Brief written August 2, 2026 from GPS Intelligence System data.(K)

Advocate Intelligence Brief: What You Can Do This Month

For the GPS Advocate Network, affected families, and allied organizations

This brief is built for action. Every section ends in something you can do — this week, this month, with the people you already know. The evidence base behind every claim here is drawn from GPS's tracking of 114 Georgia Department of Corrections facilities, 5,543 publishable claims, court records, open-records productions, and the U.S. Department of Justice's October 2024 findings report. Where a claim rests on family attestation or anonymous tips rather than court-verified records, we say so.

If you read nothing else, read the next section.

Five Things You Can Do Right Now

1. Join the GPS Advocate Network. We are building facility-monitor, records, legislative, and family-liaison teams. Roles and signup are below.
2. Submit what you know. If you have information about conditions, violence, medical neglect, or a death in custody, file it through Submit a Report. GPS's real-time reporting network is how the public learned what happened during the April 1 and May 21 statewide lockdowns.
3. Share the two active campaigns. Vision 2027 is the reform framework; End the Warehouse is the evidentiary case. Both are built to be forwarded to legislators, faith communities, and local media.
4. Find your legislator and put the deaths in front of them. Use Find Your Legislator and the GPS legislative brief as your leave-behind.
5. If your family has lived this, tell the story. Tell My Story is the intake channel for family members, formerly incarcerated people, and survivors. Details below.

The Ground Truth You Are Organizing Against

Keep these numbers at your fingertips. They are the ones that end arguments.

• At least 1,859 people have died in GDC custody since 2020 (GPS-tracked mortality data, n=1,859). That figure is a floor: GDC reports deaths roughly two months late and does not publicly release cause-of-death information, so the true count is always higher. Of those deaths, 1,044 — more than half — remain classified as unknown or pending cause. Only 417 have been attributed to natural or medical causes (Deaths in Custody).
• 2024 was the deadliest year on record: 333 deaths. Officials attributed 66 to homicide; GPS's independent tracking documented at least 100. In 2025, 301 more people died. So far in 2026, at least 158 have died — again, a floor (GPS mortality archive).
• The system is under a federal constitutional finding. The DOJ's October 2024 CRIPA report — 93 pages, three years of investigation — found "deliberate indifference" to lethal violence, documented 142 homicides from 2018–2023 and more than 1,400 violent incidents in a single sixteen-month window, and concluded that gangs control housing units. GDC publicly rejected the findings. As of GPS's most recent research, no CRIPA enforcement suit has been filed (Oversight & Investigations).
• The staffing collapse is the engine. System-wide officer vacancy stood at 52.5% as of 2024; eight facilities ran above 70%; Valdosta State Prison hit 80%. Former assistant warden Russell Zirkle testified on the record that major prisons — Telfair, Hancock, Smith, Valdosta, Macon, Autry, Calhoun — run 70–80% officer vacancy, concealed by blending fully staffed halfway houses into system averages. GPS's open-records production showed six officers on duty when the Washington State Prison riot began (Staffing Crisis).
• The money is not the constraint. GDC spending peaked at $1.91 billion in FY2025; the approved FY2027 budget is $1.79 billion. New spending runs roughly 22-to-1 security-and-surveillance over rehabilitation — about $1.23 million for rehabilitation across two budget cycles, roughly $26 per incarcerated person per year. The food line works out to $0.54 per meal, under 15% of the American Correctional Association benchmark (Budget Analysis).
• The state holds 52,894 people across its facilities (GDC population snapshot, July 31, 2026), with another 2,542 state inmates backlogged in county jails.

Active Campaigns

Vision 2027: Post-Conviction Justice Reform

Vision 2027 is GPS's synthesis of more than a dozen research collections: the economics of incarceration, the legal architecture of accountability, comparative reforms that demonstrably worked in other states, and the specific statutory levers that already exist in Georgia law.

