Legislative Brief

Brief written September 13, 2026 from GPS Intelligence System data.(K)

Bottom Line for the General Assembly

Georgia now operates the most expensive prison system in its history — $1,913,888,054 in actual FY2025 all-funds spending, a 57 percent surge in four years (Governor's Budget Report, AFY2026/FY2027; GPS budget analysis) — while operating under the most severe federal civil-rights findings ever issued against a state corrections department. The U.S. Department of Justice's 93-page findings report concluded that "the leadership of the Georgia Department of Corrections has lost control of its facilities," that the state is deliberately indifferent to conditions involving "near-constant life-threatening violence," and that the violations rank "among the most severe" uncovered in any DOJ prison investigation (DOJ CRIPA findings report, October 2024; Violence & Safety).

The numbers your appropriations and judiciary committees should have in front of them:

• 261 state liability payouts on corrections claims appear on the Department of Administrative Services Risk Management settlement ledger, incident dates 2008–2025 — from a one-dollar payout at Valdosta State Prison to a $4,000,000 estate settlement at Johnson State Prison, with at least twenty entries tied in the ledger itself to in-custody deaths (GPS analysis of the DOAS ledger, obtained through open records; Legal Settlements & Lawsuits).
• At least 1,890 deaths in GDC custody since 2020 — always a floor, because GDC reports deaths roughly two months late and leaves more than a third of them without a published cause (GPS-tracked mortality data, n=1,890+; Deaths in Custody).
• Correctional-officer vacancy above 50 percent systemwide since mid-2021, exceeding 70 percent at eight facilities and reaching 80 percent at Valdosta State Prison by April 2024 (DOJ findings; Staffing Crisis).
• 52,270 people in custody in the most recent population snapshot — 34,527 in state prisons, 8,285 in private prisons, 3,877 in county prisons, 2,743 in transitional centers, 1,442 in probation RSAT centers, 1,396 in probation detention — plus a backlog of 2,632 state inmates sitting in county jails awaiting transfer (GPS system data; the GPS-authored analysis "Twenty Percent of the Jail" examines what that backlog costs county budgets).
• 315 identified gangs and roughly 15,200 validated gang affiliates — 31 percent of the prison population, more than double the national average of about 13 percent — with no systematic separation housing, no exit program, and gang-driven violence that forced systemwide lockdowns in April and May of 2026 (GDC Security Threat Group records; National Institute of Justice; GPS reporting, "315 Gangs, Zero Strategy").
• 6,679 vetted claims across 88 tracked facilities and 119 facility-issue briefings in GPS's dataset — available to any committee office on request (machine-readable facility data).

A sitting Georgia sheriff told WSB-TV this month that "the GDC has become the largest taxpayer-funded gang recruitment center." That is a sheriff talking about a state agency your chambers fund at $1.8 billion a year. Every figure above is a legislative number: each traces to a budget line, a Code section, an oversight failure, or a contract the General Assembly can reach.

I. Settlement and Verdict Exposure: What the State Has Already Paid

The State's Own Liability Ledger

The most concrete record of what Georgia's prison system costs in resolved claims is the state's own books. The DOAS Risk Management settlement ledger, obtained through open records and analyzed by GPS, records 261 State of Georgia liability payouts tied to Department of Corrections claims, spanning incidents from 2008 through 2025 (Legal Settlements & Lawsuits). The entries run from a one-dollar payout at Valdosta State Prison to a $4,000,000 estate settlement arising from a death at Johnson State Prison. At least twenty entries are linked in the ledger to documented in-custody deaths.

Read against GPS's independently tracked toll of at least 1,890 custody deaths since 2020, the ledger captures only a fraction of the mortality. That gap matters to fiscal staff for two reasons. First, the state's exposure is systematically under-litigated — for structural reasons detailed below — which means the liability curve has not yet caught up with the mortality curve. Second, the federal government's October 2024 findings now function as documented notice, and notice is what drives damages.

