# Follow the Money: Where Georgia’s Prison Tax Dollars Go

> Using the State of Georgia's own payment records, we follow the money through the Department of Corrections — who gets paid, who profits, and who pays.

**Published**: 2026-06-29
**Source**: https://gps.press/follow-the-money/
**Author**: Georgia Prisoners' Speak

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Georgia spends well over a billion dollars a year running its prison system. This page **follows that money** — using the State of Georgia’s own public payment records (the [Open Georgia](https://open.ga.gov) transparency portal), the Department of Corrections’ budget, and court and settlement records. The pattern is consistent: the state spends heavily on staffing and on private companies, underfunds food and care, quietly shifts costs onto prisoners’ families, and then bills the taxpayer again for the medical fallout and the lawsuits.

## The money map: who GDC paid, FY2018–2025

*Every figure below is an eight-year total (state fiscal years 2018 through 2025) drawn from the State of Georgia’s transparency portal, open.ga.gov — the state’s own record of what the Department of Corrections paid each recipient.*

| Recipient | Paid (FY18–25) | What for |
| --- | --- | --- |
| **Salaries** | **$2.92 billion** | GDC payroll |
| **Benefits** | **$1.88 billion** | Employee benefits |
| Augusta University | $878 million | Prison healthcare (held the contract until 2021) |
| CoreCivic Inc | $861 million | Private-prison operator |
| Wellpath LLC | $539 million | Prison medical contractor (2021–2024) |
| MHM Correctional Services | $332 million | Mental-health contractor |
| Georgia Correctional Industries (GCI) | $326 million | State food & products operation |
| The GEO Group Inc | $239 million | Private-prison operator |
| Centurion of Georgia LLC | $239 million | Prison medical contractor (since July 2024) |
| Correct RX Pharmacy Services | $194 million | Prison pharmacy |
| Georgia Technology Authority | $169 million | IT / systems |
| Georgia Power | $101 million | Utilities |
| Ranger Mechanical | $100 million | Construction / mechanical |
| Georgia Dept. of Administrative Services | $76 million | State services / risk & liability fund |
| Spectrum Health Systems | $48 million | Substance-abuse treatment |
| **Aramark Correctional Services** | **$46 million** | Private food contractor (e.g., Valdosta SP) |
| LEO Technologies | $20 million | AI monitoring of inmate phone calls |

## $2.2 billion to private healthcare — and a revolving door

Add up the medical, mental-health and pharmacy contractors and Georgia paid roughly **$2.2 billion to private healthcare companies** over these eight years — and the contract keeps changing hands. **Augusta University** ran prison healthcare until **Wellpath** took it over in 2021; Wellpath’s contract ended June 30, 2024, when **Centurion** took over on July 1, 2024. Running alongside them: **MHM** for mental health ($332 million) and **Correct RX** for the pharmacy ($194 million). *(The dollar totals above are fiscal-year payment sums from Open Georgia, so a company’s billing can keep appearing for a year or so after a handoff — which is why Wellpath payments still show through FY2025.)* This is the privatized care at the center of most of the wrongful-death and medical-neglect settlements Georgia taxpayers have paid — see [the failure tax](#failure-tax) below.

## The second pocket: the vendors the state doesn’t pay — because families do

Two of the biggest names in prison profiteering are almost invisible in the state’s payment records. **Securus** — the prison phone-and-tablet company — shows just **$2.2 million** from the state across eight years. The commissary vendor shows essentially nothing. That is not because they make little money. It is because **the state does not pay them — prisoners’ families do**, through per-call and per-message charges, tablet fees, and commissary markups. Inside a Georgia prison, a pack of ramen that costs about twenty cents at a grocery store sells for roughly ninety cents — a markup of about 350% on the cheapest staple in the store. The state underfunds the basics, then sells them back to the families of the incarcerated at a markup. (See our [prison-food investigation](https://gps.press/food/).)

## The failure tax: when the system fails, the taxpayer pays again

When that system fails, the public pays a third time. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s investigation, Georgia has paid **nearly $20 million since 2018** to settle prisoner death and injury lawsuits — and **all of it is State of Georgia (self-insured) money, not the contractors’.** Recent payouts include $5 million (a mentally ill man left in a burning cell), $4 million (a man beaten to death by his cellmate after ignored pleas), and $3.2 million (Juan Carlos Ramirez, left in an outdoor cage in 105° heat at Telfair State Prison — a death GDC first called “natural causes”).

And the underfeeding shows up downstream in the medical bill. By GPS’s analysis of the GDC budget, the Department’s **medical line ($432 million) has grown 33% in four years while its food line ($31 million) grew 1%** — a roughly fourteen-to-one ratio between what it spends to treat people and what it spends to feed them. The state under-feeds the population at about **$0.53 per meal**, then pays for the diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular disease that follow. (Full analysis: [Georgia Prison Food Crisis](https://gps.press/food/).)

## The pattern

Follow the money and the same shape appears at every turn: Georgia spends big on staffing and on private companies, hands the most sensitive job — medical care — to a rotating cast of for-profit contractors, underfunds food and basic care, shifts the cost of phones and commissary onto prisoners’ families, and then bills the taxpayer once more for the medical fallout and the lawsuits. The money is public. The choices are political.

### Sources & method

- **Vendor payments:** State of Georgia transparency portal, [open.ga.gov](https://open.ga.gov) — Department of Corrections, fiscal years 2018–2025 (eight-year totals; public records). Figures are fiscal-year payment totals, which can lag contract dates.
- **Budget, food & medical figures:** GPS analysis of the Georgia Department of Corrections budget — see our [prison-food investigation](https://gps.press/food/).
- **Settlements:** news and court records and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s reporting; the complete official ledger of state payouts on behalf of GDC is pending via an open-records request to the Georgia Department of Administrative Services (Risk Management). We will publish it when received.
- Figures are public records. Where a number is contested or a request is still pending, we say so.