The campaign's core argument is that Georgia does not need to invent solutions — it needs to use the ones on the shelf. The flagship example: O.C.G.A. § 42-5-52 has commanded the classification and separation of dangerous prisoners since 1897. Georgia has validated roughly 15,200 people — 31% of its prison population — as gang-affiliated across 315 identified gangs, more than double the national rate, and has no systematic gang-separation housing policy, no exit program, and no strategy for keeping rivals apart. Texas, Arizona, and California built those systems decades ago. GPS's gang-separation series makes the case that enforcement of existing law costs nothing — and that every statewide lockdown (January, April, and May of this year alone) is a confession that the state refuses to do it.

Do this: Share the Vision 2027 brief with one organization you belong to — a congregation, a union local, a civic group — and ask them to formally endorse it. When you meet a legislator, ask one question: "Will you demand enforcement of O.C.G.A. § 42-5-52?"

End the Warehouse

End the Warehouse is the companion campaign: the evidence that the crisis is a design, not a management failure — and that it can be unmade. It assembles the budget record (a 57% spending surge in four years off a decade-long plateau), the DOJ record, the contraband-economy record — including GDC's Securus phone contract, which pays the department a 59.6% commission on call revenue while families pay roughly 13 cents a minute — and the normalization alternative, the principle that the punishment is the loss of liberty and nothing beyond it, with working examples in Scandinavia and now in California.

Do this: Use End the Warehouse as your long-form leave-behind for editorial boards, candidate forums, and coalition partners. It is written to be excerpted; take the section you need.

Facility Priorities: Where Reports Are Concentrating

GPS's intake over the last 90 days shows five facilities carrying the heaviest claim weight. If you have people inside these prisons, or you are choosing where to focus monitoring, start here.

1. Central State Prison — staff-violence cluster

The largest single cluster of reports in the current window concerns alleged staff assaults at Central State Prison: family attestations and anonymous tips describing officers striking handcuffed and immobilized people, an alleged assault carried out on orders from a deputy warden, an alleged beating of an elderly person with a mental-health condition, and an account of a person dragged into a hallway the family believes was chosen for its lack of cameras. These are allegation-weight claims, not court-verified findings — but the volume and internal consistency of the reporting, naming recurring personnel and recurring locations, is what elevates a cluster into a priority. Two deaths were recorded at Central in July: Mickey Barrett (July 11) and Steve Allen Burk (July 20) (GPS mortality data).

Do: If your loved one reports an assault, get photographs if at all possible, write down names and dates the same day, and file a report with GPS immediately. Several families report that unit managers photographed injuries — request those photos by open-records request before they disappear.

2. Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison — medical-unit conditions

Reports from incarcerated witnesses at GDCP describe blood — fresh and dried — present in the medical unit, an exam gurney contaminated with blood and urine and apparently uncleaned all day, a nurse performing an EKG without gloves or handwashing, and orderlies made to clean up blood without protective equipment. GDCP also houses the Special Management Unit, Georgia's Tier III solitary program, where as of 2017 twenty-six percent of the population had been held more than five years (Solitary Confinement). Three deaths were recorded at GDCP in June, including Mark Rutledge on June 27 — a man whose family reported to GPS that he was killed in June and that, weeks later, they had "not heard a word from the Warden or the State" (family account shared with GPS).

Do: Medical-unit reports are time-sensitive evidence. If you receive a call describing unsanitary medical conditions, note the exact date and time of the call and submit it the same day.

3. Ware State Prison — deaths without answers

Ware is where the state's accountability failure is most fully documented. Coroner and state crime-lab records obtained by GPS through an open-records request — 231 death-investigation reports covering 84 Ware deaths since 2020 — document at least 19 homicides, 12 suicides, and 8 fatal overdoses at a facility built for roughly 500 people that now holds about 1,447. In eleven of the nineteen homicides, the state's own death investigations name a suspected attacker; GPS found no public record that any of them was ever charged, indicted, or tried. Families in the current claims window report a death they believe was wrongly classified as suicide, and one family reports the state provided no answers about a wrongful death until the statute of limitations expired. David Randolph Newcomer, 85, died at Ware on June 30 (GPS mortality data).