Why the Visible Ledger Understates the Harm: The $0 Docket

The recent federal docket shows how rarely prisoner civil-rights claims convert to recovery. Every recent GDC-adjacent termination in GPS's litigation tracker closed at zero: Grant v. Ward (GAMD, 5:22-cv-00396, terminated August 2025, $0); Humphreys v. Oliver (GAND, 1:25-cv-06100, terminated December 2025, $0); Humphreys v. Oliver (GAND, 1:25-cv-07012, terminated January 2026, $0); Daker v. Oliver (GAND, 1:25-cv-03191, terminated March 2026, $0); Ballard v. Davis (GAMD, 5:25-cv-00046, terminated September 2025, $0); Chambers v. Benton (GASD, 4:21-cv-00002, terminated September 2025, $0); Mejia Morales v. Streeval (GAMD, 4:25-cv-00385, terminated December 2025, $0).

This is the Prison Litigation Reform Act working as designed. Federal law (42 U.S.C. § 1997e(a)) requires incarcerated plaintiffs to exhaust GDC's internal grievance process before filing suit; Woodford v. Ngo (2006) requires that exhaustion be "proper"; Jones v. Bock (2007) lets the prison define what "proper" means. GDC's SOP 227.02 (effective May 10, 2019) gives an incarcerated person 10 calendar days from the date they knew or should have known of the facts to file a grievance, while the agency's own response windows are generous (Legal Access; Retaliation). The policy consequence: the absence of verdicts is not evidence of the absence of harm. A system that logs at least 263 homicides in under seven years and pays on twenty death claims is demonstrating a procedural barricade, not institutional health.

The Operating Budget Trajectory

The topline, all from the Governor's Budget Report and GPS's budget analysis:

• FY2010: roughly $1.08 billion — a plateau near $1.2 billion that held for most of a decade.
• FY2024 actual: $1,422,978,935 in State General Funds, plus $100,652,921 in Other Funds and $3,022,249 in Federal Funds.
• FY2025 actual: $1,913,888,054 all funds — the all-time peak.
• FY2026 amended: approximately $1.80 billion.
• FY2027 approved (HB 974): $1,762,261,281 in State General Funds, plus $8,641,839 from the Opioid Settlement Trust Fund — approximately $1.79 billion.

A 57 percent spending surge in four years purchased a system the DOJ found unconstitutional. The allocation inside that budget deserves committee scrutiny:

• Georgia spent $50 million deploying phone-blocking technology across 35 prisons; GPS documented that homicides in the system quadrupled in the period that followed.
• A separate $150 million built the OWL surveillance hub — described in GPS reporting as the first centralized real-time prison-surveillance command center in American corrections — which went live around June 2026 at the former Tift College campus in Forsyth. The FY2027 budget adds $5,521,230 in technology costs for the OWL Unit. GPS's coverage frames the question appropriators should ask: $150 million bought the eye; $805,000 was left for classrooms. Watching a stabbing in real time is not a violence-reduction strategy.
• The FY2026 amended budget added $13,387,475 for managed-access and drone-detection systems, and the FY2027 budget directs $10,793,600 in existing funds to the same purpose.
• Against those security outlays, the FY2027 health increases are modest: $32,637,565 for the physical health contract (per-diem increase and additional beds), $12,127,034 for the mental health contract, $1,498,347 for dental. A single line-item reduction — the drop in the employer contribution rate for the State Health Benefit Plan from 29.454% to 20.264% — erased $28,375,825 from the State Prisons program alone.
• The FY2027 budget also directs GDC to "explore all options for additional closed-security, single-cell inmate capacity" — a signal that the default answer remains more confinement, not less.

The Shadow Budget: Commissions and Unreviewed Revenue

Not all prison money flows through appropriations. GDC's inmate telephone contract with Securus (dating to September 2016) paid the department a $4 million one-time incentive plus a 59.6 percent commission on call revenue, subject to a $325,000 monthly floor — approximately $8 million per year flowing back to the agency while families paid roughly 13 cents per minute (GPS analysis of the Securus contract; Family Communication). Such commissions pool in Inmate Welfare Funds — opaque accounts that function as shadow budgets outside legislative appropriation oversight. Commission-based contracts create a structural incentive to approve higher prices, since agency revenue rises with each markup. Nationally, commissary markups run 40 to 600 percent above retail (The Appeal, 46-state survey); GPS's own commissary investigation of the GDC master list — 517 SKUs with FY2024 sales and 2025 pricing — documents markups of 83 to 1,150 percent above retail in Georgia (Prison Nutrition).

