GDC Budget: Where the Money Goes

Brief written June 28, 2026 from GPS Intelligence System data.

A $1.8 Billion Apparatus: Growth, Diminishing Returns, and Avoidable Deaths

Georgia’s prison system now consumes nearly $1.79 billion in public funds each fiscal year, according to the state’s own budget documents. In FY 2025, actual spending surged to $1.91 billion—a spike driven by emergency pay increases, ballooning healthcare contracts, and an expanding private prison footprint. The FY 2027 approved total of $1,787,672,791 represents a slight retreat from that peak, but still marks a breathtaking escalation from the $1.53 billion recorded in FY 2024. This spending trajectory persists even as the incarcerated population hovers around 50,000 people, roughly flat or slowly declining, meaning the per‑inmate daily cost has climbed to $86.61—or $31,612 per year.

The money is not buying safety or rehabilitation. GPS‑tracked mortality records show 1,841 deaths in Georgia Department of Corrections custody since 2020. Prison homicides exploded from 8 or 9 annually in 2017‑2018 to 66 confirmed in 2024, according to a GPS research brief on the staffing crisis. The U.S. Department of Justice, after a three‑year investigation, concluded that conditions inside Georgia prisons violate the Eighth Amendment, describing “near‑constant life‑threatening violence as the norm” and finding that the State and GDC are “deliberately indifferent to unsafe conditions.” The DOJ’s October 2024 findings letter covered 17 of the state’s 34 prisons and uncovered at least 142 homicides between 2018 and 2023—a number the DOJ itself believes is a significant undercount, because GDC “categorizes many deaths that obviously were homicides as having an unknown reason.”

The budget is a story of choices. Year after year, lawmakers and the governor have pumped hundreds of millions into security hardware, overtime pay, and private‑prison contracts while starving the very programming—education, vocational training, mental health care, and reentry support—that research shows reliably reduces violence and recidivism. The following analysis draws on GPS’s own investigative reports, publicly available GDC budget documents from the Governor’s Office of Planning and Budget and House Bill 974, and the DOJ’s exhaustive findings to show exactly where the state’s prison dollars go, and what they fail to accomplish.

Healthcare: The Aging Prisoner Crisis and the Contract Bonanza

Nothing in the GDC budget has grown as relentlessly as healthcare. In the FY 2027 budget, the Health appropriation reached $432,247,728—an increase of $54.8 million over the original FY 2026 allocation and roughly a quarter of the entire department’s spending. The amended FY 2026 budget already added $39.8 million, largely to cover a per‑diem increase for the physical health contract, $15 million for “outside‑the‑wire” care when prisoners must be transported to community hospitals, and $12.9 million for new beds. The state also dipped into $20.4 million in prior‑year funds to meet physical health risk‑share obligations—a hidden cost that reveals how expensive and unpredictable prison medicine has become.

This explosion is not a mystery. Georgia abolished parole for all offenses committed after 1996 and requires incarcerated people to serve 65 to 100 percent of their sentences—a policy that has packed the system with an aging, chronically ill population whose medical needs vastly exceed those of a younger cohort. A GPS investigation into prison healthcare documented that 95 percent of prisoners eventually return to the community, making prison healthcare a public health emergency, yet the federal Medicaid Inmate Exclusion Policy blocks the state from drawing down federal dollars for the care it is constitutionally obligated to provide. The result is a captive, high‑need patient pool managed almost entirely through for‑profit contracts.

Those contracts are lucrative, but the companies behind them are crumbling. In 2023 and 2024, three of the nation’s largest correctional healthcare firms—Corizon Health, Wellpath, and Armor Correctional Health Services—filed for bankruptcy. GPS reporting found that Senator Elizabeth Warren raised concerns that Wellpath was using bankruptcy to avoid accountability for medical malpractice. Meanwhile, GDC’s own budget shows the pharmacy contract alone getting a $3.68 million per‑diem increase in FY 2027, mental health staffing add‑on of $1.92 million, and dental contract enlargement of $1.5 million—line items that reflect a system in triage mode, not one delivering constitutionally adequate care.

The Surveillance State: Drones, Managed Access, and the OWL Unit

While vocational education contracts in FY 2025 totaled $172,000 across the entire system—roughly $3.44 per incarcerated person per year, per GPS’s reentry research brief—spending on security technology has exploded. The amended FY 2026 budget allocated $13.39 million for managed access and drone detection systems designed to block contraband cell phones and airborne deliveries. The FY 2027 budget repurposed $10.79 million in existing funds to continue the same programs, and separately appropriated $6.76 million to annualize personnel and purchase additional technology for the Over Watch and Logistics (OWL) Unit, a centralized surveillance operation. Five new managed access analysts were also funded, and the department paid for six canine handlers and three security threat group regional coordinators.

