# Solutions: A Path Forward for Georgia's Prisons **Published**: 2026-06-28 **Source**: https://gps.press/intelligence/solutions/ **Author**: Georgia Prisoners' Speak --- Every other page in this intelligence system documents what Georgia's prisons do to the people inside them — the 1,842 deaths GPS has tracked in Department of Corrections custody since 2020 (GPS-tracked mortality data, n=1,842), the federal finding that conditions are "among the most severe violations" the U.S. Department of Justice has ever documented, the gangs that control housing units while officer posts sit empty. This page is the other half of the ledger. It documents what GPS has put forward to **fix** it. These are not slogans. Each one carries a price tag, a precedent in another state where it already works, and a named obstacle — the specific actor who blocks it and why. We lead with the cheapest, highest-leverage fix on the board, because Georgia could begin it tomorrow, with the laws it already has, at a cost close to zero. --- ## The Flagship Solution: Separate the Gangs **This is the single cheapest, highest-leverage intervention available to Georgia, and the state refuses to use it.** Most of the violence that drives Georgia's death toll is not random. It is gang-on-gang and gang-on-civilian violence inside facilities where the same factions are packed onto both sides of every fence. GPS's reporting in **"Separate the Gangs. It Costs Nothing. Georgia Keeps Choosing the Bodies."** lays out the mechanism plainly: when a fight broke out at Ware State Prison, it became a crisis at Augusta, Dooly, Central, and Hancock on the same afternoon — because the same gangs are present in every facility at once. Spread the gangs everywhere, and violence travels everywhere. The only thing that contains it is keeping rival factions apart, and apart from the unaffiliated ("civilian") prisoners they extort, stab, and kill. The state's current tool is the statewide lockdown. As GPS put it, that "is not a strategy. It is a confession." It says the state cannot tell you who is safe in which dorm, so it punishes everyone — the victims, the witnesses, the men three weeks from release — by sealing them in their cells until the bodies stop, then lifts the lockdown, changes nothing, and waits for the next one. ### Georgia Already Has the Law Here is the part the state would prefer no one notice: **separating dangerous prisoners never required a new law.** GPS's reporting in **"On the Books Since 1897: The Separation Law Georgia Refuses to Enforce"** documents that under **O.C.G.A. § 42-5-52**, the statute does not suggest or encourage — it commands: "The department **shall** provide for the classification and separation of inmates." That language traces back to 1897. For more than 125 years, Georgia law has treated the sorting and separating of dangerous prisoners not as an option but as a duty, written into the article of the corrections code titled "Conditions of Detention Generally." A second statute declares that every person has a right to be safe from gang violence. **The department honors neither.** This is not a gap in the law. It is a state that wrote the rules and then refused to follow them. ### What the Failure Costs in Bodies The cost of choosing not to separate is measured in named human beings. On January 11, 2026, four men were killed inside Washington State Prison in a single gang disturbance, at a facility running roughly 72% officer vacancy. One of them, **Jimmy Trammell**, had 72 hours left on a ten-year sentence; his brother was already planning to pick him up at the bus station ("Separate the Gangs or Keep Burying the Dead"). On May 21, 2026, gang violence forced **every state prison in Georgia** onto lockdown, with men reported dead at Ware and Augusta ("On the Books Since 1897"). GPS's recent mortality records show the pattern continuing — deaths at Valdosta, Washington, Ware, and Augusta State Medical Prison clustering within days of one another through the spring of 2026 (GPS-tracked mortality data). ### The Cost, the Precedent, the Obstacle **Cost:** Near zero. Gang separation is a classification-and-housing decision — sorting who sleeps where — not a construction project or a new appropriation. The state already validates roughly **15,200 people (31% of its population) as gang-affiliated** ("315 Gangs, Zero Strategy"). The intelligence to separate them largely exists; what is missing is the operational will to act on it. **What works in peer states:** GPS's **"315 Gangs, Zero Strategy: How Georgia Abandoned Its Prisons While Other States Found Solutions"** documents that **Texas, Arizona, and California** each confronted the same crisis decades ago and built comprehensive responses — housing-based separation, intelligence-driven classification, structured gang-renouncement and exit programs, and incentive systems that gave people a documented pathway out of gang life. The evidence base is substantial; the results are documented. Georgia has no systematic gang separation