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

Georgia Department of Corrections: Legislative Intelligence Brief

Prepared by Georgia Prisoners' Speak (GPS) for members of the General Assembly, legislative staff, and committee analysts. Every figure in this brief traces to GDC's own budget and population documents, federal findings, court records, state inspection databases, records obtained through open-records requests, or GPS's independently maintained mortality and claims databases (5,898 publishable claims across 90 tracked facilities). Where evidence comes from family attestation or anonymous reporting, the source weight is stated.

The Bottom Line

Georgia's prison system is now a $1.9 billion annual liability generator operating under the most severe federal findings ever issued against a state corrections department. According to the Governor's Budget Report for Amended FY2026 and FY2027, GDC's actual all-funds spending reached $1,913,888,054 in FY2025 — an all-time peak and a 57% surge in four years off a plateau near $1.2 billion that had held for most of a decade. The amended FY2026 budget sits near $1.80 billion; the approved FY2027 budget under HB 974 totals roughly $1.79 billion (GPS budget analysis).

What that money purchased is in the federal record. The U.S. Department of Justice's 93-page findings report of October 1, 2024 concluded there is reasonable cause to believe Georgia violates the Eighth Amendment, describing "near-constant life-threatening violence" and finding that "the leadership of the Georgia Department of Corrections has lost control of its facilities." DOJ recommended 82 remedial measures and noted the Attorney General may sue under CRIPA. GDC publicly rejected the findings.

Meanwhile, GPS has independently tracked at least 1,861 deaths in GDC custody since 2020 — a floor, since GDC reports deaths roughly two months late and publishes no official cause-of-death data (GPS mortality archive). 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.

Three numbers for a floor speech:

$1.9 billion annual spending. 1,861+ deaths since 2020. $50.6 million paid out — and the liability pipeline below shows why that figure will compound unless the General Assembly acts first.

The choice before this legislature is not whether to pay. It is whether to pay for remediation voluntarily, through statute, or involuntarily, under a federal consent decree with a monitor's invoice attached.

Settlement and Verdict Exposure

The documented floor: $50.6 million

Court-verified records and state risk-management files compiled by GPS show $50,633,556 paid across 261 prison death-and-injury claims (GPS legal settlements analysis). This is a floor: it captures what GPS could document through DOAS records and court files, not every negotiated resolution, and it excludes the state's internal defense costs.

Why the current federal docket looks quiet — and why that is misleading

In GPS's current federal-court tracking window, recently terminated prisoner-civil-rights filings all closed at $0: Humphreys v. Oliver (GAND, Nos. 1:25-cv-06100 and 1:25-cv-07012), Grant v. Ward (GAMD, No. 5:22-cv-00396), Ballard v. Davis (GAMD, No. 5:25-cv-00046), Mejia Morales v. Streeval (GAMD, No. 4:25-cv-00385), and Chambers v. Benton (GASD, No. 4:21-cv-00002).

The absence of payouts is not evidence of the absence of harm. It is evidence of a procedural gauntlet. Under the Prison Litigation Reform Act (42 U.S.C. § 1997e(a)), no prisoner may sue until administrative remedies are exhausted; Woodford v. Ngo (2006) requires "proper" exhaustion; Jones v. Bock (2007) lets the prison define "proper." GDC's Standard Operating Procedure 227.02 (effective May 10, 2019) gives an incarcerated person 10 calendar days to file a grievance — a deadline the Eleventh Circuit held fatal if missed in Johnson v. Meadows (2005) — while allowing the warden 40 days to respond (GPS legal access analysis). Georgia does not have to win these cases on the merits. The merits are almost never reached.

Committee staff should not let a quiet docket be read into the record as a clean bill of health.

The liability pipeline

Federal enforcement risk. The DOJ findings letter put the State on formal notice of constitutional violations and documented that GDC's own conduct obstructed review: DOJ described an "unnecessarily contentious" records fight in which the department refused to produce documents until a subpoena was enforced and conducted pre-inspection cleanups; GDC ultimately produced more than 19,000 records. As of GPS's May 2026 research, no CRIPA enforcement action had been filed, and the current federal administration's posture is uncertain — but the findings letter is a loaded weapon that any future administration, or a private plaintiff class, can pick up. Notice has been established; damages exposure now grows with every documented death.