Do: If your family lost someone at Ware, request the death-investigation file from the Ware County Coroner and the autopsy from the GBI medical examiner. These are public records. GPS's experience shows they exist and can be obtained.

4. Pulaski State Prison — threats and scalding

Family attestations from Pulaski report an incarcerated person receiving death threats, another having hot water thrown in his face, and families questioning whether staff respond at all. Two deaths were recorded at Pulaski in July: Monika Yvette Bradley (July 3) and Kristi Perkins (July 12). Pulaski is also one of only three GDC kitchens to fail a health inspection since 2022 — a 67 in January 2026, with a non-functional handwashing sink and sewage backing up through floor drains as repeat violations (Scores Without Sanitation).

Do: Death threats are exactly what GPS's intake is built to document contemporaneously. Report the threat when it is made, not after it is carried out; a timestamped report changes what the state can later claim it knew.

5. Telfair State Prison — a death record that doesn't match

GPS's analysis of a Telfair death found discrepancies between the autopsy report and GDC's own records, including conflicting information about location and the reported involvement of another person. A family reports being told there was an altercation in which their son was the only fatality; GPS analysis indicates a medical examiner's manner-of-death determination relied on GDC reports stating no foul play. Zirkle's on-record testimony places Telfair among the prisons running 70–80% officer vacancy. Franciso Samuel Cruz-Castro, 56, died at Telfair on June 12 (GPS mortality data).

Do: If the story you were told about a death doesn't match the paperwork, that mismatch is itself evidence. Request the autopsy and the incident report and bring both to GPS.

Each of these facilities has a standing GPS facility page — Central, GDCP, Ware, Pulaski, Telfair — where claims, deaths, and records are aggregated. Machine-readable data for all 114 facilities lives at gps.press/facilities-data/.

Family Resources

How to file an open-records request

Georgia's Open Records Act entitles you to public records from state agencies and county offices. GPS's own investigations — the six-officers-on-duty staffing fact, the Guidehouse consultants' report, the DOAS settlement ledger, the Ware death-investigation files — were built this way. You can do the same:

• For a death in custody: request the death-investigation report from the coroner of the county where the prison sits, and the autopsy and toxicology reports from the GBI medical examiner. Be specific: name of the deceased, date of death, facility.
• For an incident: request the incident report, use-of-force reports, and any disciplinary investigation from GDC's Central Office legal services / open-records unit, naming the facility, date range, and the person involved.
• For conditions: county health-department inspection reports for prison kitchens are public and searchable; settlement payments are obtainable from the Department of Administrative Services risk-management ledger.
• Practical rules: put everything in writing and keep copies; cite approximate dates if you lack exact ones; ask for a fee estimate up front and a waiver if cost is a barrier; expect delays — DOJ itself had to enforce a subpoena to get GDC to produce documents. Persistence is the norm, not the exception.

How to escalate a medical-neglect emergency

The stakes are documented: GPS reporting includes the case of a 41-year-old who died of hepatitis C — a curable disease — in a Georgia prison, and families currently reporting loved ones whose cancer progressed while requests for help went unanswered.

1. Document in real time. Dates, symptoms, what was requested, who was told, what the response was. Contemporaneous notes become evidence.
2. Work the grievance clock. Under GDC SOP 227.02, an original grievance must be filed within 10 calendar days of the incident, and a Central Office appeal within 7 days of the warden's response. GPS's "Grievance Machine" investigation documents how this process is engineered to defeat claims — file anyway, because the federal Prison Litigation Reform Act requires exhaustion of the grievance process before any lawsuit, and a missed deadline can end a case before it starts (Retaliation).
3. Escalate in parallel, not in sequence. Call the facility's medical unit and warden's office; email so there is a paper trail; report to GPS through Submit a Report; and contact your state legislators' offices — a legislative staffer calling a warden gets answered differently than a family calling alone. Find Your Legislator.
4. If the person is in segregation and expressing despair, treat it as an emergency. GPS's mental-health analysis links roughly half of prison suicides to isolation (Mental Health).

