How We Count
Every number Georgia Prisoners’ Speak publishes about deaths in Georgia’s prisons is checkable. This page explains exactly what our death count includes, where each figure comes from, and why the true number is always higher than the one you see.
The count is a floor, not a total
We publish this number with a plus sign, and we mean it. The Georgia Department of Corrections typically reports a death about two months after it happens. That means people have already died whom the state has not yet reported — so the real figure is higher than this one, right now, always. When you see a recent month or a current-year total that looks low, you are usually looking at a reporting gap, not a safety improvement. We flag or shade any incomplete window on our charts for exactly this reason.
Who is counted
Our count is every person who died while under the control of the Georgia Department of Corrections, since January 1, 2020, to the present — regardless of where they physically died:
- State prisons
- Private prisons operated under GDC contract
- County prisons, transition centers, probation detention centers, and RSAT programs
- People who died in a hospital while in GDC custody — if the state had custody, the state owns the death
- Deaths GDC has officially reported, and deaths reported to us by families and incarcerated people that our editors have reviewed and approved
GDC reports that someone died. It will not say why.
GDC used to report cause of death. It stopped. The agency still acknowledges that people die. It no longer says how. And when GPS filed an Open Records request for the historical causes — deaths from years when GDC was still reporting them — GDC refused to produce those too.
That is not a change in disclosure policy going forward. Refusing to release causes of death you already determined, for people who already died, that you already published, is a decision that the past should stop existing.
On GPS’s accountability review of four prisons, 21 of 37 deaths now sit in a column the state simply labels “unknown.”
This is not our characterization. It is a federal finding.
In October 2024, the United States Department of Justice concluded an eight-year federal civil rights investigation of Georgia’s prisons — opened in 2016, expanded in 2021, and published October 1, 2024. It examined this exact question — and it did the arithmetic.
- GDC reported 6 homicides for the first five months of 2024. GDC’s own incident reports categorized at least 18 deaths as homicides over that same period.
- Two homicides from 2021 were still classified “unknown” in GDC’s June 2024 data — three years later — and were therefore still excluded from GDC’s official homicide count. GBI autopsy records and EMS records made both plain: one a stabbing, the other an asphyxiation after a chokehold.
- A death that GDC’s own Office of Professional Standards internally determined to be a homicide in February 2022 was reported publicly as “undetermined” for two years.
- In total, DOJ identified seven deaths from 2022 logged as undetermined or natural until 2024 — although other official records had made clear much earlier that they were homicides.
GDC’s explanation for the “unknown” category is that it is waiting on death certificates. DOJ checked. It isn’t true. The deaths GDC published as “unknown” included deaths GDC’s own incident reports already called homicides. The information was in the building.
GDC’s homicide-reporting practices shield the State from public accountability for homicides in the prisons.
U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, October 1, 2024A death without a cause is a death without accountability. You cannot sue over it, legislate against it, or learn from it. You cannot even mourn it properly. A homicide and a heart attack look identical in a column that has stopped recording the difference.
Source: “Investigation of the Georgia Department of Corrections,” U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, October 1, 2024, pp. 55–57
https://www.justice.gov/d9/2024-09/findings_report_-_investigation_of_georgia_prisons.pdf
So we go and get the record ourselves
1. Primary death records from agencies GDC does not control
GDC stopped publishing cause of death. It cannot stop the coroners from recording it.
When someone dies in a Georgia prison, that death does not exist only in GDC’s files. It generates records held by agencies that answer to different masters — county coroners and medical examiners who certify the death and determine its manner, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, which conducts autopsies in custodial deaths, death certificates, and autopsy reports.
GPS requests these records directly. From counties. From the GBI. One death at a time.
These are primary official documents. A death certificate is not a rumor. A GBI autopsy report is not an allegation. They are the State of Georgia’s own findings about how a person in the State of Georgia’s custody died — and GDC has no authority over any of them.
The Justice Department used the same records to catch GDC. When federal investigators wanted to know whether GDC’s “unknown” deaths were really unknown, they went to GBI autopsy records and EMS records — and found homicides.
