Where Georgia’s prison technology money goes
GDC technology spending has 2.6×’d since 2018 — from $43M to $114M a year. Here is who it goes to, who actually pockets it, and the second stream of money that barely shows up in the budget at all.
While correctional-officer vacancies ran near 50% and facilities fell apart, one budget line did the opposite of shrink: GDC technology spending climbed from $43 million in 2018 to $114 million in 2025 — up 2.6×. Most of it does not go where the record says it does. Source: Open Georgia vendor payments, FY2018–2025 (sum of technology-classified vendors).
The money over time
GDC technology-vendor payments per fiscal year (Open Georgia). The surge after 2022 is the part worth following.
Follow each dollar
The pass-through
$169Mto the Georgia Technology Authority, FY18–25The single biggest “technology” line isn’t a private vendor at all — it’s the state paying its own central IT agency, the Georgia Technology Authority, which adds a fee and routes the work to private contractors (NTT DATA, Capgemini, AT&T, Atos, Unisys, Xerox). So the dollar reaches private IT firms one step removed from the record — the public payment names a state agency, not the company that actually did the work.
Sources: Open Georgia; GTA published vendor list; state ACFR (GTA internal-service fund).
The surveillance complex
$20Mto LEO Technologies, FY18–25The corrections-specific money funds surveillance. LEO Technologies sells AI that transcribes and keyword-flags incarcerated people’s phone calls (“Verus”) — founded by a pardoned felon, run by a former state-corrections secretary. Securus (Platinum Equity) runs the telecom under a commission model the FCC moved to ban in 2024. ALSCAN and others build the cameras and access control. The technology budget is, increasingly, a watching budget.
Sources: Open Georgia; Reuters / The Intercept on LEO/Verus; FCC 2024 prison-calling order.
The resellers that hide the maker
$27Mto Carahsoft, FY18–25Much of the rest disappears into resellers that mask the real manufacturer. Carahsoft — which paid a $75.5M False Claims Act settlement and had its HQ raided by the FBI in 2024 — and a brand-new $21.6M hardware reseller appear in the records where the actual software and equipment vendors should be named. You can see the dollar leave; you can’t see what it bought or who ultimately made it.
Sources: Open Georgia; DOJ on the Carahsoft/VMware settlement and the 2024 raid.
The money that flows two ways
And the appropriation data only shows half of it. Incarcerated people’s families pay Securus and others directly for calls and tablets — and the vendor pays a commission back to the state: in Georgia, 59.6% of every family phone dollar, roughly $8 million a year flowing back to GDC. That family-billed money barely appears in the public spending record at all. The cheapest place to hide a prison budget is on the families’ phone bills.
Sources: GDC offender-communications revenue-share records, obtained via the Georgia Procurement Registry (searchable in our data tool); FCC 2024 order (commission model).
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
- Securus’s total Georgia billings to families — the state’s 59.6% commission is in procurement records we obtained, but the vendor’s full take is not.
- What the FY2025 reseller surge — a brand-new $21.6M vendor — actually bought.
- Which GTA pass-through dollars went to which private contractor.
We publish the verified figures and label the gaps. How we verify →