Policy & Advocacy

The Fiscal Case for Reform

Georgia spends approximately $1.8 billion per year on its state prison system — $1,913,888,054 in FY2025 actual expenditures and $1,799,204,979 in the Amended FY2026 budget (Fiscal Impact of Post-Conviction Reform in Georgia; GDC Budget FY2026-FY2027). That figure does not capture the full cost of mass incarceration. Families of incarcerated Georgians bear an estimated $350 billion nationally in total hidden costs annually — nearly four times what taxpayers spend on jails and prisons — including $5.6 billion on commissary, phone calls, and basic necessities at markups reaching 600% above retail, and $1.8 billion on prison visit travel (Families as the Hidden Tax Base). According to the Ella Baker Center, roughly 65% of families with a loved one in prison are unable to meet their basic needs because court-related fines and fees send them into debt averaging more than $13,000 per family — and the Prison Policy Initiative finds that 58% of families could not afford the costs associated with a conviction at all (Economic Exploitation in Prison: Wages, Fees, and the Poverty Cycle). GDC alone extracts over $8 million per year in kickbacks from Securus Technologies at a 59.6% commission rate on prison phone revenues (Follow the Money: Georgia Prison MAS Vendors). These are not incidental costs — they are structural features of a system that transfers incarceration's true price tag from the state budget onto the poorest families in Georgia.

The fiscal argument for decarceration is not theoretical. The United States reduced its prison population by 25% between 2009 and 2021 — from over 1.6 million to under 1.2 million — while crime continued to fall (The Case for Decarceration in Georgia: An Evidence Base). Georgia, by contrast, incarcerates at a rate of 881 per 100,000 residents, the 7th highest nationally and higher than any country in the world except El Salvador (Recidivism & Reentry Failures in Georgia). With over 528,000 Georgia residents under total criminal justice supervision — including 191,000 on felony probation alone, the highest felony probation population of any state — the system's footprint is vast, its costs compounding, and its returns diminishing (Georgia Probation & Community Supervision). Every dollar spent warehousing people who could be managed in the community, or who have completed their just sentence, is a dollar unavailable for education, mental health, housing, or the environmental remediation — including lead abatement — that research now confirms reduces crime more effectively than incarceration (Lead Poisoning Drove America's Crime Epidemic).

Sentencing Reform: Truth-in-Sentencing, the Trial Penalty, and the Parole Gate

Georgia's sentencing architecture was shaped in significant part by federal financial incentives that prioritized incarceration over evidence. Between FY1996 and FY2001, Georgia received $82,211,036 in federal Violent Offender Incarceration and Truth-in-Sentencing (VOI/TIS) grants — ranking 9th nationally among recipients — conditioning this funding on requiring offenders to serve at least 85% of their sentences (Truth in Sentencing & Fiscal Impact: The $40 Billion Story). By 2001, 29 jurisdictions had collectively received $2.7 billion through this program. The practical result in Georgia is a prison population that has shifted: since the 2012 criminal justice reforms, the proportion of the incarcerated population convicted of violent offenses has grown by 12% (2024 Georgia Senate Study Committee Report on Prison Conditions), in part because the reform's front-end sentence reductions were offset by back-end release restrictions that kept violent-offense prisoners in longer.

The parole gate compounds this problem. In FY2024, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles considered 19,328 parole-eligible cases and cast 69,375 total votes — releasing only 5,443 people, 420 fewer than the prior fiscal year (Georgia's Parole System: Denial Rates, Life Sentences & Fiscal Impact). Of 2,046 life cases considered in FY2024, only 93 were granted parole — a 4.5% grant rate — while the overall parole grant rate fell to 28%, a record low, down from 38% in 2019. No hearings were held; no written explanations for denials were provided. Georgia's parole successful completion rate of 72% exceeds the national average of approximately 60%, which means the Board

Economic Exploitation in Prison: Wages, Fees, and the Poverty Cycle

The fiscal burden documented above does not fall on incarcerated people and their families by accident — it is the product of a deliberately constructed economic architecture. Inside prison, incarcerated people in states like Michigan earn an average of just $12 to $16 per month from prison jobs, depending on their circumstances and job assignment. Labor is mandatory: in Michigan, not participating in the job pool can result in long-term isolation in solitary confinement. Court-ordered fees and restitutions are automatically garnished from the trust accounts the state establishes upon sentencing, establishing from day one an economic framework in which the incarcerated person's labor flows upward to the institution before it can address any personal or family need. As one incarcerated writer observed: "My time and money went to MDOC, which makes top dollar off me and other incarcerated people."

Against wages of $12 to $16 per month, the goods available inside are priced at levels only reachable by drawing on family resources from outside. Commissary shoes cost $70 or more. Securepak food orders run up to $150. A tablet — including music and games — can exceed $500 in total cost. An aluminum footlocker from Michigan State Industries, required simply to store belongings beyond the one green duffle bag each person is allotted (everything else being labeled contraband and destroyed), costs $150. Vendors offering these products are structurally designed not to collect from the person inside, but from their family and friends: "Those vendors aim not for the incarcerated person to pay, but their family and friends." Since 2025, tariff-driven price increases have pushed these costs higher still, with incarcerated people receiving email notifications of new price spikes in clothing and food items — compounding the burden on families already struggling to meet basic needs.

This system operates on a foundation the U.S. Constitution explicitly permits. The Thirteenth Amendment allows persons convicted of crimes to be held in involuntary servitude, a provision that underpins mandatory prison labor regimes across the country and what one author describes as being "a slave to the economic serving of the state." The communities most exposed to this system are not randomly selected: the poorest communities are the most heavily policed and most heavily funneled into prison, and a disproportionate share of the incarcerated population is poor, Black, and brown. "It cost money to be poor," one incarcerated writer noted, "and it seemed to be a major reason for crime to run rampant in low-income neighborhoods." When both victim and perpetrator come from the same communities — as they most often do — the extraction of wealth from incarcerated families through fines, fees, commissary markups, and phone commissions does not repair those communities. It drains them. "Paying a debt to society has less to do with helping or repairing the victim's family's true desires, especially if both victim and perpetrator are from the same demographic."

Vera Institute's Incarceration and Inequality Project Data Explorer now provides advocates and policymakers with interactive access to data documenting the connection between incarceration and economic inequality — a tool that makes the structural relationship between poverty, policing, and prison visible in ways that support both legislative advocacy and community organizing.