Brief written October 4, 2026 from GPS Intelligence System data.(K)

Legislative Intelligence Brief: Georgia Department of Corrections

Prepared for members of the Georgia General Assembly, legislative staff, and committee analysts by Georgia Prisoners' Speak (GPS). Every figure below traces to a public record, a court document, GDC's own published data, or GPS's investigative corpus. Where evidence comes from a claim-layer source, the source weight is stated. Committee staff may quote any section of this brief with attribution to GPS.

The Bottom Line for the 2027 Session

Georgia is operating a 88-facility prison system holding 52,139 people — with another 2,889 backed up in county jails awaiting transfer — under a federal finding, issued October 1, 2024, that the system violates the Eighth Amendment as a matter of "pattern or practice" (U.S. DOJ Civil Rights Division findings letter). The fiscal exposure is documented across multiple ledgers:

• The state spent $1,913,888,054 on corrections in FY2025, an all-time peak, before the FY2026 amended ($1,799,204,979) and FY2027 approved ($1,787,672,791) budgets bent the curve down by roughly $126 million (Governor's Budget Reports; HB 974 Senate Appropriations Committee Substitute).
• A separate $2.4 billion, nine-year, no-bid healthcare contract with Centurion of Georgia, LLC began July 1, 2024 — weeks before the DOJ described the care being purchased as "abhorrent," "life-threatening," and "unconstitutional."
• GPS has independently tracked at least 1,897 deaths in GDC custody since January 1, 2020 — a floor, not a complete count, because GDC reports deaths roughly two months late and stopped publishing causes of death in March 2024 (GPS-tracked mortality data, n=1,897+; GPS mortality archive).
• The state's liability-settlement ledger, maintained by the Department of Administrative Services Risk Management division and obtained by GPS through Open Records, documents GDC payouts stretching from 2008 through 2025, including multi-million-dollar wrongful-death resolutions and a federal spoliation sanction against the department.

The pattern-or-practice finding converts every condition documented in this brief into live legal exposure for the state. The General Assembly's alternative — the subject of the final sections of this brief — is to legislate the remedy itself, on Georgia's terms and Georgia's calendar, rather than wait for the federal process to set them.

What Georgia Already Pays: The Fiscal Baseline

The operating budget

The canonical figures, drawn from Governor's Budget Reports and the HB 974 Senate Appropriations Committee Substitute, and laid out in GPS's GDC budget analysis:

• FY2025 actual: $1,913,888,054 across all fund sources — a 25.4 percent, roughly $387 million, single-year jump over FY2024's $1,526,654,104, the largest increase in the visible window.
• FY2026 amended: $1,799,204,979. FY2027 approved: $1,787,672,791.
• The long arc: spending sat near $1.08 billion in FY2010, stayed roughly flat for eight years, then rose 57 percent in four years to the FY2025 peak. Georgia Public Broadcasting's budget primers documented a 44 percent increase from FY2022 to FY2026 — roughly $500 million more per year. State General Funds climbed from $1,073,261,001 in FY2020 to $1,823,730,648 in FY2025.

Where the money moved between FY2025 actual and FY2027 approved is the policy story. The State Prisons program was cut from $1,117,374,600 to $929,889,321 — a reduction of $187,485,279, or 16.78 percent — while Private Prisons grew from $152,648,138 to $173,541,185, an increase of $20,893,047, or 13.69 percent. Health grew $37.3 million (9.56 percent) and Offender Management grew $8.1 million (15.98 percent). In plain terms: money moved out of state-operated facilities and toward contractors.

The FY2027 private-prisons line includes a $1,055,658 increase for Jenkins and Riverbend bed utilization tied to the tier rate added in HB 68 (2025 Session). The Governor proposed adding 263 private beds — 160 at Coffee Correctional Institution and 103 at Wheeler Correctional Institution — at $4,227,620. The Senate Appropriations Committee rejected the expansion, with budget language stating that "Space is not compatible with single cell needs of prison population," and attached a $0 directive requiring GDC to study single-cell housing needs. That directive matters: GDC's own commissioner has told senators that single cells reduce violence, and GPS's September 2026 analysis ("Three to a Cell") found four medium-security prisons housing three men in cells built for one, with close-security populations rising at three of them.

