How GPS Verifies Its Intelligence
GPS Intelligence pages draw on thousands of sources — court records, Georgia Department of Corrections reports, news coverage, open-records requests, research documents, and accounts from people inside. Because sources disagree and facts change over time, we apply a layered trust model so that what we publish reflects the best-available, current truth.
A hierarchy of trust
Not every source carries equal weight. We rank them, strongest first:
- Canonical GPS data (ground truth). Our own reconciled datasets — verified facility records, the GPS mortality database, and figures parsed directly from official GDC reports.
- Primary documents. Court filings and rulings, official GDC statements, medical and policy records.
- Attributed reporting. Named news outlets and GPS’s own published analysis.
- Testimony. Accounts from families and people inside — invaluable signal, presented with care.
- Derived / automated leads. Machine-extracted items, treated as leads to verify — never as proof.
Higher always overrides lower, fact by fact. When our canonical data holds a figure — a prison’s design capacity, its current population — that number overrides any older or lower-confidence claim that conflicts with it.
Facts change — and we keep up
A figure that was accurate last year can be overtaken by better data. Each week an automated check reconciles the numeric claims in our system against our canonical records. When a figure has been superseded, we retire it: it stays in our archive as “what was known then,” but it is no longer published as current. This keeps our public pages honest as the underlying data improves.
What we don’t automate
Some claims can’t be settled by arithmetic — firsthand accounts, allegations, narrative detail. We present those with appropriate framing rather than as settled fact. Sensitive figures such as death counts are flagged for human review rather than changed automatically, because context — a single incident versus a year versus a facility’s all-time total — matters.
Corrections
When we get something wrong, we fix it and say so. To report an error, contact GPS.
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