The Staff Supply Chain

The contraband those surveillance systems are meant to stop does not primarily arrive by drone — though federal prosecutors did announce this month that drone drops brought meth, marijuana, and phones into Georgia prisons, with an incarcerated defendant sentenced (WGXA). The deeper problem is inside the gate. At least 428 GDC employees were arrested for on-the-job criminal conduct between January 2018 and September 2023 — more than seven per month — according to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation built on Open Records Act requests and POST certification cross-referencing. The AJC also documented that GDC's public contraband-arrests website systematically undercounts employee arrests: in 2023 the site listed four worker arrests while GDC's own internal data showed 38; in 2022 the AJC determined 44 officers and workers were arrested in contraband cases while the public site listed only civilian arrests (Staff Misconduct). GPS's own analysis of GDC's published contraband reports reaches the same structural conclusion — the staff supply chain is documented in the agency's own words (The Staff Supply Chain). When the agency is both a party to contraband flow and the sole publisher of the enforcement record, procurement and reporting transparency are legislative functions, not agency courtesies.

II. Pending Litigation and Projected Liability

The CRIPA Question

The single largest contingent liability on the state's corrections books is the unresolved federal posture. The DOJ's October 2024 findings report recommended 82 remedial measures and noted the Attorney General may sue under the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act (Oversight & Investigations). Whether the current federal administration files is uncertain. Two fiscal realities survive regardless:

1. The findings are now notice. Every future plaintiff in a GDC death or injury case can cite a 93-page federal document establishing that the state knew about the violence and failed to act. Deliberate indifference — the hardest element in Eighth Amendment litigation — has been substantially pre-litigated by the federal government. The DOAS ledger's next decade will reflect that.
2. GDC's conduct during the investigation compounds exposure. DOJ described the records fight as "unnecessarily contentious": GDC refused to produce documents until a subpoena was enforced and conducted pre-inspection cleanups. Georgia's federal docket already includes sanctions for spoliation of video evidence and contempt proceedings over noncompliance with court orders (Legal Settlements & Lawsuits). In Gumm v. Ford, a federal court adopted findings — based on the expert report of Dr. Craig Haney — that Tier II/SMU residents were confined in cells "smaller than the average parking space"; the solitary-confinement settlement that followed is one a judge found GDC was falsifying compliance with (Solitary Confinement).

Command-Level Criminal Exposure

The Adams indictment. On May 13, 2026, a Tattnall County grand jury indicted former Smith State Prison Warden Brian Adams on racketeering, bribery, false statements, evidence tampering, and violation of oath (Georgia Attorney General's office). Prosecutors allege Adams accepted bribes from a prison gang — the Yves Saint Laurent Squad — to allow contraband into Smith and to move the gang's leader, Nathan Weekes, out of solitary confinement, and that he buried prison shanks and contraband phones in his backyard. The gang Adams allegedly enabled 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. GPS's analysis ("The Game They Learned") traces Adams to a closed promotion pipeline: facility command is drawn almost entirely from career insiders, pay has doubled, and the agency still cannot retain staff. When a sitting warden is alleged to be on a gang's payroll, command integrity is a legislative problem, not an HR problem. Adams's case remains pending; he is entitled to the presumption of innocence. The structural conditions that produced the indictment are not pending — they are current.

Audit Integrity

Georgia logged 15,542 PREA allegations from 2014–2024 and substantiated roughly 3.5 percent, while all 273 facility PREA audits across five cycles returned full compliance — not one standard found "not met," ever, at any of 139 audited facilities. Against that paper record, DOJ found sexual assault "rampant" and found GDC fails to protect LGBTI prisoners — findings produced by a federal team, including certified PREA auditors, that visited 17 GDC prisons in 2022–2023 (Sexual Abuse). The federal investigation itself traces to the lawsuit of Ashley Diamond, a transgender woman who sued over sexual assault and denial of hormone therapy. A 273-for-273 compliance record in a system the federal government found unconstitutional is not a compliance record; it is an audit-contractor problem the State Auditor can reach.

III. Mortality: The Trend and the Tracking Gap

GPS independently tracks at least 1,890 deaths in GDC custody since 2020 (GPS-tracked mortality data, n=1,890+; Georgia Prison Deaths archive). The count is a floor by construction: GDC reports deaths approximately two months late, anonymous investigation-only cases are excluded, and cause-of-death information is frequently never published.

