Brief written October 4, 2026 from GPS Intelligence System data.(DS)

Where the Money Goes: Inside Georgia's $1.8 Billion Corrections Budget

Georgia's prison system runs on roughly $1.8 billion a year. That single figure conceals a set of choices — about who gets fed, who gets watched, who gets treated, and who gets taught — that the state makes every legislative session and rarely explains. This analysis traces the Georgia Department of Corrections' fiscal trajectory from FY2020 through the FY2027 approved budget, drawing on Governor's Budget Reports, the HB 974 Senate Appropriations Committee Substitute, DOAA State Auditor audits, Georgia Public Broadcasting's budget primers, and GPS's own budget series. The pattern is consistent: money moves toward custody and surveillance, away from the people inside, and the state's own line items show it.

A Budget That Peaked and Then Fell — But Not Toward Rehabilitation

The canonical figures are unambiguous. GDC's FY2025 actual spending reached $1,913,888,054 across all fund sources — an all-time peak, and a 25.4 percent jump over FY2024's $1,526,654,104. That surge was the largest single-year increase in the visible four-year window, roughly $387 million. Then the curve bent downward: the FY2026 amended budget came in at $1,799,204,979, and the FY2027 approved budget at $1,787,672,791 under HB 974's Senate Appropriations Committee Substitute. From peak to FY2027 approved, that is a decline of about $126 million.

The long view is starker than the four-year window. GDC spending sat near $1.08 billion in FY2010 and stayed roughly flat for eight years, then rose 57 percent in four years to the FY2025 peak. Georgia Public Broadcasting's budget primers documented the same arc from the other direction: a $1.48 billion FY2025 proposal, a $1.62 billion FY2026 proposal, and a 44 percent increase from FY2022 to FY2026 — roughly $500 million more per year. Governor's Budget Report data shows State General Funds climbing from $1,073,261,001 in FY2020 to $1,823,730,648 in FY2025.

One widely circulated figure needs correcting. The "$1.8 billion" that appears throughout GPS's own earlier reporting corresponds specifically to the FY2026 amended total, not to FY2025 actual, which was higher. And the claim that the AFY2026/FY2027 cycle contained "$634 million in new corrections appropriations — the largest single corrections funding increase in Georgia history" cannot be reconciled with the line-item record: the canonical total of line-item changes across those two cycles is approximately $154 million combined ($87.1 million amended plus $67.0 million approved). The $634 million figure should be re-sourced.

State Prisons Shrink While Private Beds Grow

Between FY2025 actual and FY2027 approved, the redistribution inside the GDC budget moved money away from state-operated facilities and toward contractors. The State Prisons program — by far the largest GDC program — was cut from $1,117,374,600 to $929,889,321, a reduction of $187,485,279, or 16.78 percent. Over the same span, Private Prisons grew from $152,648,138 to $173,541,185, an increase of $20,893,047 or 13.69 percent. Health grew $37.3 million (9.56 percent), and Offender Management grew $8.1 million (15.98 percent).

The private-prison line carries its own detail. FY2027 allocates $173,541,185 in State General Funds for Private Prisons, including a $1,055,658 increase for Jenkins and Riverbend bed utilization tied to the tier rate added in HB 68 (2025 Session). The Governor's budget proposed adding 263 private beds — 160 at Coffee Correctional Institution and 103 at Wheeler Correctional Institution — at a cost of $4,227,620. The Senate Appropriations Committee rejected that expansion, saving the money, with budget language stating that "Space is not compatible with single cell needs of prison population." The same committee attached a $0 directive requiring GDC to study single-cell housing needs without new funding.

CoreCivic and GEO Group own and operate select facilities in Georgia, according to the state's own budget documentation. The FY2027 approved budget also carries $1,055,658 specifically for Jenkins and Riverbend, and $1,054,637 in the amended FY2026 budget for the same two facilities.

Healthcare: The Fastest-Growing Line, and the Largest Single Change

Health is the second-largest program in the GDC budget and its fastest-growing component. It rose from $325,613,120 in FY2024 (21.3 percent of the total) to $389,939,841 in FY2025 (20.4 percent), then to $417,255,739 amended in FY2026 (23.2 percent) and $432,247,728 approved for FY2027 (24.3 percent) — a 33 percent increase in three years. Health spending is up roughly 40 percent since FY2022.