Active contempt exposure. In Gumm v. Ford, litigation over GDC's Tier II/SMU solitary regime, the federal court adopted findings — based on the expert report of Dr. Craig Haney — that residents were confined in cells "smaller than the average parking space." The litigation has produced a contempt ruling carrying daily fines (GPS solitary confinement analysis). GPS does not have a public cumulative figure for fines paid to date; committee staff should request one.

Criminal exposure at the command level. On May 13, 2026, a Tattnall County grand jury indicted former Smith State Prison Warden Brian Adams on charges of racketeering, bribery, false statements, evidence tampering, and violation of his oath — prosecutors allege he took bribes from a prison gang, moved its leader out of solitary, and buried shanks and contraband cellphones in his backyard. The case connects to the wrong-house murder of Bobby Kicklighter, an 88-year-old Glennville man killed by a hit ordered from inside a Georgia prison. Adams was a 26-year GDC employee — the predictable output of a closed promotion pipeline GPS documented in "The Game They Learned."

PREA audit-integrity exposure. Georgia facilities have passed 273 consecutive PREA audits across 139 facilities and five audit cycles without a single failed standard — while DOJ, whose certified auditors visited 17 GDC prisons in 2022–2023, found sexual assault "rampant." GPS's analysis of 15,542 allegations from 2014–2024 shows a 3.5% substantiation rate (GPS sexual abuse analysis). A paper-compliance regime this divergent from the federal record is discoverable, and it converts every future sexual-assault verdict into a punitive-damages argument.

Coming §1983 filings. GPS has received family-attestation accounts indicating that an incarcerated person has prepared two pro se federal civil-rights complaints — one against the State Board of Pardons and Paroles and one against Telfair State Prison — expressly anchored to the October 2024 DOJ report. GPS treats family attestation as lower-weight than court records, but the pattern matters: the DOJ findings are now being used as the evidentiary foundation for new suits, which is precisely how "notice" converts into damages.

Mortality Trend and the Tracking Gap

The trend

GPS-tracked deaths in GDC custody, by year (canonical floor counts; GDC cause-of-death reporting runs roughly two months late, so recent years are undercounts):

• 2020: 294 · 2021: 257 · 2022: 254 · 2023: 262 · 2024: 333 · 2025: 301 · 2026 year-to-date: at least 160

Of the at least 1,861 total, GPS records 260 homicides, 119 suicides, 54 overdoses, 657 natural/medical deaths — and 688 deaths with cause still "Unknown/Pending," more than one in three. Only nine deaths in the entire database are classified "Medical Neglect," a number that reflects classification failure, not reality (GPS deaths-in-custody analysis).

DOJ's own series shows the homicide trajectory: 7 in 2018, 13 in 2019, 28 in 2020, 28 in 2021, 31 in 2022, 35 in 2023 — 142 in six years, plus 18 more confirmed or suspected in the first five months of 2024. Georgia's 2019 prison homicide rate of 34 per 100,000 was nearly triple the national state-prison average of 12. More than 1,400 violent incidents were reported across just 24 prisons from January 2022 through April 2023 (GPS violence analysis).

The tracking gap is a policy choice

Georgia publishes no official prison-homicide count and no public cause-of-death data. GPS fills the gap with open-records requests and family reporting. The gap is sometimes grotesque: GPS's mortality log contains a July 2026 entry at Burruss Correctional Training Center whose decedent-name field reads, literally, "Don't know." In the first twenty days of July 2026 alone, GPS recorded at least eight deaths across six facilities — Central State Prison, Pulaski State Prison, Valdosta State Prison, Baldwin State Prison, Augusta State Medical Prison, and Burruss CTC. Recent entries include David Randolph Newcomer, dead at Ware State Prison at age 85, and Bobby Clinton Biggs, dead at Coastal State Prison at 77 — consistent with a system holding more than 5,700 people aged 60 or older (GDC weekly population snapshot, July 2026).

Ware State Prison: nineteen homicides, no prosecutions

Through an open-records request, GPS obtained 231 death-investigation reports, GBI autopsies, and toxicology findings covering 84 deaths at Ware State Prison since 2020. The state's own files document at least 19 homicides, 12 suicides, and 8 fatal overdoses at a single facility that opened in 1990 designed for roughly 500 people and now holds about 1,447. In 11 of the 19 homicides, the state's own death investigations name a suspected attacker — and GPS found no public record that any of them was ever charged, indicted, or tried. Squaier Jiles bled to death from sharp-force injuries in 2024. Christopher Gresham was stabbed by at least three other prisoners in 2021 (Ware State Prison profile; GPS investigation, "At Least Nineteen: The Murders the State Didn't Prosecute").