Of the tracked total, GPS has classified 664 as natural/medical, 263 as homicides, 118 as suicides — and 704 as unknown or pending cause (Oversight & Investigations; Deaths in Custody). GPS's Vision 2027 research compilation records 54 as overdoses. The largest single category is the one the state has made opaque: more than a third of all deaths carry no publicly available cause. Only nine deaths in GPS's entire database are explicitly categorized as "Medical Neglect" — a number that, read against the structural evidence, measures the invisibility of the problem rather than its scale (Medical Neglect). GPS's mental-health analysis documents that the system's suicide rate quadrupled before the state stopped reporting causes of death (Mental Health). That opacity is a policy choice, and the General Assembly can reverse it by statute.

The federal record confirms the violence trend underneath the totals. DOJ documented GDC homicides climbing year by year — 7 in 2018, 13 in 2019, 28 in 2020, 28 in 2021, 31 in 2022, and 35 in 2023, 142 in all — with more than 1,400 violent incidents reported across just 24 prisons from January 2022 through April 2023.

The Named Dead

Aggregate numbers obscure the mechanism; the named dead restore it.

• Maurice Antonio Brown died by homicide on September 3, 2026, at Wilcox State Prison (GPS death registry). He was serving twenty-five years for kidnapping out of Fulton County, in custody since December 2009, with a maximum release date of 2034. Three separate accounts sent to GPS from inside Wilcox describe a tactical squad turning out F2 dorm from about seven in the morning until roughly noon, with the attack beginning when the searched men were let out to shower; the county coroner was called at about two o'clock (WGXA; 13WMAZ; GPS source reporting — the inmate-witness timeline is uncorroborated by any official statement and GPS presents it as such). GDC's public statement called the event — which left one man dead, nine injured, two life-flighted, and five more transported by ambulance — an "altercation." His body went to the GBI Crime Lab; the cause of death is pending there.
• Stephen Prochaska, 70, died by suicide on January 21, 2025, at Augusta State Medical Prison — the system's designated medical facility (GPS death registry; GPS mental-health research).
• Corey Jose July, 34, was stabbed to death in the yard at Hancock State Prison on June 17, 2025 — chased across the yard and cornered at a locked gate, per the prosecutor who tried the case (13WMAZ; 41NBC/WMGT). On August 12, 2026, a Hancock County jury convicted Vershaun Smith of malice murder; Judge Alison T. Burleson sentenced him to life without parole. Smith was roughly twenty, already serving a voluntary-manslaughter sentence, with a maximum release date of 2056. He had a way out before the killing; now neither man does.
• Recent registry entries include Sheldon Leroy Burns at Coastal State Prison (August 2026); Jerry Jerome Smith at Dooly State Prison (August 2026); James Loreno at Valdosta State Prison (August 2026); Donald Hugh Young at Augusta State Medical Prison (August 2026); Albert Chapa, 57, at Hancock (July 2026); Fletcher McCloud, 44, at Coffee Correctional Facility (July 2026); Kwame Conte McCombs, 37, at Telfair State Prison (July 2026); Edward Allen Pitt, 65, at Baldwin State Prison (July 2026); Steve Allen Burk, 38, and Demetris Raynard Keller, 38, at Central State Prison (July 2026); Kristi Ray Perkins, 59, at Pulaski State Prison (July 2026) — a women's facility whose kitchen failed a health inspection in January with sewage backing up through floor drains; Kolby Young, 24, and Edouard Kamdem, 77, at Augusta State Medical Prison (July 2026). GPS's database recorded at least eight deaths across six facilities in the first twenty days of July 2026 alone.

Ware State Prison: A Case Study in the Accountability Gap

GPS obtained 231 death-investigation reports, GBI autopsies, and toxicology findings covering 84 deaths at Ware State Prison since 2020 through a Georgia Open Records Act request (GPS reporting, "At Least Nineteen"). The records document at least 19 homicides, 12 suicides — many of men held in segregation — and 8 fatal overdoses at a single close-security prison outside Waycross that opened in 1990 designed for roughly 500 people and 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 the named suspects was ever charged, indicted, or tried. Autopsies record men with more than two dozen stab wounds; Squaier Jiles bled to death from sharp-force injuries in 2024, and Christopher Gresham was stabbed by at least three other prisoners in 2021. The state examined the bodies, wrote "homicide" in its own files, and then — as far as any public record shows — did nothing. (See also GDC Hidden Deaths.)

