Brief written August 23, 2026 from GPS Intelligence System data.(K)

Advocate Intelligence Brief: The System Is Documented. Now Move.

This brief is for the people who do the work: family members with someone inside, reform advocates, allied organizations, and GPS Advocate Network members. It is organized around one question — what can you do this month? — and every claim in it traces to GPS's published intelligence corpus: court-verified records, GDC's own published data, open-records productions, and source-weighted reports from inside. Where evidence comes from family attestations or anonymous tips, we say so. Where it comes from the U.S. Department of Justice or a court file, we say that too.

The short version of the moment: Georgia holds 52,615 people in custody across 90 facilities GPS tracks. GPS has independently documented at least 1,861 deaths in GDC custody since 2020 — a floor, because GDC reports deaths roughly two months late (GPS-tracked mortality data, n=1,861+). The DOJ's 93-page findings report concluded that GDC leadership "has lost control of its facilities" and described "among the most severe violations" uncovered in any DOJ prison investigation. None of this is allegation anymore. It is the record. Your job — our job — is to make the record expensive to ignore.

Do This Month: The Five-Item Action Menu

1. Join the GPS Advocate Network. Roles are listed below — facility monitors, records requesters, family liaisons, district captains, translators, amplifiers. Start at gps.press/submit-a-report and mark your interest, or submit a first-person account through Tell My Story.
2. Submit anything you know. A death, a lockdown, a denied sick call, a retaliatory transfer — gps.press/submit-a-report. GPS currently holds 5,898 publishable claims, each source-weighted and cross-checked. Yours becomes part of the corroboration graph.
3. Share the two active campaigns. Vision 2027 and End the Warehouse are built to be forwarded — to your group chat, your church, your legislator, your local paper.
4. Look up your legislators and send them the numbers. gps.press/find-your-legislator — pair it with the budget figures below.
5. If you have a loved one inside, read the crisis-moment guidance now — before you need it. Lockdowns in this system have gone statewide twice in recent months. The steps are below.

The Numbers Every Advocate Should Carry

Memorize these. They are drawn from GDC's own budget documents, the DOJ findings, and GPS's mortality database, and they end most arguments.

• $1.91 billion. GDC's actual all-funds spending in FY2025 — an all-time peak, after a 57% surge in four years off a plateau of roughly $1.2 billion (Governor's Budget Report, Amended FY2026/FY2027; GPS budget analysis). The FY2027 approved budget sits at roughly $1.79 billion.
• At least 1,861 deaths since 2020, including 260 homicides and 119 suicides. The single largest category — 688 deaths, more than one in three — carries no publicly known cause at all (GPS-tracked mortality data, n=1,861+; Deaths in Custody). Year by year: 294 deaths in 2020, 257 in 2021, 254 in 2022, 262 in 2023, 333 in 2024, 301 in 2025, and at least 160 so far in 2026 — always an undercount, because of the reporting lag.
• 142 homicides from 2018 through 2023, climbing from 7 in 2018 to 35 in 2023 — a five-fold increase, per the DOJ investigation. Georgia's 2019 prison homicide rate of 34 per 100,000 was nearly triple the national state-prison average.
• Correctional officer vacancy rates above 50% systemwide since mid-2021, exceeding 70% at eight facilities (DOJ findings). At Valdosta State Prison the rate hit 80%. A former GDC assistant warden, Russell Zirkle, has testified on record that the state's published staffing numbers are "skewed" — fully-staffed halfway houses are blended into system averages, hiding 70–80% vacancy rates at major prisons, including Telfair, Hancock, Smith, Valdosta, Macon, Autry, and Calhoun [corroborated testimony; corroborated ×2 with former officer Tyler Ryals].
• 46:1. The ratio of GDC's surveillance spending ($120 million) to its rehabilitation programming ($2.6 million) — roughly $52 per person per year on programming, per GPS's budget analysis.
• $0.54 per meal. What Georgia spends to feed an incarcerated person, against an American Correctional Association benchmark of about $3.66 — 14.8% of standard (Prison Nutrition).
• 315 gangs, roughly 15,200 validated members — 31% of the prison population, more than double the national rate, with no systematic gang-separation housing policy (GDC Security Threat Group data; NIJ comparison; GPS "315 Gangs, Zero Strategy").
• 273 consecutive PREA audits without a single failed standard — while the DOJ found sexual assault "rampant." GPS's analysis of 15,542 allegations from 2014–2024 found a 3.5% substantiation rate (Sexual Abuse).
• 428 GDC employees arrested for on-the-job criminal conduct between 2018 and 2023 (AJC investigation via Open Records Act requests and POST records) — while GDC's public contraband-arrests website listed only 4 worker arrests in a year its own internal data showed 38 (Staff Misconduct).