The FY2027 approved budget's single largest line-item change was the health contract: $49,944,274, against $39,723,896 in the amended FY2026 budget. Within that, the physical health contract increase was approved at $32,637,565 — reduced from the Governor's proposed $47.9 million by roughly $15 million. The mental health contract increase was approved at $12,127,034, matching the House version and roughly six times the Governor's proposed $1.9 million. Dental health received a $1,498,347 increase for staffing ratios, and the pharmacy contract $3,681,328 for a per diem increase.

The amended FY2026 physical health contract increase of $38,869,898 broke down into a per diem increase ($10,946,108), outside-the-wire care ($15,000,000), and the opening of additional beds ($12,923,790). The state also utilized $20,402,982 in prior-year funds for physical health risk-share obligations.

Against that spending, the state charges a $5 medical co-pay. Georgia Public Broadcasting noted that no fiscal proposal specifically addresses incarcerated Georgians' ongoing health access challenges, and that unaffordable co-pays or the threat of debt can deter people from seeking care, increasing the likelihood that illness spreads or worsens — and that subsequent care costs more. Fees collected from incarcerated individuals for medical co-pays and prescriptions exceed $10 million annually.

Food: Fifty-Five Cents a Meal

The Food and Farm Operations line item is the clearest measure of what Georgia is willing to spend on the people it holds. FY2024 actual spending was $30,914,139; FY2025 actual was $31,748,617; the FY2026 amended budget set $31,137,154; and the FY2027 approved budget allocated $31,261,736. Against a population basis of 52,139, that works out to roughly $1.62 to $1.67 per person per day — about 54 to 56 cents per meal. The FY2027 approved figure is a reduction of $486,881, or 1.53 percent, from FY2025 actual.

The Senate Appropriations Committee rejected House-approved increases of $850,000 for farm equipment and $4,900,000 for food service contract increases, while approving $364,749 for four food service modular units. The Governor's budget had included $528,167 in increased funds for food contracts within State Prisons.

For scale: the American Correctional Association's recommended per-meal benchmark, matched to the National School Lunch Program federal reimbursement rate, is approximately $3.66. GDC's per-meal cost is roughly 14.8 percent of that. Meeting the ACA standard at current population would require approximately $211 million a year — about 6.8 times what the state now spends. The FDA Thrifty Food Plan benchmark for an adult male is approximately $10 per day. Aramark-served states pay $3 to $7 per person per day.

The trajectory is also a decline in real terms. In 2015, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution documented Aramark's GDC contract at $2.973 per day per prisoner at Hays State Prison and Smith State Prison — roughly $0.99 per meal in 2015 dollars, or about $1.34 in 2026 dollars after cumulative inflation. The current system-wide figure of roughly $0.54 per meal represents a real-terms decline of approximately 60 percent, though the comparison is not perfectly clean: the 2015 figure was contract-specific at two facilities, the current figure system-wide.

Georgia's food system is state-run, not privatized at the system level. GDC operates a centralized food service program through Georgia Correctional Industries (GCI) Food and Farm Services, which manages more than 13,000 acres of farmland and produces over 40 percent of the food items used in prisoner menus under the Georgia Grown label, serving over 39 million meals annually. Georgia is one of the few states where prison labor is entirely uncompensated. GDC's Standard Operating Procedure 409.04.02, effective September 23, 2020, specifies three meals Monday through Friday and two meals on Saturday, Sunday, and state holidays — reducing incarcerated people to two meals per day on more than 110 days a year.

Education and Reentry: Rounding Errors in a $1.8 Billion Budget

Education is not a standalone line item in GDC's budget. It is embedded within the State Prisons appropriation, which ranged from roughly $901 million to $938 million across the two budget years, with no dedicated allocation for education inside that envelope. The total education spending across all line items remains unresolved in published GDC documentation.

What is visible is small. Vocational education contracts totaled $172,000 statewide in FY2025 — approximately $3.44 per active incarcerated person per year, against a $1.48 billion corrections budget, a ratio of 0.012 percent. Technical and vocational education programs and related equipment received $1.2 million in AFY2025 and $805,000 in FY2026. The high school diploma program received $93,672 in the amended FY2026 budget for accreditation staffing; the Governor proposed $953,033 for FY2027, and the Senate Appropriations Committee reduced it by $104,000 to approximately $849,033 while directing GDC to "explore virtual high school options." The combined two-cycle investment in expanded prison education through the high school diploma program comes to approximately $942,705.