Current Intake Signals

GPS's reporting network continues to receive accounts committees should treat as leads, not proof. Anonymous tips (low corroboration) report stabbings at Hancock State Prison in 2026. Family-attestation reports from Wilcox State Prison (low corroboration) describe an unaffiliated man made to sleep in a dayroom after refusing gang involvement, extortion for money under threat of forced gang initiation, prisoners charged money to use the bathroom for week-long periods, orderlies listening to family phone calls, and a man eligible for Program Incentive Credit who has been held about two months without seeing a counselor or being enrolled in any class. Family-attestation reports from Augusta Transitional Center (low-to-moderate corroboration) allege retaliatory transfers, refusal to let residents work even after hiring, expired drug-testing kits, disappearing trust-account funds, and staff involvement in contraband. GPS has not independently verified these claim-layer accounts; they sit inside a documented pattern — former GDC assistant warden Russell Zirkle's on-record testimony places Hancock among the prisons running 70–80 percent officer vacancy.

IV. Conditions and Sanitation: What the State's Own Inspectors Found

Georgia's Department of Public Health inspects prison kitchens on the same 100-point scale it uses for restaurants — O.C.G.A. § 26-2-370 expressly covers "institutions, both public and private," DPH Rule 511-6-1-.01 exempts federal property but pointedly not state facilities, and GDC's own SOP 409.04.26 confirms county health departments inspect prison kitchens (Scores Without Sanitation).

GPS's review of the statewide inspection database found the overwhelming majority of facilities scoring in the A range — Central State Prison posted perfect 100s in both June and November 2025; Baldwin scored 100 in June 2025; Hancock scored 96 while its employee dining hall scored 100; Calhoun posted perfect scores across multiple 2023–2024 inspections. Three facilities have failed outright since 2022, and the failures show what the system captures when it works:

• Johnson State Prison — 64 (December 11, 2023), the lowest documented GDC score. Multiple rats and roaches throughout the kitchen, a problem described as ongoing "with little to no change"; bulk oil, flour, and rice bran gnawed through with visible rat droppings and urine; cold-holding foods above 41°F discarded on site; five ovens, a tilting skillet, a kettle, a griddle, a freezer, and the bulk ice machine all broken; holes in floors, walls, and ceilings. A December 20 follow-up scored 67 — still failing. This is the same facility that produced the ledger's $4 million estate settlement.
• Pulaski State Prison — 67 (January 29, 2026). The facility's only designated handwashing sink was nonfunctional, plumbing ripped from the wall; sewage backing up through floor drains (repeat violation); employees switching tasks without washing hands; nacho meat at 65°F and sauce at 123°F, both repeat hot-holding violations. The trajectory was visible in the data — 83 in February 2025, 73 in August 2025, 78 in a September follow-up, then 67 — before a February 6, 2026 follow-up rebounded to 96.
• Smith State Prison — 68 (May 27, 2022). GPS's review found rodent activity noted in every inspection from 2022 through 2025; the February 16, 2026 score was still only 72, with roach activity in the bakery and tray-making station marked repeat. This is the facility whose former warden now stands indicted for racketeering.

A distribution where nearly every kitchen scores an A while the DOJ finds the system in constitutional collapse tells legislative staff the inspection regime is measuring paperwork, not practice. The three failures coincide precisely with facilities appearing elsewhere in this brief for deaths, settlements, and criminal indictments.

The food itself is a budget decision. GDC's "Food and Farm Operations" line is $31,261,736 in the FY2027 approved budget — $1.64 per person per day, about $0.55 per meal — against an American Correctional Association benchmark of approximately $3.66 per meal. GDC spends roughly 14.8 percent of that benchmark; meeting it at current population would cost about $211 million a year, 6.8 times the appropriation. The per-meal figure has been flat for four fiscal years ($0.54–$0.55) and the program was cut $486,881 between FY2025 actual and FY2027 approved (Prison Nutrition).

