End the Warehouse: Prison Transformation Plan

Brief written October 1, 2026 from GPS Intelligence System data.(K)

End the Warehouse is the standing policy framework of Georgia Prisoners' Speak (GPS) for transforming the Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC) from a system that stores people into one that prepares them to come home. The premise is no longer seriously contested: the U.S. Department of Justice found Georgia's prisons unconstitutional in October 2024, the state's own consultants found a system in "emergency mode" two months later, and GPS has independently tracked 1,896 deaths in GDC custody since 2020. What remains contested is the remedy. Georgia's answer so far has been money — roughly $700 million in new corrections spending between FY2022 and FY2026 — aimed almost entirely at custody: locks, cameras, beds, and contractors. This page lays out the warehouse model and what it produces, the evidence that a different model works, and the transformation plan itself.

The Warehouse Was a Choice, Made Over and Over for Fifty Years

Georgia did not drift into warehousing; it voted for it, budgeted for it, and defended it against warnings that read today like prophecy. In 1976, the Georgia Advisory Committee found that most adult prisoners in the state were kept in "dehumanizing" accommodations, that most institutions held more people than they were built for, and that over a quarter of state prisoners were warehoused in county work camps. The committee found that academic training was "not encouraged" — education treated as a special reward while punitive prison work took priority — and recommended that education be regarded "as a right, not a privilege." A year earlier, Commissioner Allen Ault had acknowledged the system held more than 11,000 people in facilities designed for 4,200, and Commissioner MacDougall conceded that 93 percent of Georgia's prisoners had no saleable skills. The state was told, in writing, half a century ago, what warehousing would produce.

The population math shows what the state did instead. GDC's own year-end counts record 7,966 prisoners in 1965, 15,687 in 1984, 22,132 in 1990, 43,875 in 2000, and 50,107 in 2024; the Board of Pardons and Paroles calculated a 470 percent increase in the prison population between 1973 and 2004 alone. The accelerant was policy. A GDC "Truth in Sentencing" report states that between 1989 and 1993 the average Georgia inmate served less than one-third of the court's sentence because anything longer would not fit in the available space. The state's answer was to build and to harden: prison capacity doubled between 1991 and 2003, Truth in Sentencing laws came to require 65 to 100 percent of sentences served, and parole consideration for serious violent offenders moved from seven years for pre-1995 convictions to fourteen, then to thirty for those convicted after 2006. The parole grant rate collapsed from roughly 70 percent in 1993 to a record-low 28 percent in FY2024 — and to 4.5 percent for the 2,046 lifers the board considered that year, of whom 93 were released. Life-sentenced serious violent felons who were paroled served an average of less than nine years in 1973; by FY2024 the average was 29.2 years.

The behavioral consequences of removing hope were measured, not merely predicted. Economist Ilyana Kuziemko's study of Georgia's 1998 reform — which forced certain prisoners to serve at least 90 percent of their sentences, effectively eliminating early parole — found that affected prisoners accumulated significantly more disciplinary infractions and completed fewer programs than a comparable group that kept the parole incentive. Georgia built a system in which, as one incarcerated man put it in GPS's reporting, no matter how much a person changes, "it doesn't help me to go home." That is the warehouse: custody severed from purpose. By March 2026 the total GDC system population stood at 52,855 across state prisons, private prisons, county prisons, transitional centers, and probation facilities, with thousands more backed up in county jails awaiting transfer.

What the Warehouse Produces

The federal government has now answered, at length, the question of what fifty years of warehousing yields. On October 1, 2024, after a three-year investigation, the U.S. Department of Justice issued a 93-page findings report concluding that conditions in Georgia's prisons violate the Eighth Amendment — "among the most severe violations of constitutional rights" the department had documented in any prison system. The DOJ gave Georgia 49 days to respond or face a federal lawsuit; GDC immediately rejected the findings. The documented record behind them: more than 1,400 reported incidents of violence across close- and medium-security prisons between January 2022 and April 2023, of which 19.7 percent involved a weapon, 45.1 percent resulted in serious injury, and 30.5 percent required offsite medical treatment; 142 homicides between 2018 and 2023, with a 95.8 percent increase in the latter three years; incarcerated people at 16 of the 17 prisons visited reporting they had witnessed life-threatening violence; gangs controlling housing units, selling bed space, and extorting families; and correctional officer vacancy rates around 50 percent systemwide and over 70 percent at ten of the largest facilities, with individual officers single-handedly responsible for nearly 400 beds. The state's own consultant, Guidehouse, found in December 2024 that 20 of 34 state prisons had emergency-level vacancies, that night shifts could leave one or two officers covering an entire prison, and that gangs were "effectively running the facilities" in the vacuum.

