Where Georgia’s prison healthcare money goes
Georgia has paid more than $2 billion for prison healthcare since 2018 — moving it from a public university to for-profit contractors with bankruptcies, data breaches, and a thousand-plus inmate-death lawsuits between them.
Georgia’s current prison-healthcare contract was handed to a single for-profit company — Centurion — through a no-bid “emergency procurement” in 2024, for roughly $2.4 billion. That one contract is larger than everything the state actually paid for inmate medical care over the previous eight years combined. A Fulton County judge dismissed the ousted incumbent’s challenge, and the scoring behind the award has never been made public. Source: GPB / Georgia news on the 2024 GDC healthcare award; Open Georgia FY2018–2025 payment totals.
The money over time
GDC medical-vendor payments per fiscal year (Open Georgia). The line barely moved as care was privatized — the money bought a change of contractor, not better care.
Follow each dollar
The public-university era
$878Mto Augusta University, FY18–25For about 23 years, a public university — Augusta University — ran Georgia’s inmate medical care as Georgia Correctional HealthCare, until the state privatized in 2021. It remains the single largest medical payee in the records. The understaffing and death controversy that trailed Augusta State Medical Prison — including a death ruled a homicide and federal charges against former officers — is part of why this money is worth following.
Sources: Open Georgia; GPB/AJC on the Augusta State Medical Prison cases; GDC Annual Reports.
The for-profit turn — Wellpath, then Centurion
$539Mto Wellpath, FY18–25Care went to Wellpath in 2021, then to Centurion in 2024. Wellpath filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2024 carrying ~$644M in debt, and watchdogs count roughly 1,395 lawsuits against it and its predecessors. Centurion then won the replacement contract with no competitive bid — see the number at the top of this page.
This is an industry with a documented, multi-state pattern of understaffing, delayed and denied care, and inmate-death litigation. Georgia bought into it at the moment its own prisons were under federal civil-rights scrutiny.
Sources: POGO and court records on Wellpath; Fulton County Superior Court (challenge dismissed); Open Georgia.
The data the contractors lost
The money also bought a data-security failure to match the care record. The claims administrator CorrectCare exposed the records of about 600,000 incarcerated people in a 2022 breach, later settled for $6.49 million. The people whose medical histories leaked had no say in who held them.
Sources: HIPAA Journal / Prison Legal News on the CorrectCare breach and settlement.
The same system, across our data
Every number below comes from GPS’s own databases — click through to the underlying data.
The numbers we can’t see — and why
- How much of each contractor’s payment actually reaches patient care versus corporate overhead and profit — never broken out.
- The scoring and justification behind the no-bid Centurion award.
- Which specific deaths are tied to care delays under each contractor — GDC fee-loads the records that would show it.
We publish the verified figures and label the gaps. How we verify →