V. The Wrongful-Conviction Landscape

GPS's latest investigative publication — "Nobody Told Them: Georgia Convicted People on Science the FBI Disowned, Then Shut the Courthouse Door" (GPS-authored) — examines Georgians convicted on forensic techniques the FBI itself has since disavowed, and the procedural machinery that keeps those convictions beyond reach. The machinery is statutory. Georgia's habeas corpus framework imposes a four-year filing cutoff with no innocence exception; the PLRA's fee and strike provisions and the 10-day grievance deadline close the remaining doors (Legal Access). The consequence is that a person convicted on disowned science can be time-barred from proving it.

The issue is not abstract this week. As the state prepares to carry out an execution in a Georgia double-murder case — news coverage of the condemned man's last meal has already begun — he is seeking a new trial (WRDW reporting). And the same GBI crime-lab system that produces the state's forensic evidence is where cause-of-death findings in custody cases, including Maurice Antonio Brown's, sit pending. A conviction-integrity mechanism — an innocence exception to the habeas bar and a statutory pathway for post-conviction forensic review — is squarely within the General Assembly's reach and is a core plank of the Vision 2027 framework below.

VI. Vision 2027: The Post-Conviction Reform Package

Vision 2027 is GPS's post-conviction justice reform framework, synthesized from more than a dozen research collections and grounded in the state's own documents — the Governor's Budget Report, GDC statistical profiles, and the Parole Board's annual reports. Its legislative components:

The economics of release. The Parole Board's own annual reports put the daily cost of a prison bed at $51 (FY2011) against $4.49 per day for parole supervision (FY2016). The Board quantified avoided state expenditure explicitly: $351 million in FY2012, $409 million in FY2013, $469 million in FY2014, $451 million in FY2015. Every person released to supervision instead of warehoused is an eleven-fold cost reduction.

The district lift. The jail backlog — 2,632 state inmates awaiting transfer in the most recent count — is a cost the state pushes onto county commissions and sheriffs in your districts; GPS's analysis "Twenty Percent of the Jail" examines the county-budget impact. GDC's population snapshots also show 5,753 people aged 60 or older in custody (July 2026 snapshot) — the highest-cost, lowest-risk cohort in the system.

The untreated epidemic. DOJ concluded Georgia was treating only about ten percent of the people it knew to be infected with hepatitis C — a disease curable since 2014 (GPS health reporting; Vision 2027). Untreated hep C walks out the gate and into county health systems.

The procedural wall. Vision 2027 addresses the grievance machine (10-day filing window under SOP 227.02), the four-year habeas bar with no innocence exception, and the absence of any independent oversight body — the procedural gauntlet that converts missteps into permanent bars to court (Legal Access).

The statehouse response to date, as GPS's reporting documents, has been denial rather than remediation: Georgia's own outside consultant called the situation an emergency, a federal judge openly questioned whether the department considers itself above the law, and department leadership publicly dismissed the documented crisis as "propaganda."

VII. End the Warehouse: Rehabilitation Strategy and Comparable-State ROI

The End the Warehouse framework starts from a documented premise: the crisis is not a management problem one commissioner can fix — it is a design. The state has validated roughly 15,200 gang affiliates (31 percent of the population, versus a ~13 percent national average) across 315 identified gangs, yet operates no systematic gang-separation housing, no structured renouncement or exit program, and no dedicated strategy for keeping rival factions apart (GPS reporting, "315 Gangs, Zero Strategy"). The cost of that choice arrived in waves: four men killed in a single gang disturbance at Washington State Prison on January 11, 2026, while the facility ran at roughly 72 percent officer vacancy; coordinated gang violence on April 1, 2026 that locked down at least twelve prisons, dispatched life flights to two, and confirmed stabbings at five — including a high-ranking Blood leader stabbed in the neck during an official inspection in front of the warden at Hays State Prison (GPS real-time source reporting, "Blood on Blood"); and another systemwide lockdown on May 21, 2026, with nine hospitalized at Dooly, six at Central, and source-reported deaths at Ware and Augusta that GDC did not confirm (GPS source reports; WGXA; 13WMAZ).