The deaths are the ledger. Georgia recorded 333 deaths in custody in 2024, the highest on record, at an average age of 51.4. GPS's mortality registry, always a floor because GDC reports deaths roughly two months late, stands at 1,896 since 2020 — including at least 262 homicides, 123 suicides, and 59 overdoses. Behind the counts are people the evidence in this record discusses by name:

• James Merritt Byrd died January 23, 2022, at Effingham County Prison, age 30; GPS's registry classifies the death as medical neglect. GPS's reporting describes the three weeks beforehand: a toothache that became an infection, acknowledged to his family by staff, in an isolation cell.
• Reginald Jerome Jacobs Jr. died February 6, 2023, at Calhoun State Prison, age 24; the registry classifies the death under deliberate indifference. GPS's reporting describes a lawsuit alleging staff shut off the water to his segregation cell — and a state death record that called the death natural.
• Arthur Wimbush died April 2, 2023, at Phillips State Prison, age 46, a homicide weeks from his release; GPS's reporting describes the prison's own security chief acknowledging there had been no available bed to move him to safety.
• Torrey Wayne Forrester died July 1, 2024, at Washington State Prison, age 41; the registry lists the death as natural/medical. GPS's reporting describes the recorded cause as complications of cirrhosis from chronic hepatitis C — a disease curable since 2014 — against the DOJ's finding that only about one in ten infected people in GDC custody was receiving treatment.
• Vincent Reshad Dyer died August 21, 2024, at Baldwin State Prison, age 50, a homicide; GPS's reporting describes a federal lawsuit alleging officers had been warned in writing the day before his killing.

The warehouse corrodes its keepers too. Between January 2021 and November 2024, 82.7 percent of new correctional officers quit within their first year — a 17.3 percent effective retention rate that makes it mathematically impossible to hire out of the crisis. Accounts that continue to reach GPS from inside the system — officers working lockdown units alone, visitors confronted in visitation rooms, families extorted by gangs — read less like allegations than like the DOJ report retold from the inside. And the DOJ's conclusion about the product speaks directly to the transformation case: programming had been "slashed rather than expanded," participation was "effectively impossible" in the chaos, and people "leave prison worse than when they came in." Even Georgia's official recidivism metric — which counts only felony reconviction within three years, excludes deaths, and omits technical violations, making it among the most flattered in the nation — has risen four straight cohorts, from 23.3 percent for FY2019 releases to 30.7 percent for FY2022, the worst in GDC's published series. Warehousing is not merely cruel. By the state's own suppressed yardstick, it is failing at its stated purpose.

The Money Votes for the Warehouse

Georgia's corrections budget has exploded — from $1.53 billion in actual FY2024 spending to a peak of $1.91 billion in FY2025, $1.80 billion in the amended FY2026 budget, and $1.79 billion approved for FY2027 under HB 974. The single-year 2025 infusion of $634 million — $434 million amended FY2025 plus $200 million FY2026 — was the largest corrections funding increase in state history. The return on that investment, as GPS's accountability analysis documented, is a paradox with no innocent explanation: over the same period annual prison homicides went from roughly eight to over one hundred, deaths set records in consecutive years, gangs expanded to about a third of the population, 29 of 34 facilities degraded to needing critical upgrades, and the DOJ concluded the system was unconstitutional. GPS characterized the infusion bluntly: it bought body bags, not safety.

The internal composition of the budget explains why. Between FY2025 and the FY2027 approved budget, the State Prisons program — the system's operational core — was cut by roughly $187 million from its peak, while Private Prisons grew by $20.9 million to $173.5 million and the Health program, the fastest-growing line, climbed from $325.6 million in FY2024 to $427.2 million approved for FY2027, much of it flowing to Centurion Health under a $2.4 billion, nine-year contract awarded in 2024 without competitive bidding. New discretionary spending across the AFY2026/FY2027 cycles skewed overwhelmingly to surveillance: over $120 million, including $84.7 million for thermal cameras, CCTV, and perimeter security and $4.1 million for digital forensics alone. Total new rehabilitation investment across both budget years was approximately $2.6 million — about $52 per incarcerated person per year. Depending on whether the comparison is drawn on new spending or on all line-item changes, GPS's budget analyses put the surveillance-to-rehabilitation ratio between 22-to-1 and 46-to-1. Either way, it is not close.