The hidden fiscal channels

• Healthcare: $2.4 billion over nine years to Centurion, a Centene subsidiary, awarded without competitive bid, covering medical, mental health, and dental care for roughly 52,000 people (medical neglect analysis).
• Family communications: the department's communications contract pays GDC roughly $8 million a year in commissions drawn from the families who pay for the calls — a revenue line extracted from some of the poorest households in every legislative district (family communication analysis).
• Food: GDC spends about 54 to 56 cents per meal against an American Correctional Association benchmark of $3.66; the FDA's Thrifty Food Plan estimate for an adult man is about $10 a day, and Georgia spends about $1.64. More than 110 days a year, the system serves two meals, not three. A commissary system marking protein staples up 157 to 466 percent sells the difference back to families (prison nutrition analysis).
• Procurement: GPS's "Direct Selection" investigation documented an $85,585,244 prison purchase justified by a two-page note, and "The Swing Space That Wasn't" documented 524 new beds purchased without a contract the state will produce. Both are live questions for any committee with procurement jurisdiction.

Liability Exposure: Settlements, Sanctions, and the Litigation Pipeline

What the state has paid

Georgia does not publish a list of the people its prison system has killed. It publishes a settlement ledger. The DOAS Risk Management ledger, obtained by GPS through Open Records and analyzed in GPS's legal settlements brief, records GDC liability payouts from 2008 through 2025 — a running account, sorted by claimant name and incident year, of deaths, injuries, and neglect the state paid to close. The ledger includes multi-million-dollar wrongful-death resolutions, and the federal litigation record includes a spoliation sanction against the department itself — a court finding that evidence was destroyed. GPS will provide the full ledger, with line items, to any legislative office on request.

The $0 docket — and why it is not reassurance

Committee staff reviewing recent federal dockets will find a string of GDC-touching prisoner cases terminated with no recovery: Daker v. Oliver (GAND, 1:25-cv-03191, terminated), Humphreys v. Oliver (GAND, 1:25-cv-07012 and 1:25-cv-06100, both terminated), Grant v. Ward (GAMD, 5:22-cv-00396, terminated), Chambers v. Benton (GASD, 4:21-cv-00002, terminated), Ballard v. Davis (GAMD, 5:25-cv-00046, terminated), Mejia Morales v. Streeval (GAMD, 4:25-cv-00385, terminated), and A v. Carlson (GAND, 1:24-cv-00037, terminated). Each closed at $0.

That pattern is not evidence that the underlying harms are absent. It is evidence of the procedural gate. Federal law requires prisoners to exhaust GDC's own grievance system before suing — a system administered by the department the prisoner would be suing, on deadlines as short as ten days, with a two-active-grievance cap and a list of non-grievable subjects that includes the housing and classification decisions most often used as retaliation (legal access analysis; retaliation analysis). Cases die on procedure, not merit. The claims that survive that gate are the ones that reach the settlement ledger.

Pending matters projecting future liability

1. The DOJ pattern-or-practice finding (October 1, 2024). The 93-page findings letter documented 142 homicides between 2018 and 2023, more than 1,400 reported violent incidents in a sixteen-month window, gangs controlling housing units, and conditions rated "among the most severe violations of constitutional rights in the nation." GDC fought the investigation "at nearly every step" (oversight analysis). The finding stands unresolved. The General Assembly does not have to wait for the federal process to dictate the remedy; it can legislate one directly, and every session it declines to act is a session in which the terms are shaped elsewhere.

2. The Baldwin State Prison wrongful-death suit. Four corrections officers were sued in federal court over a deadly stabbing at Baldwin State Prison (13WMAZ reporting; GPS's "Pleading From a Laundry Bin" documented that officers had been warned about the killing in advance). The DOAS ledger already contains multi-million-dollar wrongful-death resolutions; this suit adds a pending deliberate-indifference claim with advance-warning allegations to that pipeline.

3. The Smith State Prison gun litigation. A wrongful-death suit arising from the June 16, 2024 murder-suicide at Smith State Prison alleges — supported by testimony from a GDC Criminal Investigations Division special agent in Tattnall County Superior Court — that a firearm was inside the facility for a year before the killing, that inmates warned multiple GDC officials about the gun on June 13, 2024, three days before the shooting, and that no lockdown, search, or protective measures followed (news-attributed court reporting). Attorney Brent Savage has stated publicly there were no guards in the area when the victim was shot. The core factual record in this litigation was created by GDC's own agent.

4. The parole-system suit. A federal judge questioned the constitutionality of Georgia's parole system and allowed a woman's lawsuit to proceed (Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporting). The suit proceeds against a parole apparatus whose lifer grant rate collapsed to 4.5 percent in FY2024.