Contrast Hancock State Prison, where prosecution happened: Corey July, 34, with twenty months left on his sentence, was chased across the yard and stabbed to death at a locked gate on June 17, 2025; on August 12, 2026, a Hancock County jury convicted Vershaun Smith of malice murder, and Judge Alison T. Burleson sentenced him to life without parole (GPS investigation, "Death at a Locked Gate"). Accountability is possible. At Ware, the public record shows it simply did not occur.

Other documented cases: Jimmy Trammell, killed January 11, 2026 at Washington State Prison with 72 hours left on a ten-year sentence — one of four men killed that day in a facility running five officers against 69 posts at roughly 72% vacancy. Melvin Johnson, 35, beaten to death at Hays State Prison on January 25, 2026 after telling a counselor he could not safely return to his dorm; he was sent back. Jerry Merritt, stabbed to death at Augusta State Medical Prison over a commissary debt worth roughly fifteen dollars. Christian Krauch, tortured for three weeks inside Macon State Prison in June 2024 — stabbed, burned, mutilated, stuffed under a bunk — while the facility's required population counts, roughly 168 counts over that period, recorded everyone accounted for. He survived with permanent brain damage and the amputation of his right hand and right leg.

GPS additionally notes, with explicit low source weight: anonymous tips report an unconfirmed death at Dooly State Prison in 2026; GPS has not verified the report and GDC has published nothing about it. The tips exist because no official channel does.

Staffing: The Root Driver the Budget Has Not Fixed

Every line of exposure above runs through staffing. Court-verified federal findings show systemwide correctional-officer vacancy above 50% since mid-2021, exceeding 70% at eight facilities, and reaching 80% at Valdosta State Prison by April 2024. DOJ's annual series: 49.3% (2021), 56.3% (2022), 52.5% (2023), peaking at 60% systemwide in April 2023 with more than 2,800 positions vacant. The national standard is no more than 10% (GPS staffing crisis analysis).

GDC's published averages conceal the collapse. Russell Zirkle — a former GDC assistant warden who rose from officer to chief of security — has testified on record that the state's 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. Former officer Tyler Ryals corroborates the cover-up account; Zirkle's on-record assessment of Ryals's testimony: "Everything he says is completely true." Zirkle's testimony is independently corroborated by GPS's open-records production showing six officers on duty at Ware State Prison when a riot began.

The pipeline cannot close the gap. GDC Commissioner Timothy Ward testified in 2022 budget hearings that annual officer turnover was 49% — the workforce is functionally rebuilt every two years. GPS's systemic finding records an acceptance rate under 15%, 82.7% of new hires leaving within their first year, and correctional-officer pay ranked last of 50 states. Minimum hiring standards are age 18, a high-school diploma or GED, and 240 hours of basic training.

The misconduct dimension is quantified: at least 428 GDC employees were arrested for on-the-job criminal conduct between January 2018 and September 2023 (AJC investigation assembled through Open Records Act requests). GDC's public contraband-arrests website systematically undercounts employee arrests — listing four worker arrests in 2023 when internal data showed 38. This August, a former GDC cadet was sentenced to 15 years for smuggling meth into Dooly State Prison (GPS staff misconduct analysis).

Conditions and Sanitation: What the State's Own Inspection Record Shows

GPS reviewed the Georgia Department of Public Health's food-safety inspection database. Most GDC kitchens score in the 90s or a perfect 100 — Central State Prison scored 100 twice in 2025. But three facilities have failed since 2022, and the failing reports describe conditions no score snapshot captures (GPS analysis, Scores Without Sanitation):

• Johnson State Prison — 64 (December 2023), the lowest documented score. Inspectors found multiple rats and roaches throughout the kitchen "with little to no change," bulk food bags gnawed through with visible rat droppings and urine, cold-holding failures requiring on-the-spot disposal, and five ovens, a tilting skillet, a kettle, a griddle, a freezer, and an ice machine all broken. A follow-up nine days later still failed at 67.
• Pulaski State Prison — 67 (January 2026). The only designated handwashing sink had been ripped from the wall; sewage was backing up through floor drains, a repeat violation; hot-holding violations were also repeats. The trajectory was visible in public data: 83, then 73, then 78, then 67. A follow-up eight days later scored 96 — demonstrating that the score measures preparation, not conditions.
• Smith State Prison — 68 (May 2022); 72 as of February 2026. GPS's review found rodent activity noted in every Smith inspection from 2022 through 2025, plus repeat violations for roaches, broken sinks and plumbing, clogged drains, and mildew.