Active Campaigns

Vision 2027: Post-Conviction Justice Reform

gps.press/intelligence/issue/vision-2027/

Vision 2027 is GPS's synthesis framework — the assembly of more than a dozen research collections into a single evidentiary foundation for post-conviction reform: what the system costs, what it does to the people inside and the families outside, why internal accountability fails, and what has demonstrably worked in other states. It names the specific statutory levers that already exist in Georgia law — including O.C.G.A. § 42-5-52, the classification-and-separation duty on the books since 1897, which commands that the department "shall" separate dangerous prisoners. The state is not missing a tool. It is ignoring one it has held for more than 125 years.

How to push it: - Share the brief with one organization you belong to this month — a congregation, a union local, a bar association chapter — and ask them to read it as a group. - Bring it to your legislators. Vision 2027 is built for legislative meetings: it pairs the federal findings with the budget lines. Use Find Your Legislator and hand them the page, not a summary. - Quote it. Every figure in it is sourced. When you write a letter to the editor or speak at a county commission, the Vision 2027 numbers are citable.

End the Warehouse: Prison Transformation Plan

gps.press/intelligence/issue/end-the-warehouse/

End the Warehouse starts from a harder premise: the crisis is not a management problem one commissioner or one budget cycle can fix. It is a design — enforced idleness, gang recruitment into the vacuum, surveillance instead of rehabilitation — and it can be unmade. The campaign page assembles the proof: court-tested population-reduction models, costed oversight frameworks from other states, rehabilitation investments with measured returns, and the normalization principle now running on American soil, at a price lower than what Georgia already spends to fail.

The page also documents what the warehouse produced just this summer: at least eight deaths across six facilities in the first twenty days of one month alone — at Central State Prison, Pulaski State Prison, Valdosta State Prison, Baldwin State Prison, Augusta State Medical Prison, and Burruss Correctional Training Center (GPS mortality database).

How to push it: - Sign on and share. The campaign page is the shareable object. Post it with the one-line framing: Georgia spends $1.9 billion a year to warehouse 50,000 people. The DOJ says it's unconstitutional. There's a costed alternative. - Anchor a local meeting around it. The page works as a discussion document for a community meeting — the "Follow the Money" section (the Securus contract's 59.6% commission kickback, the $4 million signing incentive, the opaque Inmate Welfare Funds) reliably converts skeptics. - Pair it with the companion Legislative Brief when lobbying — that brief leads with fiscal exposure.

Facility-Level Priorities

Ranked by the weight of reports GPS has received over the past 90 days, cross-referenced with recent mortality entries. Source weight is noted for each — treat unverified items as leads to corroborate, not facts to repeat.

1. Dooly State Prison — facility page

Dooly dominates the current intake. GPS has received multiple anonymous tips reporting a death in custody, with the person's name unconfirmed, the cause unconfirmed, and the facility reported to be in lockdown at the time of the reports. Tipsters specifically asked why no public monitoring channel had said anything. These reports are anonymous and unverified — but they are numerous, internally consistent, and they match a documented pattern: families in this system routinely learn of a death from other incarcerated people before the State tells them anything (GPS claim-layer data). Separately, a former GDC cadet was just sentenced to 15 years for smuggling meth into Dooly (DOJ via WGXA; GPS-authored coverage) — staff-channel contraband at the same facility where sources report lethal conditions. Advocate task: if you know anyone housed at Dooly, ask what they saw and submit it. Corroboration is what turns a tip into a record.

2. Washington State Prison — facility page

Four men were killed in a single gang disturbance at Washington in January — including Jimmy Trammell, who had 72 hours left on a ten-year sentence — in a facility operating with five officers to cover 69 posts (GPS "Separate the Gangs or Keep Burying the Dead"). The facility was still locked down weeks later when another man was stabbed inside the lockdown. In the current window, a family-attestation account reports a person found dead there, and a separate family-attestation account alleges an incarcerated person was poisoned through food; GPS staff analysis notes independent inside corroboration as to the substance of the poisoning allegation, though it remains unverified. Advocate task: Washington is the clearest case for the gang-separation demand in both campaigns. Families with people at Washington should document everything and expect the official account to arrive late.