5. The Brian Adams prosecution as a governance marker. A Tattnall County grand jury indicted the former Smith State Prison warden on racketeering, bribery, false statements, evidence tampering, and violation of oath — prosecutors allege he took bribes from a prison gang, moved its leader out of solitary, and buried shanks and contraband phones in his backyard (Georgia Attorney General's office press release; CBS Atlanta). A 26-year GDC employee who rose to warden now stands accused of running his facility in partnership with a gang; that is a command-integrity data point that bears directly on the oversight recommendations in this brief.

Mortality: The Trend Line and the Tracking Gap

The count

GPS has independently tracked at least 1,897 deaths in GDC custody since January 1, 2020 (GPS-tracked mortality data, n=1,897+; deaths in custody analysis). The annual series:

• 2020: 294 · 2021: 258 · 2022: 255 · 2023: 262 · 2024: 333 — the deadliest year on GPS's record, a 27 percent increase over 2023 · 2025: 302 · 2026 year-to-date: 192, with the caveat that GDC's roughly two-month reporting lag means the live count is always an undercount.

GDC's own single-methodology release-by-death series tells the same story from inside the department: an administrative count that rose from 172 to 282 deaths a year. The DOJ found 142 homicides between 2018 and 2023 alone.

The gap

The tracking gap is now a policy problem in its own right:

• The DOJ found GDC "inaccurately reports these deaths both internally and externally, and in a manner that underreports the extent of violence and homicide in its prisons."
• GDC stopped publishing cause of death in March 2024 — after the state's own data showed the suicide rate tripling between 2010–2014 and 2015–2019 (mental health analysis).
• Coroner and GBI records GPS obtained through an open-records request document at least 19 prisoner-on-prisoner homicides at Ware State Prison since 2020, alongside twelve suicides and eight fatal overdoses, across 84 Ware deaths in 231 death-investigation files. 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 eleven was ever charged ("At Least Nineteen: The Murders the State Didn't Prosecute").
• GPS's derived analysis found that at Washington State Prison, some deaths were certified as natural with no autopsy performed, while homicide and overdose deaths at the same facility received autopsies. At Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison, GDC recorded a death as suicide months before the medical examiner certified the manner of death. At Telfair State Prison, GPS found discrepancies between an autopsy report and GDC's own records, including conflicting information about location and the reported involvement of another person.

The named dead

Counts summarize; they do not substitute. Among the people the evidence in GPS's registry discusses:

• Marcus Walker died January 10, 2026, at Wilcox State Prison, age 20; GPS's registry records the manner as homicide. State death records describe homicide by manual strangulation in the cell he shared with another man, at a facility GPS had flagged months earlier for packing close-security prisoners three to a cell.
• Maurice Antonio Brown died September 3, 2026, at Wilcox State Prison; GPS's registry records the manner as homicide. Three separate accounts sent to GPS from inside Wilcox describe a tactical squad completing a five-hour shakedown of F2 dorm around noon and the fatal attack beginning when men were released to showers; GDC's public statement called the killing an "altercation" that was "contained to one dorm" and mentioned neither the squad nor the search (GPS source reporting; WGXA and 13WMAZ attribution).
• Corey Jose July died June 17, 2025, at Hancock State Prison, age 33; GPS's registry records the manner as homicide. According to the prosecutor who tried the case, surveillance footage showed him chased across the yard, cornered at a locked gate, and stabbed. A Hancock County jury convicted his attacker of malice murder on August 12, 2026; the sentence was life without parole (court-verified record).
• Zeary Davante Davis died September 26, 2024, at Dooly State Prison, age 31; GPS's registry records the manner as homicide. News-attributed reporting states he was stabbed to death on his birthday, three days after a warning letter about conditions at the facility was sent to Commissioner Oliver.
• Squaier Lamar Jiles died September 16, 2024, at Ware State Prison, age 35; GPS's registry records the manner as homicide. The state's own death-investigation records describe him bleeding to death from sharp-force injuries.
• Christopher Eli Gresham died September 30, 2021, at Ware State Prison, age 39; GPS's registry records the manner as homicide. The state's own records describe him stabbed by at least three other prisoners.

In two of these cases, the documented warning predated the death: GPS had published the close-security, three-to-a-cell classification pattern at Wilcox months before Marcus Walker was killed there, and news-attributed reporting states the warning letter about Dooly reached Commissioner Oliver three days before Zeary Davis was stabbed. All six deaths occurred in facilities whose vacancy rates, classification practices, or inspection failures appear elsewhere in this brief.

