharged from parole, and 2,199 parole violators were revoked, with less than 1% revoked for technical violations alone (BOPP Annual Report FY2020). The parole population under active supervision grew from 20,719 on July 1, 2019, to 21,069 on June 30, 2020, with a cumulative FY2020 supervision population of 30,830 (BOPP Annual Report FY2020).

| FY2020 parole and clemency metric | Value | |---|---| | Total clemency votes | 75,522 | | Individual cases considered | 21,790 | | Prison releases (all clemency forms) | 10,429 | | Pandemic-related additional releases | 918 | | Parole completion rate | 73% (national ~60%) | | Parole discharges | 7,130 | | Parole revocations | 2,199 (less than 1% technical-only) | | Life-sentence decisions | 2,009 (223 granted / 1,786 denied) | | Clemency investigations completed | 39,060 | | Pardon and restoration applications received | 763 | | Total pardons and restorations granted | 402 | | ICE Rapid REPAT releases | 95 ($5,336,319 cost avoidance) |

The Board’s FY2020 clemency workload also included 5,643 preconditions to parole, 39,374 PIC points awarded for earned program/work credits, and more than 30,000 stakeholder notifications (BOPP Annual Report FY2020). The Georgia Office of Victim Services sent more than 16,000 pieces of correspondence, handled 10,741 victim phone calls, and received 8,144 victim correspondences (BOPP Annual Report FY2020). The agency operated with 170 full-time employees (BOPP Annual Report FY2020).