Where to find legal help

GPS is a watchdog, not a law firm, and does not provide legal representation. What we can do: the Legal Access brief maps the barriers; the Legal Settlements & Lawsuits brief documents the litigation landscape so you can approach counsel with the record already assembled. When seeking an attorney, look for civil-rights lawyers with Eighth Amendment conditions cases; bring your documentation and your grievance paper trail — exhausted administrative remedies are the first thing a lawyer will ask about, because the PLRA demands them. Families pursuing a death should not wait: at least one Ware family reports the state's silence outlasted the statute of limitations.

The GPS Advocate Network: Roles Open Now

The network is organized around what the work actually requires. Sign up through Submit a Report with "Advocate Network" in your message, or through Tell My Story if your entry point is a personal account.

• Facility monitors. Adopt one of the 114 facilities. Track its GPS facility page, its deaths, its claims pattern, its inspection scores. Monitors are how clusters like Central State Prison get detected early.
• Records team. File and track open-records requests — coroner files, autopsies, settlement ledgers, inspection histories. Training provided; the Ware and DOAS records show what one persistent requester can surface.
• Family liaisons. Help families navigate grievance deadlines, records requests, and escalation calls. This role requires reliability and discretion; it is the network's most direct service to affected families.
• Legislative district captains. Deliver the legislative brief to your own state representative and senator, in person, and report the response. Georgia's 2,542-person jail backlog and $1.79 billion budget are legislative facts — they land hardest from a constituent.
• Amplification — including Spanish-language. GPS publishes major investigations in both English and Spanish (the statewide-lockdown and hepatitis C reporting both ran bilingually). Bilingual advocates who can carry this reporting into Spanish-speaking communities fill a gap the state is not filling.
• Intake support. Help people in crisis turn a phone call into a documented, timestamped report.

Submit a Report — and What GPS Does With It

Submit a Report is the intake valve for everything: conditions, violence, medical neglect, retaliation, deaths, staff misconduct. What happens next is not a black box:

1. Classification by source weight. Reports enter as what they are — family attestation, anonymous tip, incarcerated-witness account — and are labeled accordingly. GPS does not launder allegation into fact; it tracks corroboration.
2. Corroboration. A single report is a data point. Multiple independent reports naming the same officer, the same dorm, the same practice become a cluster — which is how the Central State Prison priority in this brief was identified. GPS also cross-checks against court records, news coverage, and records obtained through open-records requests.
3. Protection. Retaliation is a documented system in Georgia's prisons — GPS has catalogued 61 retaliation-linked events, and the DOJ found GDC fails to protect people who report. GPS does not publish identifying information about living incarcerated sources. Reports can be made anonymously.
4. Publication and escalation. Corroborated findings feed facility pages, issue briefs, and investigations — and, during crises, real-time reporting that has repeatedly outrun official accounts.

Tell My Story

Tell My Story is for the people the system happens to: currently and formerly incarcerated people, family members, and survivors. It is distinct from Submit a Report — TMS is testimony in your own words, at your own length, about what custody did to you or your family. Those accounts become the human record behind the statistics: the reason a briefing about 1,859 deaths lands with a legislator is that a family described one of them. If your loved one died in custody, TMS is also how that person's name and life are preserved alongside the data. You control how much identifying information is attached.

In a Crisis: Lockdowns and Disturbances

Georgia has now seen repeated system-wide lockdowns: January 2026 after four men were killed at Washington State Prison — a facility running five officers across 69 posts that day — April 1, when coordinated gang violence locked down every state prison with life flights to two facilities and stabbings at five, and May 21, when violence at Ware, Dooly, Central, Augusta, and Hancock locked down the system again. Washington State Prison remained locked down without interruption for weeks. Lockdowns mean visitation cut off, phones and tablets restricted, and information reduced to whatever the department chooses to release.