Conditions and Sanitation: Inspection Scores vs. the Tray

Georgia's prison kitchens are inspected on the same 100-point scale the Department of Public Health uses for restaurants, and the score distribution looks reassuring — dozens of facilities scoring 96 to 100, repeatedly. Central State Prison scored 100 three times in the review window; Hancock posted 100s in May, June, and December 2025. But GPS's review of the DPH database found three facilities below the 70-point passing threshold since 2022 (scores without sanitation analysis):

• Johnson State Prison: 64 (December 11, 2023) — the lowest documented DPH food-safety score in the system. Inspectors found rats and roaches throughout the kitchen "with little to no change," bulk oil, flour, and rice bran bags gnawed through with visible droppings and urine, cold-holding food above 41°F discarded during the inspection, eleven pieces of kitchen equipment broken, and holes in floors, walls, and ceilings.
• Pulaski State Prison: 67 (January 29, 2026) — the facility's only designated handwashing sink ripped from the wall, sewage backing up through floor drains as a repeat violation, and repeat hot-holding violations. Pulaski's scores declined 83 → 73 → 78 → 67 before the failure — a response problem, not a discovery problem.
• Smith State Prison: 68 (May 27, 2022), rising only to 72 by February 2026 — rodent activity noted in every inspection from 2022 through 2025, roach activity in the bakery and tray-making station (repeat), broken sinks and plumbing, and mildew on walls, floors, and ceiling (repeat).

The 64-to-100 spread is the legislative point: adequate food safety is demonstrably achievable inside this system. The failures are management and appropriation choices, not physics. The same is true of fire safety — GPS's "Bolted In" investigation documented that the state's own inspectors keep finding prison fire exits locked, inspection after inspection. And beneath the inspections sit the DOJ's structural findings: broken cell locks that let people walk out of their cells, nonfunctional fire alarms, raw sewage in living areas, a single officer responsible for nearly 400 beds, and state-hired consultants describing a system in "emergency mode" (facility conditions analysis).

Staffing: The Cost Driver Under Every Other Line Item

Every fiscal and liability number above runs through one variable: Georgia cannot keep correctional officers.

• GDC had 5,991 budgeted correctional-officer positions as of January 2024; 2,985 were vacant — a 52.5 percent vacancy rate, after 56.3 percent in 2022 and 49.3 percent in 2021 (staffing crisis analysis).
• Between January 2021 and November 2024, 82.7 percent of new correctional officers left within their first year — an effective retention rate of 17.3 percent.
• The DOJ found rates above 70 percent at ten of the largest prisons. Russell Zirkle — a former GDC assistant warden who rose from officer to chief of security inside the system — testified on the record that Telfair, Hancock, Smith, and Valdosta State Prisons run 70–80 percent officer vacancy, and that state averages are "skewed" because fully staffed halfway houses are blended in. Tyler Ryals, a former GDC officer, gave corroborating testimony. A GPS open-records production documented six officers on duty when a riot began at one major facility.
• Commissioner Tyrone Oliver told lawmakers, as reported by GPB: "We don't have a problem with recruiting. We have a problem with the retention piece."

The misconduct ledger compounds the vacancy math. At least 428 GDC employees were arrested for on-the-job crimes between January 2018 and September 2023 — more than seven a month, roughly 360 involving contraband (Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Open Records and POST records; staff misconduct analysis). GDC's own published contraband reports — 599 reports, 1,615 incidents, assembled by GPS including 265 reports recovered from the Internet Archive after they disappeared from GDC's site — name 374 of the department's own staff, officers, and contract employees as a recurring supply route (contraband supply chain analysis). Two details deserve committee attention: in 2022, GDC published 40 reports describing 80 incidents and not one reported staff arrest — the only year since 2010 at zero — and in one week of August 2019, the cumulative arrest tally on 137 existing GDC pages was retroactively replaced with a lower figure. Official numbers moved backward on the department's own website.

The downstream effects are violence and cost. The DOJ tied the vacancy rate directly to gang control of housing units, delayed emergency response — including a stabbing victim at Ware who waited half an hour while other prisoners beat on a window for help — and rising deaths. The public-safety spillover has reached county sheriffs: one Florida sheriff publicly blasted Georgia officials over scams run by Georgia prisoners, and a Georgia sheriff called GDC "the largest taxpayer-funded gang recruitment center" (WSB-TV). Cellphone-enabled fraud — including a bitcoin jury-duty scam linked to Georgia inmates — is now a recurring constituent-services issue.