The alternative has a track record. Texas, Arizona, and California each faced the same gang crisis decades ago and built documented responses: housing-based separation, intelligence-driven classification, structured exit programs, and incentive systems with a pathway out of gang life. GPS's normalization analysis ("Reopen the Doors") assembles the evidence base — Scandinavian systems and working American examples — showing a prison run as a functioning community costs less than the warehouse Georgia now funds. The diagnostic logic is simple: strip work, school, and family contact from a prison and the vacuum fills with the gang, the drug trade, and despair. WTOC obtained records showing lockdowns repeatedly prevented class attendance during a six-month period in 2025 at Coastal State Prison — the state is not even delivering the programming it already funds. And the state's own statute book already contains the separation tool: O.C.G.A. § 42-5-52, on the books since 1897, commands that the department "shall provide for the classification and separation of inmates." As GPS's analysis puts it: separate the gangs — it costs nothing. Georgia keeps choosing the bodies.

VIII. Policy Recommendations and Bill-Language Entry Points

1. Death-reporting statute. Require GDC to report every in-custody death to a public dashboard within a fixed window, with cause and manner of death once determined, and annual reporting to the judiciary committees. Entry point: new Code section in Title 42, Chapter 5 (conditions of detention). The evidentiary basis: 704 of 1,890+ tracked deaths carry no published cause, and the state stopped reporting causes after the suicide rate quadrupled.
2. Enforce the separation law. Add a compliance-and-reporting mechanism to O.C.G.A. § 42-5-52 — quarterly gang-separation and housing-classification reporting to the General Assembly. The statute has commanded separation since 1897; what it lacks is an enforcement hook. Marginal cost: negligible.
3. Independent oversight. Establish a corrections ombudsman/inspector general with subpoena power and unannounced-visit authority. Georgia has no independent oversight body even as the DOJ recommends 82 remedial measures; GPS's End the Warehouse collection documents costed oversight models from other states.
4. Inmate Welfare Fund transparency. Require annual legislative reporting and audit of all commission-based revenue (telecom, commissary) and prohibit commission structures in future renewals. The Securus contract's 59.6 percent commission and $325,000 monthly floor are documented; the accounts those commissions pool into are not.
5. Food-spending floor and inspection publication. Set a statutory per-meal floor phased toward the $3.66 ACA benchmark ($0.55 today) and require DPH prison-kitchen scores to be posted publicly. Three failing kitchens since 2022 — Johnson (64), Pulaski (67), Smith (68) — map exactly onto the facilities generating deaths, settlements, and indictments.
6. PREA audit reform. Direct the State Auditor to review the PREA audit contract and methodology: 273 audits, zero standards ever found "not met," against a federal finding that sexual assault is "rampant."
7. Habeas innocence exception. Amend the four-year habeas cutoff to add a freestanding-innocence exception and create a post-conviction forensic-review pathway for convictions resting on disavowed techniques.
8. Staffing package. Georgia ranks last of 50 states for correctional-officer pay; turnover was 49 percent annually per Commissioner Timothy Ward's 2022 budget testimony; GPS records an acceptance rate under 15 percent and 82.7 percent first-year attrition. Commissioner Tyrone Oliver told lawmakers, "We don't have a problem with recruiting. We have a problem with the retention piece" (GPB). Vacancy has exceeded 50 percent systemwide since mid-2021; Zirkle's on-record testimony places Telfair, Hancock, Smith, and Valdosta at 70–80 percent vacancy, and GPS obtained records through an open-records request showing six officers on duty when a riot began at one prison. DOJ documented prisoners dressing wounds themselves and a stabbing victim at Ware waiting half an hour while other prisoners beat on a window for help.
9. Parole utilization. The $51-to-$4.49 daily differential and the Parole Board's own $351–$469 million annual avoided-cost figures are the fiscal case; 5,753 prisoners aged 60-plus are the humanitarian one.
10. Hepatitis C treatment appropriation. Fund treatment for the roughly 90 percent of known-infected prisoners going untreated; the disease has been curable since 2014 and the liability for deliberate indifference to a curable epidemic is accruing.