These investments sit atop the OWL Unit’s earlier expansion, which GPS reporting has flagged as emblematic of GDC’s preference for expensive, hardware‑heavy solutions over proven, lower‑cost interventions. The same GPS brief on prison malnutrition cited rigorous randomized controlled trials showing that simple nutritional supplementation reduces prison violence by 26–48 percent—an effect larger than many psychological interventions—for a tiny fraction of the price of a drone detection array. A landmark 2002 Oxford study found that supplements costing £40 per prisoner annually ($50) cut serious violence by 37 percent. In Georgia, the state has chosen to spend millions on cell‑phone jamming advocacy, managed access analysts, and private‑sector surveillance contracts while the people confined inside eat meals budgeted at roughly $2.49 per day, according to GPS’s analysis of the private‑prison per‑diem rate, a proxy that likely overstates actual food costs.

Staffing: The Collapse and the Private‑Prison Lifeboat

Georgia’s correctional officer crisis has been documented exhaustively by the DOJ, by the consulting firm Guidehouse—whose report, obtained through the Georgia Open Records Act, concluded the system was in “emergency mode”—and by GPS’s own reporting. As of 2024, 52.5 percent of correctional officer positions were vacant system‑wide, with eight facilities above 70 percent vacancies and Valdosta State Prison hitting 80 percent. Between January 2021 and November 2024, 82.7 percent of new CO hires left within their first year. The turnover creates a self‑reinforcing death spiral: understaffing forces mandatory overtime, overtime causes burnout, burnout drives resignations, and resignations worsen understaffing. The Safe Inside initiative, a February 2026 government‑funded report, found that assaults on inmates rose 54 percent and assaults on staff rose 77 percent between 2019 and 2024, with understaffing identified as the primary driver.

The state’s response has been to throw money at recruitment and retention while simultaneously outsourcing incarceration to the private sector. The FY 2027 budget includes $26.82 million for additional correctional officer positions—funds that can only be spent if the agency can find people to hire, a prospect GDC Commissioner Oliver himself has called “just not possible.” The amended FY 2026 budget added $12.05 million for a one‑time $2,000 salary supplement for state prison employees, on top of prior years’ 10 percent raises and $5,000 bonuses that failed to reverse attrition. Meanwhile, the private prisons line has grown from $144.3 million in FY 2024 to $173.5 million in FY 2026 and $177.8 million proposed for FY 2027. The FY 2027 plan includes $4.23 million to add 263 new private prison beds at Coffee and Wheeler Correctional Institutions, plus $1.05 million to fully utilize beds at Jenkins and Riverbend. County jail subsidies, which pay local jails to house GDC inmates the state has no room for, were bumped by $6.24 million in the amended FY 2026 budget.

The human cost of this staffing void is measured in lives. At Smith State Prison, seven prisoners were homicide victims in 2024 alone. Anthony Zino was found dead in his cell in April 2024 after five days—no one had checked on him. Marquis Jefferson was beaten to death at Washington State Prison in 2022 while no guard watched the dorm; other prisoners had to carry his body to the door. The DOJ investigation found that gangs “effectively run” many housing units, and that night shifts sometimes leave one or two officers covering an entire prison.

Communications: The Family Extraction Racket

Hidden outside the official GDC budget, but a crucial piece of the financial architecture, is the commission‑kickback system that charges families for the privilege of staying connected to incarcerated loved ones. Georgia’s Department of Corrections contracts with Securus Technologies for phone calls and JPay—a Securus subsidiary—for emails, video, and money transfers. In FY 2018‑2019, the state received $8,062,200.60 in commission revenue, making it the third‑highest commission collector in the nation, according to GPS’s communications research brief. The current phone rate for state prisons is $0.06 per minute, a cap forced by Biden‑era FCC rules, but that rate is precarious. In October 2025, the Republican‑controlled FCC voted to raise the large‑prison cap to $0.11 per minute—an 83 percent increase—and added a $0.02‑per‑minute “facility cost recovery” add‑on, effectively restoring the commission system the 2024 rules had banned.

Even at current rates, the costs pile up. JPay email “stamps” cost families $0.20‑0.35 each, and money transfer fees run $3.50 to $6.50 per deposit, with a maximum $200 per transaction. A videogram adds three extra stamps. The tablets themselves—which GDC touts as a no‑cost perk—operate on a closed network without internet access and are designed to extract revenue from both the incarcerated person and their family. Six states and New York City have already made prison calls free; Georgia has taken no legislative action and has not even disclosed how it spends the millions in commission revenue it collects. GPS’s research notes that this is a significant FOIA‑able data gap.

