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).

ACA Accreditation as Compliance Shield: GDC's Accreditation Claims, the Oliver Conflict, and the Audit-Failure Rate of Zero

Accreditation claims. On December 10, 2024, GDC stated that since beginning the ACA accreditation process in 2017 it had received official accreditation of 47 state facilities plus its training academy and central office, with an average score of 98.96 percent (GDC, December 10, 2024). The 2024 Georgia Senate Study Committee on the Department of Corrections Final Report records 49 ACA-accredited facilities; the 47-versus-49 discrepancy is unresolved and neither figure should be published without qualification. Early posted scores were similarly high: Emanuel Women's Facility received initial accreditation at 98 percent, and Montgomery State Prison at 98.5 percent, each after two mock audits in May 2018 and evaluation against 525 standards in the Fourth Edition of the Standards for Adult Correctional Institutions. GDC's stated August 2018 goal was to complete accreditation for all state prisons by July 1, 2020; ACA Accreditation remains a standing strategic priority on GDC's About page. Commissioner Gregory Dozier stated in January 2018 that GDC had discontinued the ACA process in the late 1980s and early 1990s but continued to meet standards in the interim. GDC's private-prison fact sheet records Coffee Correctional Facility as initially accredited by ACA and MAG in 2000.

Cost and vendor structure. GDC paid the American Correctional Association $1,289,001 across fiscal years 2018 through 2025 (Open Georgia vendor payment records, via GPS Follow the Money). That total covers payments to the ACA only and does not capture internal accreditation staff, mock audits, or documentation workload. No competitively bid contract for ACA accreditation appears in the Georgia Procurement Registry. Historical fee reporting put accreditation fees at $8,100 to $19,500 depending on days, auditors, and facilities (Prison Legal News, 2014). The ACA's revenue structure also raises circularity concerns: in a February 2024 letter, Senators Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey, and Jeff Merkley stated that almost half of ACA revenue comes from fees and 25 percent derives from private prison companies' financial support of ACA conferences.

The Oliver timeline. Commissioner Tyrone Oliver was elected ACA Vice President in November 2022 and sworn in January 2023; he was appointed GDC Commissioner in 2023. On November 19, 2024, Senator Jon Ossoff and colleagues wrote to Commissioner Oliver urging the state and GDC to promptly address the DOJ findings. On December 10, 2024—ten weeks after the DOJ's October 1, 2024 findings that Georgia prisons violate the Eighth Amendment—GDC announced Oliver's election as ACA President-Elect for the 2025-2026 term. The February 2026 ACA Winter Conference program lists Ricky D. Dixon as president and Tyrone Oliver as president-elect. GDC's August 14, 2018 press release lists among accreditation benefits "a defense against lawsuits through documentation and the demonstration of a 'good faith' effort." The result is a timeline in which the commissioner holds an ACA leadership role while the agency cites ACA accreditation as a litigation defense.

Audit outcomes: zero “not met” findings. Across all 273 GDC PREA facility audits held by GPS, not one records a single standard as “not met.” Johnson State Prison's four PREA cycles each recorded all standards met and zero not met. Walnut Grove passed an ACA accreditation audit with a 100 percent score shortly before a December 31, 2013 disturbance in which sixteen juveniles required hospital treatment for wounds and lacerations. The zero-not-met pattern does not by itself establish falsification; it does establish that a 98.96 percent ACA average is not an outlier result—it is what this class of three-year external correctional audit has produced universally in a system the DOJ found unconstitutional.

External critiques. Senators Warren, Markey, and Merkley wrote that the ACA accreditation system has proven to be "little more than a rubber stamp" and that the BOP's contract with the ACA has been a waste of taxpayer dollars. Senator Warren's December 2020 report found that the ACA operates simultaneously as accreditor and as a trade association representing the industry it certifies; the accreditation process consists of a facility self-audit, a request for accreditation, and a formal audit, each accompanied by a fee; essentially any private prison that paid the fees was accredited; and accredited facilities conduct annual self-reporting in the off years. The Bureau of Prisons ended its ACA contract in 2024. Prison Legal News reports that a facility must meet 100 percent of applicable mandatory standards and at least 90 percent of applicable non-mandatory standards, and that ACA standards are established with no government oversight. The Boston Globe reported in 2001 that ACA had routinely accredited troubled facilities, and Judge David Bazelon's earlier critique held that the ACA refuses to open the accreditation process to public scrutiny and participation.

Internal SOP framework. SOP 103.62, “Audits of Operations and Programs,” requires internal audits at least annually, external audits at least every three years, a Corrective Action Plan within 30 days of the interim audit report, five-year retention of audit records, and an annual Executive Report on audits. The same SOP vests the decision to seek ACA accreditation in the Commissioner. SOPs 410.04 and 410.06 define a three-year Accreditation Cycle; SOP 507.01.11 commits the Health Services Division to professional standards; and SOP 101.02 routes newly effective policies to accreditation personnel, auditors, and compliance personnel. GDC states that, as required by contract, the private prisons it contracts with are accredited by the ACA and by the Medical Association of Georgia.

Workload and source cautions. Former GDC officer Tyler Ryals, an established GPS witness, stated that ACA accreditation workload increased 400 percent and linked the start of the accreditation process to deteriorating conditions: “We started [ACA accreditation] in 2018, and that is when things started going so far downhill, because we were already short then in 2018.” His further allegation that ACA accreditation paperwork is largely falsified is single-source, public social media, and uncorroborated. Data gaps include: the 47-versus-49 facility discrepancy; no per-year ACA payment breakdown; no competitive bid for ACA accreditation on the DOAS registry; a conflict between 90 percent and 95 percent non-mandatory compliance thresholds in different sources; Senator Ossoff's characterization of DOJ report page 75 on PREA investigations; and the federal-grant conditions angle for Residential Substance Abuse Treatment programming, including Northwest RSAT in Walker County, Georgia.