3. Valdosta State Prison — facility page

Three deaths in the recent mortality window (GPS-tracked mortality data), an officer vacancy rate that reached 80% (DOJ findings), and on-record corroborated testimony placing it in the 70–80% vacancy band. Valdosta is where the staffing-collapse argument writes itself. Advocate task: if you are in South Georgia, Valdosta is your legislative Exhibit A — the district's own facility is the DOJ's vacancy headline.

4. Telfair State Prison — facility page

Named in corroborated testimony as running 70–80% officer vacancy. In the current window, both a family-attestation account and an incarcerated witness report that two pro se §1983 civil-rights complaints have been prepared — one against Telfair, one against the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles — anchored to the October 2024 DOJ report as their evidentiary foundation, alleging use of force, medical claims, deliberate indifference, and First, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendment violations. Advocate task: the DOJ report is becoming the template for pro se litigation from inside. Help it along: the Legal Access brief explains the exhaustion gauntlet those filers must survive.

5. Augusta State Medical Prison — facility page

Four deaths in the recent window — the heaviest mortality concentration in the system right now (GPS-tracked mortality data) — at the facility that is supposed to be the system's medical safety net. ASMP was also among the facilities locked down during the coordinated systemwide violence this spring, with a killing reported in its D2 unit the day another facility came off lockdown. Advocate task: ASMP deaths deserve open-records follow-up on every name. The Medical Neglect brief is the framing document.

Watchlist: Ware State Prison — where coroner and GBI records GPS obtained through an open-records request document at least 19 homicides since 2020, with a suspected attacker named in eleven of them and no public record that anyone was ever charged ("At Least Nineteen: The Murders the State Didn't Prosecute"). And Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison, site of the Special Management Unit and three deaths in the recent window.

Family Resources

How to File an Open-Records Request

Georgia's Open Records Act (O.C.G.A. § 50-18-70 et seq.) applies to GDC, county coroners, sheriffs, and the GBI. GPS's own work shows what it can produce: the Ware State Prison death-investigation files — 231 coroner reports, GBI autopsies, and toxicology findings covering 84 deaths — came through an open-records request. So did the production showing six officers on duty when a riot began. Families can do this.

1. Identify the custodian. Death investigation: the county coroner where the facility sits, and the GBI medical examiner for autopsies. Facility conditions, incident reports, staffing rosters: GDC's legal services / open-records office. Jail backlog or transfer records: the county sheriff.
2. Put it in writing, cite the Act, and name the records specifically. "All death-investigation reports, autopsy reports, and toxicology reports for [name], deceased [approximate date], [facility]." Specificity defeats delay.
3. Ask for a fee estimate up front and note that the Act requires a response within three business days.
4. Keep every letter, envelope, and email. The paper trail is evidence.
5. Send GPS what you get — or tell us what was denied — via Submit a Report. Denials are themselves reportable.

Escalating Medical Neglect

The documented pathway, drawn from the Medical Neglect and Legal Access briefs:

• Inside: the incarcerated person should file sick-call requests and keep copies, then grieve denials through the grievance process — with one brutal deadline: 10 calendar days from when they knew of the facts to file. Missing it is fatal to later federal claims (Eleventh Circuit, Johnson v. Meadows; PLRA exhaustion per Woodford v. Ngo and Jones v. Bock). The warden then has 40 days to respond. Exhaustion is a trap, but skipping it is worse.
• Outside: document dates, symptoms reported, and every phone call. Put concerns in writing to the warden and to GDC health services, and keep copies. Written family escalation has a record; phone calls evaporate.
• Report every denial to GPS. Individual medical-neglect claims look anecdotal alone; against a database where 688 of at least 1,861 deaths carry no known cause, they become pattern evidence.
• If the worst happens: request the death-investigation file from the coroner by open-records request, and do not accept a verbal cause of death as the final word. GPS's mortality archive is at gps.press/georgia-prison-deaths.

