Investigations & Analysis
Featured Articles
In-depth reporting on Georgia’s prison crisis — data-driven investigations, policy analysis, and the stories that need to be told.
Social Death
Georgia stripped its prisons of work, hope, and a future — and some people answer that emptiness not with drugs or the gang, but by going silent and disappearing while still alive. An investigation into the despair the state manufactures by policy, refuses to treat, and declines to count...
$150 Million to Watch Them Die: Georgia’s OWL Surveillance Goes Live
On or about June 1, Georgia switches on OWL — the first centralized real-time prison-surveillance hub in American corrections. GPS asks the question the state won't answer: how does watching reduce a single stabbing, overdose, or suicide, when $150 million bought the eye and $805,000 was left for the classrooms?...
The Only Family Left
Georgia stripped its prisons of work, family, and purpose — and left the gangs as the only institution supplying all three. An investigation into how the state manufactured the vacuum its gangs now fill, from Commissioner Wayne Garner's 1996 purge to today's TAC-squad raids, and the body count it refuses to publish...
The Existential Vacuum
A person needs a reason to live — Viktor Frankl learned it in the camps. Georgia's prisons have built an emptiness so total that despair, violence, and addiction are the only things left to fill it. The state cannot hand anyone meaning, but it has bolted shut nearly every door to finding it...
Zombie Dorms
Georgia swears its prisons are drug-free. Inside, a single soup buys hours of oblivion on K2, meth and fentanyl kill, and the state logs overdoses as "natural" — then stops releasing causes of death at all. What idleness manufactures when no one has a reason to stay sober...
Nothing to Do
In a typical Georgia prison dorm, one television serves dozens of people and almost no one has work or class. Georgia removed the programs that once kept people occupied — and both the research and the men living it say enforced idleness is precisely how rehabilitation fails...
Who Are the Victims: The Statute That Erases Them
There is a sentence in the Official Code of Georgia that decides, in advance, that no one injured in a Georgia prison can be compensated as a victim of crime. Part 3 of the GPS series Who Are the Victims documents the statute that erases them — and the three provisions that would have to change...
On the Books Since 1897: The Separation Law Georgia Refuses to Enforce
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...
Separate the Gangs. It Costs Nothing. Georgia Keeps Choosing the Bodies.
A sixth statewide lockdown began after deadly gang violence at Ware State Prison. Georgia Prisoners' Speak has demanded gang separation for fifteen months — a reform that costs almost nothing and that Texas, Arizona, and California proved cuts violence. Georgia keeps choosing the body count instead...
Who Are the Victims: Victims Still
Christian Krauch was tortured for three weeks under a bunk at Macon State Prison while GDC filed 168 paper counts saying he was accounted for. He survived. Part 2 of the GPS series Who Are the Victims documents what Georgia does to the people who enter its prisons as victims first — and the federal record now in place...
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