Wrongful Convictions: The Post-Conviction Landscape

Georgia's wrongful-conviction exposure is structural, and the state's own Chief Justice has said so. Concurring in Sanders v. State in March 2026, Chief Justice Nels Peterson called the post-conviction system "a mess," wrote that "no rational person would have chosen the system we have today if presented with it as a whole," and concluded: "In short, the system is broken. We did a lot of the breaking. But it will require legislative action to fix it."

The load-bearing facts:

• A four-year statute of limitations on habeas corpus (O.C.G.A. § 9-14-42(c)), enacted in 2004 with no committee report, documented floor debate, impact study, or stated reason — after 37 years under the 1967 Habeas Corpus Act with no time limit at all. 70 percent of Georgia's 60 known exonerees needed longer than four years to clear their names (Vision 2027 analysis).
• GPS's fifty-state comparison: Texas imposes no habeas time limit; New York's CPL 440.10 motion can be filed "at any time after conviction"; North Carolina's Motion for Appropriate Relief has no general time limit; Maryland allows ten years; Illinois imposes three years but exempts actual innocence entirely. Even the federal AEDPA deadline contains statutory tolling, equitable tolling under Holland v. Florida, and the actual-innocence gateway of McQuiggin v. Perkins. Georgia's deadline has none of these safety valves.
• A series of Georgia Supreme Court decisions has eliminated the out-of-time appeal, nullified the statutory remedy for void convictions, and narrowed the "miscarriage of justice" exception into what GPS's research describes as a wall rather than a gateway.
• Only three of Georgia's 159 counties have any conviction-review mechanism. Constituents in the other 156 counties — including, statistically, every member's district — have no forum at all.
• Forensic exposure: GPS's "Nobody Told Them" investigation documented Georgia convictions built on forensic science the FBI has since disowned, with the courthouse door then closed by the procedural architecture above. The GBI Crime Lab sits at the center of both problems: it is the same institution whose autopsy queue determines when — and whether — families and courts learn how people died in custody, and whose forensic legacy cases the post-conviction system currently cannot revisit.

Vision 2027: GPS's Post-Conviction Reform Package

Vision 2027 is GPS's legislative framework for the 2027 General Assembly, built almost entirely on the state's own paper trail. Its components, each with a ready bill-language entry point:

1. Habeas reform. Amend O.C.G.A. § 9-14-42(c) to add an actual-innocence exception (the Illinois model), extend the window (Maryland's ten years), or repeal the deadline (the Texas model). Any of the three codifies the gateway the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed in McQuiggin.
2. Restore a functional remedy for void convictions and repair the out-of-time appeal the courts eliminated — directly responsive to Chief Justice Peterson's Sanders concurrence, which is, in effect, an invitation from the judiciary to the legislature.
3. Parole reform. The Board of Pardons and Paroles' own annual reports show the lifer grant rate collapsing to 4.5 percent in FY2024 — 93 releases out of 2,046 lifers considered — while average time served on a life sentence rose from under nine years in 1973 to 29.2 years. GPS's "The Board That Stopped Saying Yes" documents the collapse in the board's own numbers.
4. Conviction-review capacity beyond three counties and a forensic-legacy review mechanism for convictions resting on disowned disciplines.

Each entry point amends existing statute rather than creating a new agency. GPS does not yet have public data that would support a formal fiscal note for these components and will say so plainly in any committee hearing; what the record does show is the other side of the ledger — the settlement payouts, the exonerees who needed longer than four years, and a Chief Justice telling the legislature the system is broken.

End the Warehouse: Rehabilitation Strategy and Return on Investment

GPS's End the Warehouse framework starts from a proposition the state has already conceded fiscally: Georgia spent roughly $700 million in new corrections money between FY2022 and FY2026, aimed almost entirely at custody — locks, cameras, beds, and contractors. That spending did not reverse the trends: the DOJ finding, the 2024 mortality peak of 333 deaths, and the parole collapse all postdate or coincide with it.

The return-on-investment evidence is unusually strong because Georgia ran the experiment on itself. Economist Ilyana Kuziemko's study of Georgia's 1998 reform — which forced certain prisoners to serve at least 90 percent of their sentences, eliminating the parole incentive — found that affected prisoners accumulated significantly more disciplinary infractions and completed fewer programs than a comparable group that kept the incentive. Hope is not a soft variable; it is a behavioral management tool the state measured itself removing. The parole grant rate fell from roughly 70 percent in 1993 to a record-low 28 percent in FY2024.