Underneath the kitchen sits the budget. GDC spends about $31.3 million a year on Food and Farm Operations — $1.63 per person per day, or $0.54 per meal — against an American Correctional Association benchmark of roughly $3.66 (the National School Lunch Program rate). GDC spends 14.8% of the benchmark; parity would require about $211 million a year, 6.8 times current appropriation. GDC's own policies mandate two-meal days on weekends and holidays (GPS nutrition analysis). The hunger the trays don't satisfy flows to the commissary — a 517-SKU, entirely inmate-funded economy whose commissions pool in opaque "Inmate Welfare Funds" outside legislative appropriation oversight.

What the Money Buys: Surveillance Over Rehabilitation

GPS's budget reporting documented that GDC spends $120 million on surveillance technologies and $2.6 million on rehabilitation programming — a 46:1 ratio, roughly $52 per incarcerated person per year on programming. The state spent $50 million deploying phone-blocking technology across 35 prisons; homicides quadrupled in the period that followed. A separate $150 million built the OWL surveillance hub — described as the first centralized real-time prison-surveillance command center in American corrections — which went live around June 1, 2026 at the former Tift College campus in Forsyth, while $805,000 was left for classrooms. Watching has not reduced a single documented stabbing; Georgia's own homicide series proves it.

Meanwhile the extraction economy runs on families — your constituents. GDC's Securus telephone contract (September 2016) pays the department a 59.6% commission on call revenue with a $325,000 monthly floor — roughly $8 million a year — while families pay about 13 cents per minute. A 2025 FWD.us survey (developed with Duke University and NORC) found families with incarcerated loved ones spend a median of $172 per month on incarceration-related costs; mothers of incarcerated people spend a median of $286; Black families spend a median $200 (9% of household income) (GPS family communication analysis). In 2021, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau penalized JPay for violations that included conduct in Georgia, ordering $4 million in consumer redress plus a $2 million penalty.

Vision 2027: The Post-Conviction Reform Package

GPS's Vision 2027 framework assembles the post-conviction levers that exist in Georgia law now:

Parole economics. The Parole Board's own reporting puts a prison bed at $51 per day versus $4.49 per day for parole supervision — a cost ratio of more than eleven to one. The Board's annual reports historically quantified avoided state expenditure at $351 million (FY2012), $409 million (FY2013), $469 million (FY2014), and $451 million (FY2015). Yet GPS's recent investigations — "The Board That Stopped Saying Yes: Georgia's Lifer Parole Collapse, in Its Own Numbers" and "Georgia Parole Board Rejects Constitution" — document a parole grant apparatus in collapse, and "Nowhere to Put Him" documents how bed-management math killed a man thirty days from release.

The geriatric and backlog burden. More than 5,700 people aged 60+ sit in custody at $51 a day, and roughly 2,500 state inmates are backlogged in county jails awaiting transfer — a direct cost shift onto county budgets in your districts (GDC population snapshots, July–August 2026; 52,615 total in custody: 34,857 state prisons, 8,238 private prisons, 3,925 county prisons, 2,704 transitional centers, 2,891 in probation facilities).

Structural barriers. Georgia's habeas statute imposes a four-year deadline with no innocence exception, and the victim-compensation statute categorically excludes incarcerated people (GPS legal access analysis).

District lift: every long-term prisoner safely paroled returns roughly $46 per day to the state; every county-jail bed freed of a state backlog inmate relieves a county commission; every prison made safer protects correctional staff who live and vote in the same districts as the incarcerated.