The education figures are starker still. Vocational education for the entire state prison system was funded at $172,000 in FY2025 — $3.44 per incarcerated person, 0.012 percent of the corrections budget. Education is not a standalone line item at all; it sits buried inside the State Prisons appropriation with no dedicated allocation, and GDC publishes no data on what share of prisoners can access any program. The FY2027 budget cut the high school diploma program by $104,000 with a directive to "explore virtual options" and zeroed out Metro Reentry programming entirely. Georgia's roughly $39-per-inmate annual education spending ranks dead last among Southern states — Florida spends about $1,028 per inmate, Alabama $742 (nineteen times Georgia's rate, while under federal oversight itself), Texas $508 to $585, North Carolina $463. The same legislature that signed a $325 million scholarship program appropriated about $2 million for prison education — a 162-to-1 ratio. In March 2024, eight months after federal Pell Grant eligibility for incarcerated students was restored nationwide, Georgia State University shut down its prison education program — $180,000 a year, sixty students — citing administrative burden. Meanwhile the system feeds roughly 52,000 people on $31.3 million a year, about $1.62 per person per day, and releases them with a $25 prepaid Visa card, the contents of their trust account, and a bus ticket — no identification, no phone, no housing referral, no transitional support. What the state will not fund, it extracts: families spend an average of $4,200 a year supporting an incarcerated loved one, against commissary markups documented at 67 to 1,150 percent above retail. The warehouse is expensive for everyone except the state agencies that run it — and it costs $86.61 per person per day, roughly $31,600 a year, against $2.89 a day to supervise that same person on parole.

The Alternative Is Not a Theory

The evidentiary core of End the Warehouse is that every element of the alternative has been tested — much of it inside Georgia — and measured. The RAND Corporation's landmark 2013 meta-analysis found correctional education participants had 43 percent lower odds of recidivating and 13-percentage-point-higher employment, returning $4 to $5 per dollar invested; a 2018 meta-analysis by Bozick and colleagues put participants at 32 percent less likely to recidivate. GDC's own internal data show vocational program completers recidivating at 13.64 percent, roughly half the general rate. A 2009 evaluation of Thinking for a Change, one of GDC's two core cognitive programs, found 23 percent recidivism among participants against 36 percent for controls. Georgia's transition-center releases recidivated at 11.4 percent in the FY2022 cohort versus 33.7 percent for state prisons — selection effects acknowledged, but a threefold gap. The parole board itself estimated in 2002 that a one-percent drop in recidivism saves Georgia taxpayers $6 million.

The system has even produced its own controlled demonstration. The DOJ singled out Walker State Prison as a "notable exception": with better staffing and more robust programming, Walker had no reported homicides in several years and less violence and contraband than the other sixteen prisons visited — proof, in the department's words, "that larger-scale improvement is possible with an appropriate strategy and sufficient resources," inside the existing GDC, without exotic imports. The Georgia Senate Study Committee's own findings showed Smith State Prison's violence fell when its population was reduced and men moved to single cells — direct evidence that the environment, not the people, drives the violence. Outside Georgia, the replications multiply: Maine cut its three-year recidivism rate from 30.5 to 21.4 percent and prison violence by 40 percent after expanding education, job training, and treatment; Michigan's Vocational Villages returned 12.6 percent of participants to prison across 2016–2023, about half the rate of comparable releases, with a 64.2 percent employment rate; Texas runs the Windham School District at $66–76 million a year and reports 15 percent recidivism; South Carolina's dedicated prison school district awards over 8,000 credentials a year and posts the nation's lowest recidivism at 17.1 percent; Mississippi, the poorest state in the country, enrolls 80 percent of its prisoners in programming. The Bard Prison Initiative runs under 4 percent recidivism. Nor is Georgia itself without precedent: Governor Deal's justice reinvestment initiative cut the prison population 6 percent between 2012 and 2015, generated $264 million in averted incarceration costs, reinvested $57 million in recidivism reduction — and crime did not rise.

The Precondition Everyone Found: Fewer People in Prison

Every independent examination of Georgia's crisis — the DOJ, Guidehouse, the Senate Study Committee testimony, and GPS's own analyses — converges on the same structural finding: the system cannot be stabilized at its current population with its current workforce. An 82.7 percent first-year attrition rate against a hiring pipeline of 118 officers per 800 applicants means the vacancy emergency is arithmetically permanent at present scale. Guidehouse recommended expanded retention incentives, structural gang-management reform, and population reduction strategies; the 2025 spending package funded none of them. The Southern Center for Human Rights put it plainly: pouring money into the system without decarceration is a Band-Aid.