The working alternative — normalization, the principle that life inside should resemble life outside as closely as security allows because people are being returned to that outside life — has a deep evidence base, operating examples in Scandinavia and now on American soil, and a price the GPS series documents as lower than what Georgia already spends to fail. GPS does not yet have public data on per-state recidivism savings that would support a precise fiscal note; the causal evidence above, plus the state's own settlement and mortality ledgers as the cost of the status quo, is what the current record supports. GPS can provide committee staff the full underlying research file on request.

Policy Recommendations and Bill-Language Entry Points

1. Independent oversight. Reintroduce the HB 1504 (2022) framework — an independent body empowered to inspect facilities, compel records, and report publicly. Georgia remains one of the largest prison systems in the country with no such body; the internal Ombudsman unit cannot direct a facility to change course (oversight analysis).
2. In-custody death transparency. Require GDC to publish name, facility, and manner of death within a fixed window after certification; require an autopsy in every in-custody death (ending the Washington State Prison pattern of no-autopsy "natural" certifications); and require public reporting to resume — GDC's March 2024 decision to stop publishing causes of death was administrative and can be reversed by statute.
3. Enforce O.C.G.A. § 42-5-52. Since 1897, Georgia law has commanded that the department "shall provide for the classification and separation of inmates." GPS's gang-separation analysis ("Separate the Gangs. It Costs Nothing.") documents that the duty is statutory, not discretionary. An appropriations proviso tying facility funding to classification-compliance reporting would cost nothing to enact.
4. Single-cell housing follow-through. Fund and enforce the Senate Appropriations Committee's $0 single-cell study directive, with a public deadline — the commissioner's own testimony and GPS's three-to-a-cell findings establish the violence linkage.
5. PREA audit integrity. Georgia has passed 273 consecutive PREA audits without a single failed standard across 139 facilities, while the DOJ found sexual assault "rampant" and GDC substantiated only about 3.5 percent of 15,542 allegations logged from 2014 to 2024 (sexual abuse analysis). Statutory audit-independence and substantiation-rate reporting requirements would close the gap between paper compliance and the federal finding.
6. Solitary confinement reporting. Require quarterly publication of Tier I/II/III populations and lengths of stay, and set a statutory outer limit on Tier II, which currently has none; the policy floor is five hours out of cell per week, and GDC publishes a population count for exactly one isolation unit (solitary confinement analysis).
7. Family communication reform. End commission-based communications contracts — the roughly $8 million a year GDC draws from families — by appropriations proviso or contract-term statute, and revisit the twenty-number phone list, twelve-person visitation list changeable only in May and November, and the fifteen-minute call cap.
8. Food and fire-safety floors. Set a per-meal appropriations floor indexed to the ACA benchmark, and require unannounced fire-marshal inspections with a statutory response deadline where inspectors keep finding locked exits.
9. Retention-first staffing package. With 82.7 percent first-year attrition and the commissioner on record that retention — not recruiting — is the failure, tie compensation and bonus structures to tenure milestones rather than hiring volume.
10. Vision 2027 post-conviction package, as detailed above: amend § 9-14-42(c), restore void-conviction and out-of-time-appeal remedies, impose parole transparency, and fund conviction-review capacity.

District-Relevant Facility Index

GPS maintains a public page for every facility in the system, plus a machine-readable facility dataset suitable for committee staff analysis. The facilities below carry the heaviest current data signals; claim figures are GPS report volumes from the last 90 days.

The full 88-facility list, with per-facility data, is available through the GPS Intelligence System.

Next Steps

GPS is asking members and staff to do three things:

1. Schedule a briefing. GPS will present the DOAS settlement ledger, the 599-report contraband dataset, the Ware death-investigation file inventory, and the mortality registry to any caucus, committee, or legislative office, in person or by video. Committee analysts can begin now with the legislative brief's companion issue pages and the machine-readable facility dataset.
2. Request the data. Any office may request the settlement ledger line items, the DPH inspection score series, the classification-crisis facility spreadsheets, or the PREA audit compendium; GPS produces records obtained through Open Records to legislative offices on request, and accepts confidential staff and whistleblower reports through its report intake.
3. Sponsor the remedy. The entry points are drafted around existing law: reintroduce the HB 1504 oversight framework, amend O.C.G.A. § 9-14-42(c) with an innocence exception, attach a classification-compliance proviso to the FY2028 appropriations bill, and statutorily restore cause-of-death reporting. The federal government has already written the findings. The General Assembly can still write the fix — on its own terms, in its own statutes, this session.