Reentry programming is similarly thin. The amended FY2026 budget allocated $243,179 for reentry, including $150,000 for an Autry State Prison peer-led pilot and $93,179 for Metro Reentry Facility programming. The Autry pilot was funded in FY2026 only and was not continued in the FY2027 approved budget. The Senate Appropriations Committee eliminated all funding for Metro Reentry programming, reducing it to $0 from the Governor's proposed $39,786. The committee also rejected House-approved funding of $368,000 for residential substance abuse treatment and $1,500,000 for rural jail reimbursement in the Offender Management program.

The canonical two-budget-cycle rehabilitation investment — AFY2026 amended plus FY2027 approved — is approximately $1,225,705, not the $2.6 million cited in earlier GPS reporting. That yields a surveillance-to-rehabilitation ratio of roughly 22:1, not 46:1. The corrected figure is still substantial. GDC's own internal data shows vocational program completers recidivate at approximately 13.64 percent, roughly half the general population rate. Georgia's reentry centers hold 2,344 beds for approximately 50,000 people — 4.7 percent of capacity.

Surveillance: Where the New Money Actually Went

The security and technology categories tell the story of the two budget cycles. The FY2027 approved security category totaled $8,445,494: canine handlers ($695,018), security threat group coordinators ($377,168), managed access analysts ($409,040), OWL Unit personnel ($1,443,038), and OWL Unit additional technology ($5,521,230). The technology category netted $1,587,344, including $257,800 for an inmate assignment decision support system, $1,118,244 for an offender call monitoring contract, $1,750,000 for data intelligence annual maintenance, and a $1,538,700 reduction in one-time tablet funding.

The amended FY2026 security category totaled $16,940,427, of which managed access and drone detection accounted for $13,387,475. For FY2027, the state allocated $0 in new funds for managed access and drone detection, instead utilizing $10,793,600 from existing funds. The OWL Unit received $6,964,268 in new spending across the two categories.

The Overwatch and Logistics Unit was never announced in a press conference or press release and does not appear on GDC's public-facing website. Its funding was distributed across three fiscal years and multiple budget bills. Tallied across known appropriations, the OWL Unit itself accounts for approximately $17.8 million over three fiscal years: $7.2 million (AFY2025), $3.8 million (FY2026), and $1.2 million plus $5.5 million (FY2027). Ten distinct technology streams converge into it, including officer tablets, AeroDefense/AirWarden drone detection, managed access, electronic health records, Taser 10, mail screening, body-worn cameras, the Digital Forensics Unit, and the Data Intelligence Advanced Integration system.

The Data Intelligence Advanced Integration system, funded at $1.95 million in FY2026, has no public description beyond its budget line item and a single mention in April 2025 Board minutes. Its vendor, capabilities, and relationship to OWL are opaque. The GDC-OWL WiFi network appears nowhere in any budget document, board minutes, or procurement record under that name.

Staffing: Paying More Per Officer, Employing Fewer

The FY2027 approved budget allocated $28,527,189 for correctional officer staffing increases and $15,572,351 for a $2,000 correctional officer salary adjustment — the latter distributed across programs, with $12,918,078 going to State Prisons, $1,680,773 to Detention Centers, and $900,913 to Transition Centers. The amended FY2026 budget included $15,064,541 for a one-time $2,000 salary supplement and $4,982,902 for additional correctional officer positions. POST retirement increases totaled $2,528,999 across programs.

The FY2027 budget also reflects a State Health Benefit Plan employer contribution rate reduction from 29.454 percent to 20.264 percent, producing savings of $28,375,825 in State Prisons alone and $3,347,325 in Detention Centers. A separate benefits adjustment reduced $33,984,399. Across all line-item changes in the two cycles, the budget authorizes 38 total new positions.

The staffing picture these numbers are meant to address is severe. Between January 2021 and November 2024, 82.7 percent of new correctional officers left GDC within their first year. In a recent six-month period, GDC hired 118 officers for every 800 applicants — an effective hiring rate of 14.75 percent. Systemwide correctional officer vacancy has been over 50 percent since mid-2021. Commissioner Tyrone Oliver told lawmakers that "Trying to hire 2,600 people in a fiscal year is just not possible," and that lock replacement across the system will take five to six years. ZipRecruiter reported Georgia's average correctional officer salary at $45,603 against a national average of $54,007; Salary.com put it at $50,549 in January 2026, in the bottom third nationally.