The Long‑Sentence Price Tag: Truth‑in‑Sentencing and the Vanishing Parole

The root of Georgia’s fiscal predicament lies in sentencing policy. In 1995, the state enacted the “Seven Deadly Sins” law requiring life without parole for a second conviction of certain violent felonies. In 1996, it abolished parole for all offenses committed thereafter, and its Truth‑in‑Sentencing statute requires people to serve between 65 and 100 percent of their terms. Federal Violent Offender Incarceration/Truth‑in‑Sentencing (VOI/TIS) grants poured $82.2 million into Georgia between FY 1996 and FY 2001, creating 4,132 beds across GDC and the Department of Juvenile Justice, and locking the state into a high‑incarceration infrastructure.

The result, as GPS’s “Truth in Sentencing & Fiscal Impact” report explains, is a “sleeper effect”: long‑term prisoners accumulate year after year, their sentences stretching decades, while releases are postponed. An aging, parole‑denied population then drives the healthcare costs that now dominate the budget. Nationally, the Pew Charitable Trusts documented a 36 percent increase in time served from 1990 to 2009; Georgia’s system is an extreme case. The state’s own justice reinvestment initiative under Governor Nathan Deal—which reduced the prison population by 6 percent, averted $264 million in costs, and reinvested $57 million in recidivism‑reduction programs without increasing crime—has since been abandoned. The FY 2027 budget includes no meaningful reinvestment in that architecture.

A Budget Without Reentry: The Pipeline Back to Prison

Virtually no money is dedicated to preparing people for life after prison. GPS’s reentry and recidivism brief found zero visible line items for comprehensive reentry programming, transition planning, or post‑release support in publicly available GDC budget documents. The entire state vocational education contract amounted to just $172,000 in FY 2025—roughly $3.44 per incarcerated person. A peer‑led programming pilot at Autry State Prison received $150,000 in the amended FY 2026 budget; the Metro Reentry Facility got $93,000; and a high‑school diploma program accreditation received $953,000 in FY 2027. These are hollow gestures against a $1.79 billion apparatus.

Yet the evidence for reentry investment is overwhelming. RAND’s meta‑analysis found that correctional education reduces recidivism by 43 percent and returns $5 in savings for every $1 spent. Even partial participation cuts recidivism, and vocational program completers in Georgia had a recidivism rate roughly half the state’s already‑underreported general rate. Meanwhile, 78 percent of men and 66 percent of women are uninsured two to three months after release, the leading causes of post‑release death are drug overdose (40 times the general population’s risk in the first two weeks), cardiovascular disease, homicide, and suicide—all conditions for which evidence‑based interventions exist—and Georgia remains one of the few states that has refused full Medicaid expansion, limiting access to care for the very people cycling back into the system.

Security at Any Cost

The FY 2027 GDC budget is a ledger of values. It reveals a state that will spend $13.39 million on drone detection and $6.76 million on a centralized surveillance unit, while vocational training gets $172,000 and reentry programming is an afterthought. It will pay $432 million to for‑profit healthcare contractors whose parent companies are sliding into bankruptcy, but refuses to invest in the nutritional supplementation that rigorous randomized trials show can slash violence for pennies a day. It will add private prison beds and pay county jails to warehouse overflow, but has walked away from the decarceration‑and‑reinvestment model that actually delivered safer communities between 2012 and 2015. For the families footing the hidden tax of phone and transfer fees, and for the people dying inside at a rate that GPS’s mortality database tracks day by day, the budget is not an abstraction. It is the architecture of their daily existence—and it is built to punish, not to heal.

Sources: This analysis draws on Georgia Prisoners’ Speak (GPS) investigative reports including “Staffing Crisis & Correctional Officer Turnover,” “Prison Communications & Financial Exploitation,” “Prison Malnutrition Crisis,” “Prison Healthcare & Medical Neglect,” “Truth in Sentencing & Fiscal Impact,” and “Recidivism & Reentry Failures in Georgia”; publicly available GDC budget documents from the Governor’s Office of Planning and Budget (Amended FY 2026 and FY 2027) and the FY 2027 General Appropriations Act (HB 974, Senate Appropriations Committee Substitute); the U.S. Department of Justice’s October 2024 investigation findings; the Safe Inside initiative report; and data from GPS’s mortality tracking database.