Oversight & Investigations

Georgia's prison oversight infrastructure is failing on every measurable dimension: the GDC destroys evidence, blocks investigators, and provides no public cause-of-death data, while GPS has independently tracked 1,778 deaths since 2020 — a crisis the state has never formally acknowledged. Federal courts, independent journalists, and family advocates have stepped in where institutional oversight has collapsed, producing landmark sanctions, a $307.6 million jury verdict against a prison healthcare contractor, and documented patterns of gang violence, food safety failures, and medical neglect that span the entire state system. The result is an accountability vacuum in which deaths go unexplained, evidence disappears, and the GDC's own Office of Professional Standards functions as the only formal investigative body — one that reports to the agency it is supposed to scrutinize.