2. Reports from inside
Incarcerated Georgians and the families of the dead tell us what they witnessed — often months before any official document exists, and sometimes about deaths where no official document ever will. That report is not open intake and it is not published automatically. An editor reviews and approves every single one before it enters the count or the record. In many cases the person filing the report is a GPS founder acting on a direct account from inside.
Source reports frequently arrive first and are later confirmed by a death certificate or autopsy report we obtain.
These family- and witness-sourced reports are moderated, not unverified. Treating them as weaker would get the story backwards: they exist because the State of Georgia deliberately stopped keeping a record the public is entitled to. A family’s account of how their son died, later corroborated by the GBI, is not weak evidence — it is the record the state should have published in the first place.
The federal law that should have prevented this
The Death in Custody Reporting Act of 2013 requires every state receiving federal justice assistance funds to report to the U.S. Attorney General, quarterly, on the death of any person incarcerated in a state prison or any state or local contract facility. Cause and manner of death are required elements. Federal guidance is explicit that “unknown” is a placeholder — states are obligated to go back and update the record once a cause is determined. Non-compliance carries a penalty of up to 10% of a state’s federal justice assistance grant.
But DCRA requires reporting to the Attorney General. It does not require telling the public, and the federal data has never been published.
Source: Death in Custody Reporting Act of 2013, Pub. L. 113-242
https://www.congress.gov/113/plaws/publ242/PLAW-113publ242.pdf
The State Auditor found the same gap in 2007
None of this is new. In August 2007 the Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts published a special examination of inmate health care at GDC, a follow-up to its 2004 evaluation. Part of it asked whether the department’s Office of Health Services was reviewing the deaths in its custody. The auditors reported:
- Of 233 inmate deaths in calendar years 2005 and 2006 (excluding executions), only 30 had evidence that OHS clinical staff performed a mortality review.
- OHS couldn’t locate the medical files for 86 of the 203 deaths that weren’t reviewed.
- OHS said it had stopped on-the-record mortality reviews in late 2005 because of a case in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that it believed put the confidentiality of the reviews at risk. A review committee was re-established in May 2006, but the process hadn’t restarted when the auditors looked.
- After cuts to the central OHS staff, the controls that had been in place, including clinical audits and executive mortality reviews, had “deteriorated considerably.”
GDC’s response, printed in the report, said 41 of the 86 missing files had since been located.
So nearly twenty years ago the state’s own auditor found that GDC wasn’t reliably reviewing why people died in its custody, and in many cases couldn’t find the medical file. That’s the gap this page describes. GPS’s death registry is the successor to that count: a running record of every person who died under GDC control since January 1, 2020, with the source for each entry, kept outside the department.
Source: Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts, Performance Audit Operations Division, “Inmate Health Care,” Special Examination 07-06, August 2007 (published August 16, 2007; audits.ga.gov report 6961), section “OHS does not perform executive mortality reviews of inmate deaths and is unable to locate medical files for many deceased inmates”
https://www.audits.ga.gov/ReportSearch/download/6961
Showing the work is the point
We hold ourselves to “every number is checkable” because our credibility on this number is the work. But showing the work here does something more: it is itself the finding. GPS has to reconstruct the cause of death, one family and one coroner’s office at a time, because the agency responsible for these deaths stopped writing it down. A count assembled from grief is what accountability looks like when the state abandons the ledger.
What we keep out of the hard number
A small number of reports name a death but cannot yet identify the person — an unnamed account of a death at a named facility, with no confirmed identity or date. We hold these out of the published figure so we never count the same death twice when GDC later reports it under a real name. They are real leads, and they are part of why the count carries a “+” — but they do not inflate the number itself. The floor is conservative on purpose.
We also do not name living incarcerated people. Ever. People who talk to us can still be moved, and moving someone into danger is a documented form of retaliation in Georgia prisons.
One source of truth
Every surface that shows this number — the homepage, the accountability pages, our data feeds, and the AI assistant — draws from a single canonical function and re-queries it live. There is exactly one place the number comes from, so there is never more than one answer to “how many have died.”
Every cause of death in our record carries its source: GDC report, death certificate, autopsy report, coroner’s determination, or source testimony. You can always see how we know.