Finding Legal Help

GPS does not yet maintain a public legal-aid referral directory, and we won't pretend otherwise. What we can tell you from the record: prisoner civil-rights cases in Georgia's federal courts are overwhelmingly terminated with no recovery (see the settlement ledger below), which means competent counsel matters enormously and pro se filers need every procedural edge. The Legal Access brief is the map of the gauntlet — exhaustion rules, deadlines, and the statutory architecture. For case-specific advice, consult a licensed Georgia attorney; bring the DOJ findings report and the relevant GPS facility page to the first meeting, because both are citable records.

Join the GPS Advocate Network

GPS's model is documented in its own pages: a real-time reporting network of incarcerated sources across the state, a corroboration backbone that stamps provenance on every claim, and a public intelligence layer at gps.press/intelligence. The Advocate Network is the outside half of that machine. To join, reach us through Submit a Report or Tell My Story and say what role you want.

Roles we need filled now:

• Facility monitor. Adopt a facility page — start with the five priorities above. Track its deaths, its lockdowns, its inspection scores. When tips come in about "your" facility, you help corroborate.
• Records requester. File open-records requests to coroners, sheriffs, and GDC, and route results to GPS. The Ware investigation is the proof of concept: one records stream, 84 deaths documented, 19 unprosecuted homicides exposed.
• Family liaison. Be the person in your community who knows the intake pathways — who walks a newly affected family through Submit a Report, Tell My Story, and the crisis steps below.
• District captain. Own your legislative district: know your legislators, deliver the Legislative Brief, and show up at town halls with the budget numbers.
• Translator. GPS publishes in English and Spanish. Bilingual advocates double the reach of every campaign.
• Data volunteer. GPS maintains machine-readable facility data at gps.press/facilities-data — researchers and spreadsheet people, there is work for you.
• Amplifier. Share the campaigns. It sounds small; it is how a watchdog with no budget out-reaches a $1.9 billion agency with a public-relations shop.

Submit a Report — and What GPS Does With It

The form: gps.press/submit-a-report

Anyone can submit: incarcerated people, families, staff, attorneys, anonymous tipsters. Here is what happens next, because you deserve to know your report isn't going into a void:

1. Source classification. Every claim is stamped by source class and weight — anonymous tip, family attestation, inmate witness, court-verified record, open-records production, official data. You saw this in the Dooly entries above: GPS publishes anonymous tips as anonymous tips, never dressed up as confirmed fact.
2. Corroboration. Claims enter a relationship graph. When former officer Tyler Ryals described the staffing cover-up and former assistant warden Russell Zirkle confirmed it on record — "Everything he says is completely true" — that became a corroborated ×2 backbone fact. When GPS's open-records production showed six officers on duty at Ware, it corroborated the vacancy testimony. Your report may be the second source that hardens a fact.
3. Publication with weight noted. GPS currently holds 5,898 publishable claims across 119 facility-topic threads. Publication always carries the source class, so readers — and legislators, and journalists — can weigh it themselves.
4. Floor discipline. GPS counts conservatively and says so. Death totals are published as floors because GDC reports late. Homicide counts are floors because Georgia publishes no official prison-homicide count at all. Your report can raise the floor toward the truth.

Tell My Story

gps.press/tellmystory/

Tell My Story (TMS) is GPS's first-person narrative intake — the long-form companion to Submit a Report. It is for incarcerated people and their families who want the full account on record: not an incident, but a life inside the system. The GPS solution series shows what these accounts become: the warehouse series, the gang-separation investigations, and the mortality reporting all rest on first-person testimony from inside, corroborated and published with source weight. If statistics opened the door, stories walk through it. Submit yours — yours or your loved one's — and GPS will treat it with the same provenance discipline as everything else in the corpus.

Crisis-Moment Guidance: Lockdowns and Disturbances

Georgia has now seen coordinated gang violence lock down every state prison at once more than once in recent months — stabbings confirmed at five facilities in a single afternoon, life flights dispatched, visitation cut off (GPS "Blood on Blood"; "Separate the Gangs. It Costs Nothing."). During the January crisis, a man was killed at Hays State Prison after telling a counselor he couldn't go back to his dorm — they sent him back anyway — and family who rushed to the facility were turned away, told they weren't on the visitor list. Learn from what the record shows.