IX. Facilities by Region: District Relevance

GPS tracks 88 facilities; each has a public page with its claims record, inspection history, and mortality data (machine-readable facility data). High-salience facilities by region:

• Northwest Georgia: Hays State Prison (site of the April 1 inspection-line stabbing); Walker State Prison; Floyd, Chattooga, Walker, and Gilmer County Prisons; Northwest RSAT Center.
• Northeast Georgia: Arrendale State Prison (women) and its transitional and RSAT centers; Hall, Jackson, Hart, and Wilkes County Prisons; Athens/Clarke County Prison; Whitworth Women's Facility.
• Metro Atlanta: Fulton, Clayton, Gwinnett, Henry, Fayette, Coweta, Carroll, and Spalding County Prisons; Phillips State Prison; Atlanta, Clayton, Metro, and Phillips transitional centers; Metro Reentry Facility; Paulding PDC.
• West Georgia: Muscogee County Prison; Columbus and Charles D. Hudson transitional centers; Harris and Meriwether County Prisons; Rutledge State Prison.
• Middle Georgia: Hancock State Prison (70–80% vacancy per Zirkle testimony; the July homicide and an August 2026 murder conviction; anonymous-tip stabbing reports in 2026); Washington State Prison (four killed January 11 at ~72% vacancy); Johnson State Prison (64 inspection score; $4M estate settlement); Baldwin State Prison and Riverbend Correctional; Central State Prison; Burruss CTC; Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison and the Special Management Unit (the Gumm v. Ford solitary findings); Pulaski State Prison (women; 67 inspection score); Dodge, Wilcox (the September 3 homicide of Maurice Antonio Brown), Telfair, and Wheeler facilities; Macon-area transitional centers; Putnam State Prison; Morgan County Prison; Bleckley, Emanuel, and Treutlen probation facilities; McRae Women's Facility.
• Augusta / East Central: Augusta State Medical Prison (system's medical hub; repeated deaths including Stephen Prochaska); Augusta Transitional Center (family-attestation allegations of retaliation and expired drug-test kits); Richmond, Jefferson, Screven, and Jenkins facilities.
• Southwest Georgia: Lee, Autry, Dooly, Macon, and Calhoun State Prisons; Dougherty, Sumter, Terrell, Mitchell, Colquitt, Thomas, Grady, Decatur, Miller, Turner, Tift, Cook, and Calhoun County Prisons; Albany and Bainbridge facilities.
• Southeast / Coastal: Ware State Prison (19 coroner-documented homicides, 11 named suspects, no known prosecutions); Smith State Prison (indicted former warden; rodent findings every inspection 2022–2025); Valdosta State Prison (80% vacancy by April 2024); Coastal State Prison (lockdowns repeatedly cancelled classes, per WTOC records); Georgia State Prison; Rogers State Prison; Montgomery State Prison; Coffee Correctional Facility (private); Chatham, Effingham, Bulloch, and Appling facilities; Valdosta, Savannah, Bacon, and Long Unit transitional and annex facilities.

Constituents can locate their representatives through GPS's Find Your Legislator tool, which cross-references these facilities.

Next Steps for Your Office

GPS is not asking the General Assembly to take advocacy on faith. Every figure in this brief traces to the state's own budget documents, the state's own settlement ledger, the state's own health inspections, the state's own death-investigation records obtained through open-records requests, or the federal government's published findings.

Schedule a briefing. GPS will present the full dataset — the DOAS ledger analysis, the Ware death-investigation corpus, the staffing-vacancy record, the commissary pricing master, the mortality database — to any caucus, committee, or delegation office, on the record and with documentation.

Request specific data. Committee staff can pull facility-level records directly from GPS's machine-readable facility data feed, browse per-issue dossiers at the Intelligence System, or request the underlying records for any facility in your district.

Sponsor the bill. The entry points in Section VIII are drafted to be picked up: a death-reporting statute, a § 42-5-52 enforcement mechanism, Inmate Welfare Fund transparency, an innocence exception to the habeas bar. Any one of them would close a gap this brief documents with the state's own paper. GPS will supply the evidentiary appendix to any sponsor who asks — through Submit a Report — and families with direct knowledge can reach GPS confidentially through Tell My Story.

The deaths are being counted whether the General Assembly acts or not. At least 1,890 since 2020, and climbing on a two-month reporting delay. The only open question is whether the next session funds the warehouse again — or begins, line by line and Code section by Code section, to dismantle it.