Investigations & Analysis

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In-depth reporting on Georgia’s prison crisis — data-driven investigations, policy analysis, and the stories that need to be told.

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...

Who Are the Victims: Before They Were Prisoners

On January 5, 2026, Nicole Boynton walked free after twenty-three years inside. Georgia's Survivor Justice Act recognized her as a victim — twenty-three years too late. The science says she is not alone. A new GPS series asks who else qualifies as a victim under Georgia law, and why the state has chosen to look away...

Two Ways to Starve: Why Georgia’s Prison Deaths Don’t Say “Hunger”

Georgia spends $1.60 a day to feed 53,000 incarcerated adults — about 13,000 of them over fifty, some on these trays for decades. The bodies arrive at the morgue marked cardiac arrest, organ failure, natural causes. The medical literature, going back eighty years, calls it starvation...

The Game They Learned: How GDC’s Closed Promotion Pipeline Made Its Own Wardens — and Its Own Indictments

On May 13, a Georgia grand jury indicted former Smith State Prison Warden Brian Adams on RICO and bribery charges. He's the latest output of a closed promotion pipeline that has produced 43 of 43 current state wardens — and the agency cannot explain why pay raises haven't fixed it...

One Justice, One Year: How Georgia Erased a 146-Year Rule

In 2008, the Georgia Supreme Court 4-3 confirmed that defendants could challenge a void conviction under a statute Georgia had carried since 1863. Fourteen months later, after one justice retired, a new 4-3 majority erased the rule. Same statute. Same words. Different result. Article 3 of the No Way Out series...

When the Heat Comes for the Old: Georgia’s Aging Prisoners Brace for Another Deadly Summer

Three of Georgia's 35 prisons are fully air-conditioned. More than 13,000 incarcerated Georgians are 50 or older. As another deadly summer arrives — and federal courts call prison heat unconstitutional — Georgia's aging prisoners are stacked into uncooled dorms with no published heat ceiling...

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