End the Warehouse: Rehabilitation Strategy and Comparable-State Evidence

GPS's End the Warehouse campaign starts from a documented premise: the crisis is a design, not a management problem. Georgia has identified 315 gangs operating inside its prisons and validated roughly 15,200 people — 31% of the population — as gang-affiliated, more than double the national average of ~13% — yet maintains no systematic gang-separation housing policy, no renouncement or exit program, and no operational strategy for keeping rival factions apart. Texas, Arizona, and California faced the same crisis decades ago and built documented responses: housing-based separation, intelligence-driven classification, structured exit programs, and incentive systems. Georgia has adopted none of them (GPS investigation, "315 Gangs, Zero Strategy").

The separation duty is not a proposal. It is a statute Georgia has carried since 1897:

"The department shall provide for the classification and separation of inmates with respect to age, first offenders, habitual criminals and incorrigibles…" — O.C.G.A. § 42-5-52

A second Georgia statute declares every person's right to be safe from the fear and violence of gangs. The department honors neither (GPS investigation, "On the Books Since 1897"). The cost of that refusal is documented: coordinated gang violence locked down every state prison on April 1, 2026 (life flights to two facilities, stabbings at five, a gang leader stabbed in front of the warden during an official inspection at Hays), and again on May 21, 2026 (reported deaths at Ware and Augusta, nine hospitalized at Dooly, six at Central). A statewide lockdown is not a strategy; it is a confession. GPS's flagship proposal — housing reassignment that separates rival gangs using existing beds — requires no new appropriation ("Separate the Gangs. It Costs Nothing. Georgia Keeps Choosing the Bodies.").

On return on investment: the alternative model — "normalization," running prisons as functioning communities that prepare people to come home — has working examples in Scandinavia and on American soil at a price lower than what Georgia already spends to fail (GPS, "Reopen the Doors"). The most concrete ROI evidence in the record is Georgia's own: the Parole Board's documented $351–469 million in annual avoided costs. GPS maintains costed oversight models from other states and can provide them to any committee on request.

The Wrongful-Conviction Landscape

GPS's corpus is conditions-focused, and candor requires stating what it does and does not contain. GPS does not yet have public data on GBI crime-lab error rates, forensic audit findings, or a Georgia exoneration count. What the record does show: GBI autopsies and toxicology findings underpin every in-custody death investigation — including the 231-report Ware file set in which 11 named suspected attackers were never charged — meaning the same forensic system whose findings go unprosecuted in prison homicides also underwrites convictions statewide. And Georgia's four-year habeas deadline with no actual-innocence exception is a structural trap for the wrongfully convicted regardless of forensic merit. Both issues are within this legislature's reach: a joint committee data request to the GBI and the Prosecuting Attorneys' Council on prison-homicide charging rates and lab audit results, and an innocence-gateway amendment to the habeas statute.

Policy Recommendations and Bill-Language Entry Points

1. Enforce the 1897 separation statute. Amend O.C.G.A. § 42-5-52 to require a written security-threat-group separation housing plan and an annual compliance report to the House and Senate judiciary committees. Fiscal note: negligible — reassignment of existing housing.
2. Independent correctional oversight. New chapter establishing an ombudsman/oversight office with unannounced-inspection authority, benchmarked to DOJ's 82 remedial measures. Costed models from other states available from GPS.
3. Death-in-custody reporting act. Require public notification of any in-custody death within 72 hours, monthly publication of cause-of-death classifications, and independent review of any death classified "Unknown/Pending" beyond 90 days. This closes the 688-death gap and the two-month lag at trivial cost.
4. Facility-level vacancy disclosure. Appropriations rider requiring GDC to report officer vacancy by facility and by post, excluding transitional centers and halfway houses from state-prison averages — codifying what former command staff have testified the current numbers conceal.
5. Per-meal spending floor. Phase the Food and Farm Operations line from $0.54 toward the $3.66 ACA benchmark ($211 million at full parity, 6.8× current), with a first-step rider tying the line item to a published per-meal figure.
6. Inmate Welfare Fund and telecom transparency. Cap contract commissions, require annual public audit of Inmate Welfare Funds, and disclose all commission-based vendor contracts. Evidence: the Securus contract's 59.6% commission and $325,000 monthly floor.
7. Programming-before-surveillance rider. Require a public programming-expenditure report before any further surveillance capital outlay, on the record of $120M/$2.6M and the $150M OWL hub against $805,000 for classrooms.
8. PREA audit integrity review. Direct the state auditor to examine how 273 consecutive audits found zero deficiencies while DOJ found sexual assault "rampant" — including contractor selection and auditor independence.
9. Grievance-window reform. Statutory minimum 30-day grievance filing window (currently 10 days by SOP 227.02) and anti-retaliation protections for grievants, witnesses, and plaintiffs (GPS retaliation analysis).
10. Habeas innocence gateway; geriatric and medical parole review. Amend the habeas statute to add an actual-innocence exception to the four-year bar, and mandate parole reconsideration pathways for the 5,700+ prisoners aged 60 or older at $51 per day against $4.49 for supervision.