When you hear something — or hear nothing:

1. Write down the date, time, and exactly what you heard and from whom. Memory blurs; timestamps corroborate.
2. Call the facility and ask for the warden's office. Ask directly whether the facility is locked down and request a welfare check on your loved one by name and GDC number. Note who you spoke with.
3. Keep your visitation paperwork and visitor-list status current. The Hays family was turned away over the visitor list. Check yours before you ever need it.
4. Submit real-time information to GPS — Submit a Report is monitored, and during systemwide events GPS's reporting network is often faster than any official channel.
5. Expect silence from official channels, and don't mistake it for safety. During the April lockdown, information flowed from incarcerated sources while GDC said little. The documented pattern is that families learn from other people, not from the State.
6. Preserve names. If someone inside witnessed an incident, their identity matters later — for grievances, litigation, and GPS corroboration.
7. Afterward, file the open-records request. Incident reports, staffing rosters, count sheets. The paper either confirms the account or confirms the cover-up; both are evidence.

The Settlement Ledger: What GDC Pays For, and What It Gets Away With

Two ledgers, read together.

Ledger one — what the State pays out. GPS's compilation from Georgia Department of Administrative Services risk-management records and court files places prison death and injury settlements at a floor of $50,633,556 across 261 claims (Legal Settlements; Vision 2027). That is the documented cost of the violence, the neglect, and the deaths — paid quietly, from risk-management funds, without admission. For advocates, this is the fiscal-exposure argument: the State is already paying for the warehouse, in settlement checks, on top of the $1.9 billion operating budget.

Ledger two — what the courts kill. GPS's tracked docket of recently terminated Georgia federal cases shows the other side: Grant v. Ward (GAMD, 5:22-cv-00396, terminated), Humphreys v. Oliver (GAND, twice, terminated), Chambers v. Benton (GASD, 4:21-cv-00002 — filed years earlier, terminated), Daker v. Oliver, Ballard v. Davis, Mejia Morales v. Streeval — every one closed with $0 recovered. Fifteen tracked terminations, fifteen zeros. That is the PLRA machine working as designed: exhaustion traps, filing restrictions, and procedural defaults converting constitutional claims into dismissals (see Retaliation and Legal Access).

The implication for your framing: the system pays tens of millions for the harm it cannot hide, and pays nothing for the harm it can procedurally strangle. When a legislator says "let the courts handle it," this ledger is your answer.

Coalition Partners and How to Plug In

The record GPS publishes is already a coalition document — it stands on the work of many hands: the DOJ Civil Rights Division attorneys who produced the 93-page findings; the AJC reporters who built the 428-arrest database from open-records requests; the former GDC officers and command staff — Zirkle, Ryals — who went on record when it cost them something; the prosecutors who won the Hancock County murder conviction in the killing of Corey July and the Tattnall County grand jury that indicted former Smith State Prison Warden Brian Adams on racketeering and bribery charges; and above all the families and incarcerated sources whose accounts fill the corroboration graph.

If your organization works in criminal legal reform, public health, reentry, faith outreach, or journalism, here is how to plug in:

• Take the data. gps.press/facilities-data is machine-readable. Build on it, cite it, map it.
• Share the intelligence layer. Every issue brief — staffing, violence, mental health, family communication, oversight and more — is a ready-made briefing for your members.
• Bring your lane. Litigators: the DOJ report is sitting there as an evidentiary anchor — pro se filers inside are already using it. Researchers: the PREA audit analysis and the mortality database are publication-grade. Journalists: the facility pages are assignment desks.
• Connect your affected families to intake. Submit a Report and Tell My Story convert individual pain into system evidence.

This Month's Ask

Three concrete moves, in order:

1. Sign up. Join the GPS Advocate Network through gps.press/submit-a-report — name your role: facility monitor, records requester, family liaison, district captain, translator, data volunteer, amplifier.
2. Report. If you know something — a death at Dooly, a denial of care at Valdosta, a lockdown anywhere — put it on the record at gps.press/submit-a-report. If it's a story, not an incident, tell it at gps.press/tellmystory.
3. Share. Send End the Warehouse and Vision 2027 to three people today, and send your legislators the Legislative Brief with one line: At least 1,861 dead since 2020, $1.9 billion a year, and the DOJ says it's unconstitutional. What are you doing about it?

The documentation is done. The dying continues — at least 160 more this year, and counting late. The only variable left is how many people are willing to act on the record. Be one of them this month.