The decarceration evidence base is deep. New York more than halved its prison population between 1999 and 2023 while violent crime fell by more than a quarter; five states have cut populations by over 50 percent from peak; Connecticut, Michigan, Mississippi, Rhode Island, and South Carolina achieved 14 to 25 percent reductions — 23,646 fewer people — with no adverse public-safety effects. The release-ready populations inside GDC are identifiable in the state's own data: over 40 percent of Georgia prisoners are serving time for non-violent offenses; 12,146 prisoners were age 50 or older in December 2024 — nearly a quarter of the system — at medical costs nine times those of younger prisoners, while national three-year recidivism for releases over 65 runs about 4 percent and less than 1 percent of New York parolees over 65 returned for a new conviction. Georgia's parole board already holds constitutional authority to release any prisoner over 62, including those serving life without parole; GPS's reporting describes a board that has never built a process to use it. The DOJ separately documented medium-security prisons housing close-security populations at ten times normal rates — classification drift born of overcrowding that reclassification alone would relieve. GPS's stated target is a 20 percent population reduction — from roughly 50,000 to 40,000 — within three years, which by itself would improve the officer-to-prisoner ratio from about 1:14 to 1:11.

The Blueprint

End the Warehouse assembles these findings into six planks. First, reduce the population: parole reform that restores grant rates toward historical norms, operational use of the over-62 release authority, presumptive parole pathways for non-violent offenses, geriatric and medical release, and systematic reclassification. Second, restore hope as deliberate policy: Kuziemko's Georgia-specific finding is that the parole incentive itself produces program completion and order, and GPS's reporting notes that Georgia has commanded its prisons by statute since 1897 to separate dangerous from vulnerable people — a law never enforced. Case plans that change nothing must become case plans that change something. Third, fund rehabilitation to scale: GPS advocates raising vocational education funding from $172,000 to at least $15 million — one percent of the GDC budget — with a goal of five percent within three years; making education a standalone budget line; repealing the 1995 administrative regulation, never a statute, that bars incarcerated students from state financial aid; and restoring the evening programming suspended in 2020 and never returned.

Fourth, rebuild reentry as infrastructure rather than gesture: GPS advocates tripling transition-center capacity from 2,344 beds to at least 7,000 — enough to serve about half of annual releases — and replacing the $25 gate card with a real release package: identification, a phone, medication continuity, a housing referral, and continuity of addiction treatment, because the risk of death in the first two weeks after release runs 12.7 times the general population's, with opioid overdose risk in that window as much as forty times higher. Fifth, normalize the environment: GPS's End the Warehouse series documented each harm of the current model in turn — the enforced idleness, the drugs that fill empty days, the gangs that offer purpose, the despair, the severed family line — and its finale argues the remedy is the normalization principle: life inside should resemble life outside as closely as security allows, because people return to the community they were prepared for, not the one they were stored away from. Walker State Prison is the internal proof; Maine and Michigan are the external proofs. Sixth, independent oversight and honest data: Georgia is one of the states with no correctional ombudsman, no independent inspector general, and no public reporting requirement — the Official Code of Georgia contains no corrections ombudsman at all — while nineteen states and Washington, D.C., have built them, from New Jersey's independent ombudsperson to Washington's governor's-office model with records access and mandatory annual reports to Virginia's subpoena-backed office and Maryland's unannounced-inspection regime. Oversight must be paired with measurement Georgia currently refuses: full publication of deaths by cause, all three recidivism measures including deaths, and programming-access data — and rehabilitation metrics added to an accountability framework in which only three of the DOJ's 82 remedial measures touch programming at all.

The through-line of the plan is a single sentence: every documented harm flows from one choice — to warehouse human beings rather than prepare them to return — and a choice can be unmade. Roughly 95 percent of the people in Georgia's prisons will eventually come home. The only question the budget answers is in what condition.

Sources

This analysis draws on the U.S. Department of Justice's October 2024 CRIPA findings report; the Guidehouse system-wide assessment commissioned by the state; final reports of the Georgia Senate Study Committee on the Department of Corrections; annual reports of the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles; the Governor's Budget Reports and the FY2027 appropriations act (HB 974); GDC statistical profiles and year-end population series; the 1976 Georgia Advisory Committee report on Georgia prisons and related archival studies; peer-reviewed research including RAND's correctional education meta-analysis and Kuziemko's study of Georgia's 1998 parole reform; comparative data from the Brennan Center, Vera Institute, and other state correctional systems; GPS's mortality registry and budget baseline analyses; and GPS's own investigative reporting, including the End the Warehouse series, alongside accounts from incarcerated people and families collected by GPS.