Facilities by Region

GPS tracks 90 facilities statewide; the full machine-readable roster is at gps.press/facilities-data/. County prisons are listed by their namesake counties; per-facility profiles are linked for the highest-salience institutions.

Northwest: Hays State Prison, Walker State Prison, Walker County Prison, Chattooga County Prison, Floyd County Prison, Gilmer County Prison, Colwell Probation Detention Center, Northwest RSAT Center.

Northeast/Mountains: Arrendale State Prison, Arrendale Probation RSAT, Arrendale TC, Hall County Prison, Hart County Prison, Whitworth Women's Facility, McEver PDC, Athens/Clarke County Prison, Jackson County Prison.

Metro Atlanta: Fulton County Prison, Atlanta TC, Clayton County Prison, Clayton TC, Henry County Prison, Spalding County Prison, Fayette County Prison, Coweta County Prison, Carroll County Prison, Paulding PDC, Gwinnett County Prison, Phillips State Prison, Phillips TC, Metro Reentry Facility, Metro Reentry Center, Metro TC, Helms Facility.

Middle Georgia: Central State Prison, Macon State Prison, Macon TC, Macon Women's TC, Burruss CTC, Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison (including the Special Management Unit), Baldwin State Prison, Baldwin County Prison, Hancock State Prison, Washington State Prison, Johnson State Prison, Pulaski State Prison, Bleckley Probation RSAT, Dodge State Prison, Dooly State Prison, Wilcox State Prison, Telfair State Prison, Wheeler Correctional Facility, McRae Women's Facility, Treutlen Detention Center, Riverbend Correctional and Rehabilitation Facility.

East: Augusta State Medical Prison, Augusta TC, Charles D. Hudson TC, Richmond County Prison, Jefferson County Prison, Screven County Prison, Emanuel Women's Facility, Emanuel PDC, Jenkins Facility, Bulloch County Prison, Effingham County Prison, Georgia State Prison, Rogers State Prison, Smith State Prison, Coastal State Prison, Chatham State Prison, Savannah Men's TC, Appling ITF, Long Unit, Montgomery State Prison.

South/Southwest: Ware State Prison, Coffee Correctional Facility, Bacon TC, Valdosta State Prison, Valdosta TC, Lowndes Unit, Cook County Prison, Tift County Prison, Turner County Prison, Turner Residential Facility, Colquitt County Prison, Autry State Prison, Mitchell County Prison, Dougherty County Prison, Albany TC, Lee State Prison, Sumter County Prison, Terrell County Prison, Calhoun State Prison, Calhoun County Prison, Miller County Prison, Decatur County Prison, Grady County Prison, Thomas County Prison, Bainbridge Probation RSAT.

West: Muscogee County Prison, Columbus TC, Rutledge State Prison, Harris County Prison, Meriwether County Prison, Upson County Prison, West Central ITF.

Next Steps

Schedule a briefing. GPS will present the underlying datasets — the $50.6 million settlement compilation, the mortality database behind the 1,861+ floor count, the DPH inspection compilation, and the 517-SKU commissary master — to any member, caucus, or committee staff on request, and can provide costed oversight and gang-separation models from other states. The standing legislative page is gps.press/intelligence/legislative/.

Request the data formally. Committee chairs can obtain today what GPS had to litigate-grade request to assemble: facility-level vacancy counts by post, accumulated contempt fines in Gumm v. Ford, Inmate Welfare Fund balances and audits, and cause-of-death classifications older than 90 days.

Sponsor the bills. Entry points one through ten above are drafted to drop into existing code sections and the appropriations process. The 1897 statute has waited 129 years to be enforced. The next federal filing, the next lockdown, and the next death logged as "Don't know" will not wait for another session.