Fees, Commissions, and the Money That Never Appears in the Budget

A parallel revenue stream runs alongside the appropriation. GDC contracts with Securus Technologies for phone services and JPay, a Securus subsidiary, for tablets, email, and money transfers. The Georgia-Securus contract specifies a commission rate of 59.6 percent of gross revenue paid to GDC — among the highest in the nation, against a national average of roughly 43 percent. In 2019, GDC received $8,062,200.60 in annual commissions; in 2022, $7.04 million. The contract included a one-time signing bonus of $4,000,000, a minimum monthly guarantee of $325,000, and a Forensics Lab at $68,000 per month ($816,000 a year) staffed with intake specialists, digital forensics technicians, and intelligence analysts.

Families pay the other side. JPay money transfer fees run $3.50 for transfers up to $20, $5.00 for $20.01 to $100, and $6.50 for $100.01 to $300. Email stamps cost $0.35 at the standard rate, $0.20 in bulk. Georgia's phone rate is $0.06 per minute as of September 2025, with a 25-minute maximum call duration. Fees collected from incarcerated individuals total more than $10 million annually for each of the last three years.

Where the commission revenue goes has not been publicly reported. Commissions and kickbacks from commissary and telecom contracts flow into "Inmate Welfare Funds" — accounts supposedly held for incarcerated people's benefit that operate outside legislative appropriation oversight. In Georgia, welfare-fund reporting is required only upon suspicion of fraud, changes in personnel managing the fund, or extensive funding shortages. There is no routine reporting or audit schedule.

Deaths in Custody: The People Behind the Line Items

The budget's largest categories are abstractions until they are not. GPS's death registry records the following people, each of whom died inside the system these appropriations fund:

• Marcus Walker died January 10, 2026, at Wilcox State Prison; GPS's registry lists the manner as homicide, age 20.
• Corey Jose July died June 17, 2025, at Hancock State Prison; GPS's registry lists the manner as homicide, age 33.
• Vincent Reshad Dyer died August 21, 2024, at Baldwin State Prison; GPS's registry lists the manner as homicide, age 50.
• Torrey Wayne Forrester died July 1, 2024, at Washington State Prison; GPS's registry lists the manner as natural/medical, age 41.
• Reginald Jerome Jacobs Jr. died February 6, 2023, at Calhoun State Prison; GPS's registry lists the manner as deliberate indifference, age 24.
• James Merritt Byrd died January 23, 2022, at Effingham County Prison; GPS's registry lists the manner as medical neglect, age 30.

GPS has independently tracked 1,896 deaths in GDC custody since 2020. That figure is a floor: GDC reports deaths roughly two months late, and in March 2024 the Commissioner stopped including preliminary cause of death in monthly mortality reports.

What the Line Items Add Up To

Georgia's corrections budget is not a mystery. The Governor's Budget Report and the Senate Appropriations Committee Substitute publish every program total, every line-item change, and every fund-source shift. What the documents show is a system that spent $1.91 billion at its peak, cut its largest program by $187 million, grew private-prison and healthcare spending, directed roughly $27 million in new money toward security and technology against roughly $1.2 million toward rehabilitation, funded food at 55 cents a meal, and left education without a standalone line item at all.

The state's own budget language is candid about some of this. The Senate committee rejected 263 private prison beds on the grounds that "Space is not compatible with single cell needs of prison population," then attached a $0 directive to study single-cell capacity. It cut the high school diploma program and told GDC to explore virtual options. It rejected $4.9 million for food service contracts and $850,000 for farm equipment. These are choices, recorded in the appropriations record, and they are the clearest available statement of what Georgia's prison system is for.

Sources

This analysis draws on the Governor's Budget Report for Amended FY 2026 and FY 2027 and earlier editions; HB 974 (FY 2027G), the Senate Appropriations Committee Substitute; Georgia Department of Corrections budget summaries for FY2026–FY2027; Georgia Public Broadcasting's budget primers; DOAA State Auditor audits of GDC from 2004 through 2025; Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles annual reports; Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporting on the Aramark food service contract; The Marshall Project's 2026 investigation of prison food spending; and GPS's own budget series, commissary investigation, OWL Unit analysis, and mortality registry.