When it happens:

• Start a log immediately. Date and time of every call attempted, every answer, every name or title given, every refusal. If your loved one gets through by phone, write down their account verbatim.
• Expect the information blackout and route around it. GPS's incarcerated-source network documented the April 1 lockdown in real time, facility by facility, while official channels said little. Submit what you hear — during a lockdown, fragments from many families assemble into the picture.
• Call, then write. Phone the facility; follow up by email to create a paper trail. A written record of what you asked and when matters later — for records requests, for litigation, for establishing what the state knew.
• Do not rely on the department's public account. This is the agency that rejected the DOJ's 93-page findings as a "fundamental misunderstanding" and whose incident reports DOJ found routinely misclassified homicides as unknown. GPS's mortality archive exists precisely because, as our investigation "The Empty Column" documented, Georgia won't say how prisoners die.
• Afterward, request the records. Incident reports from GDC; if there was a death, the coroner file and autopsy. Remember that GDC reports deaths roughly two months late — the absence of a name from official channels proves nothing.

What the State Pays For — and What It Doesn't

Two ledgers tell the accountability story. The first is hidden in plain sight: 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 since 2008 — taxpayer money paid out behind closed doors for the system's failures (Legal Settlements & Lawsuits).

The second ledger is the public federal docket GPS tracks, where case after case filed by or against people in the system terminates with $0 recovered — Humphreys v. Oliver (twice, terminated January and December), Chambers v. Benton (filed 2021, terminated 2025), Daker v. Oliver (closed under a filing-restriction order), Grant v. Ward (terminated 2025). Individually these are docket entries; together they show the architecture doing its job — the Prison Litigation Reform Act's exhaustion requirement plus Georgia's 10-day grievance clock means most incarcerated plaintiffs never reach a jury.

The advocate framing: the state pays millions in negotiated silence through the risk-management ledger while the courthouse door is engineered shut for the people harmed. When a legislator says "let the courts handle it," this is the answer: the courts are being paid to settle quietly, and the grievance machine — one issue per form, no grieving transfers or classification, two active grievances maximum — exists to make sure most claims never arrive. Meanwhile the criminal-accountability ledger is worse: GPS's Ware investigation found eleven state-documented homicides naming a suspected attacker with no public record of any prosecution, and the one senior official recently indicted — former Smith State Prison Warden Brian Adams, charged in May with racketeering and bribery for allegedly taking gang money — was a 26-year product of GDC's own closed promotion pipeline.

Coalition: Who We Work Alongside and How to Plug In

GPS's coalition is organized by lane rather than by logo. If any of these describe you, there is a defined way in:

• Families of the incarcerated and the dead. You are the evidentiary core. Plug in through Tell My Story and the family-liaison track of the Advocate Network.
• Formerly incarcerated people. Your testimony about the warehouse — the idleness, the gang recruitment, the counts that weren't conducted — is what converts data into understanding. The End the Warehouse and normalization campaigns are built on it.
• Faith, reentry, and civic organizations. Bring GPS briefings into your programming; the overview brief is written for audiences new to the issue.
• Civil-rights and legal organizations. GPS's corroborated, source-weighted claim clusters and records productions are built to be litigation- and complaint-ready; the media brief and issue pages are the handoff format.
• Journalists and researchers. The media brief, the facility pages, and the machine-readable facilities data are open to you. GPS's investigations — the nineteen unprosecuted Ware homicides, the 168 phantom counts during the three-week torture of Christian Krauch at Macon State Prison, the PREA audit record where 273 audits found 100% compliance while the DOJ found sexual assault rampant — all began as data points like the ones in this brief.

The Ask

The state is not going to document its own failure; its own consultants called the system "emergency mode," its own statute book has commanded gang separation since 1897, and its response to a federal finding of deliberate indifference was rejection. The documentation falls to us — which means it falls to you.

This month: join the Advocate Network and take a role — monitor, records, liaison, captain, amplifier. Submit what you know, the moment you know it. If this is your family's story, tell it. Then put the campaigns in motion: share Vision 2027 and End the Warehouse, and walk the legislative brief into your legislator's office with one demand attached — enforce the law Georgia has had for 125 years.

At least 1,859 people have died on this watch. The count is still rising. The network is how it stops.