housing policy, no structured exit program, and no dedicated operational strategy. **The obstacle — who blocks it and why:** The Georgia Department of Corrections itself, through institutional inertia and a classification system the DOJ found is driven by **available bed space rather than risk**, placing close-security inmates into medium-security facilities. GPS has documented four medium-security prisons quietly packed with close-security men ("On the Books Since 1897"). Worse, separation is undermined from inside: GPS's reporting on the indictment of former Smith State Prison Warden **Brian Adams** — charged with racketeering and bribery for allegedly accepting payments from the Yves Saint Laurent Squad to move its leader out of solitary and allow contraband in — shows how gang control can be actively facilitated by the very staff responsible for classification ("The Game They Learned"). The fix costs nothing in dollars. It costs the department the admission that its current approach has failed. **This is where a reader should start.** Share the gang-separation case. It is the rare reform where the law, the evidence, and the budget all already point the same direction — and only the choosing remains. --- ## Vision 2027: The Post-Conviction Reform Package If gang separation is the emergency tourniquet, **Vision 2027** is the structural repair. It is GPS's analytical and legislative spine — a synthesis of fiscal evidence, court findings, and firsthand testimony arguing that Georgia's incarceration system has detached almost entirely from any measurable public-safety purpose ("Vision 2027: Post-Conviction Justice Reform"). The case begins by dismantling the foundations of mass incarceration. GPS's reporting documents how the 1990s "superpredator" panic — which drove 24 states to enact three-strikes laws and 41 to expand juvenile transfer to adult court — was **catastrophically wrong**: juvenile homicide arrests fell 82% from 1993 to 2019, and the theory's own author conceded it was wrong before the DOJ officially deemed it a myth by 2000. Against that wreckage sits a sobering fiscal fact: the Vera Institute found the U.S. spent roughly **$33 billion on incarceration in 2000 for the same public safety it bought in 1975 for $7.4 billion**, and the National Research Council concluded in 2014 that incarceration has marginal-to-zero impact on crime. Georgia's own machinery made it worse. The state abolished parole for offenses committed after 1996, enacted the 1995 "Seven Deadly Sins" law requiring life without parole for a second serious violent felony, and took **$82,211,036 in federal truth-in-sentencing grants** between FY1996 and FY2001 to build 4,132 prison and juvenile beds. The consequence is a population now held far longer than the crime decline warranted, with post-conviction remedies nearly sealed shut — a closure GPS documented this month in **"Buried Alive: The Four-Year Deadline That Killed Habeas Corpus in Georgia."** Vision 2027 is structured as a **seven-bill package** addressing that machinery end to end: the discredited sentencing assumptions, the truth-in-sentencing and parole collapse that keeps people inside, the breakdown of safety and programming, the near-total closure of post-conviction relief, and the evidence base for cheaper, more humane alternatives. The throughline is that each failure traces to a specific statute or policy — which means each is something the General Assembly can change. **The lift it creates:** Restoring meaningful parole review and post-conviction remedies reduces the population that the $1.8 billion budget exists to confine — and every person safely returned home is a person no longer at risk of becoming another entry in the mortality archive. GPS's reporting on exonerations underscores the stakes: this month alone, GPS documented a **Georgia man exonerated after 21 years in prison** ("Georgia man exonerated after 21 years," GPS-authored). **Cost / feasibility:** Legislative, not capital. The reforms cost the price of passing bills; the offsetting savings come from a shrinking confined population at $86.61 per person per day, or $31,612 a year ("GDC Budget: Where the Money Goes"). **The obstacle — who blocks it and why:** The General Assembly and the Parole Board. Truth-in-sentencing and the "Seven Deadly Sins" law are politically entrenched, and reversing them requires legislators to spend political capital against "tough-on-crime" framing that GPS's own reporting shows is empirically discredited. The Parole Board, which GPS identifies as "the most consequential modern engine" of Georgia's carceral expansion, operates with broad discretion and little transparency. These are the actors a reader's signature and phone call are aimed at. **How to push it forward:** Sign on to Vision 2027 and read the full package at https://gps.press/intelligence/issue/vision-2027/. Then find and contact your legislators at https://gps.press/find-your-legislator/. --- ## End the Warehouse: Transformation and Return on Investment **Vision 2027** changes who is inside and for how long. **End the Warehouse** changes what happens to them while they are. It is GPS's rehabilitation-and-transformation strategy, framed as actionable advocacy for Georgia's 2026 election cycle ("End the Warehouse: A Prison Transformation Plan for Georgia"). The diagnosis is brutal in its simplicity. Georgia spends roughly **$1.8 billion a year** to confine more than 50,000 people — incarcerating at the 7th-highest rate in the nation, **881 per 100,000 residents**, higher than any country on earth except El Salvador — and by nearly every measurable outcome, that money buys failure. The DOJ found that people "leave prison worse than when they came in." The reason is visible in the budget: education is not even a standalone line item, buried inside the "State Prisons" appropriation, and **vocational education contracts totaled just $172,000 in FY2025 against a $1.48 billion budget** — roughly **$3.44 per incarcerated person per year, less than a single commissary item.** GPS's reporting series traces what fills the vacuum that idleness creates. **"The Only Family Left"** documents why men join the gangs most likely to kill them: strip a prison of work, school, and family contact, and the gang becomes the only institution still offering a person function, belonging, and meaning. **"Reopen the Doors — Normalization"** names the alternative — the principle that life inside should resemble life outside as closely as security allows, because the entire point is to return people to that outside life intact. As GPS argues in **"Normalization: The Principle That Changes Everything,"** this is not merely a Scandinavian ideal; it is a constitutional baseline Georgia is currently violating. **Return on investment / what works in peer states:** GPS's reporting points to working American models, not just Scandinavian ones — **California's emerging rehabilitation-centered redesign** (small-unit housing, education, human connection) as documented in GPS's "Prisneyland: What Prison Should Be." The fiscal logic is favorable: normalization carries "a price lower than what Georgia already spends to fail" ("Reopen the Doors"). Programming and reentry investment is precisely what research consistently shows reduces the population the budget exists to confine ("GDC Budget"). **Cost / feasibility:** A reallocation, not a new mega-appropriation. Georgia already spends the money — it spends it on confinement, healthcare ballooning by $72 million in FY2025 alone, and emergency overtime pay rather than transformation ("GDC Budget"). End the Warehouse redirects existing dollars toward outcomes that reduce future spending. **The obstacle — who blocks it and why:** The budget-writers and the GDC's own institutional priorities. As GPS's budget analysis shows, corrections spending rose 44% from FY2022 to FY2026 — the largest increase in state history — and **almost none of it flowed toward programming.** The obstacle is not a lack of money but a choice about where it lands, made by appropriators and agency leadership who keep funding the warehouse. Georgia still pays incarcerated workers **$0** for institutional labor, an economic logic GPS traces directly to the state's post-Reconstruction convict-leasing apparatus. **How to push it forward:** Sign on to End the Warehouse and read the full plan at https://gps.press/intelligence/issue/end-the-warehouse/. --- ## A Solution for Each Documented Problem Vision 2027 and End the Warehouse are the umbrella strategies. Beneath them, each specific failure GPS has exposed has a specific, achievable fix. ### Medical Care + Staffing **The problem GPS exposed:** The DOJ found Georgia's medical and mental health care "abhorrent," "life-threatening," and "unconstitutional," driven by a **correctional officer vacancy rate above 50% systemwide** — reaching 80% at Valdosta State Prison — that has ceded control of housing units and made daily counts impossible (Medical Neglect; Staffing Crisis; Violence & Safety). The human cost is documented down to the individual: **Christian Krauch was tortured for three weeks under a bunk at Macon State Prison** while officers submitted paperwork certifying that all inmates were accounted for across roughly 168 required counts ("Three Weeks Under a Bunk"). **The solution:** Staffing is the root variable. GPS's reporting is unambiguous that the violence engine *is* the staffing collapse — which means stabilizing officer ranks is the precondition for every other safety improvement. But GPS's reporting also questions whether pay was ever the real problem: "The pay has doubled in recent years. The agency still cannot keep staff" ("The Game They Learned"). The fix pairs staffing with the gang-separation strategy above — because a separated, classified population is fundamentally easier and safer to staff than dorms where rival gangs and civilians are mixed. **Cost / obstacle:** Georgia has already proven that money alone does not solve this — emergency pay packages have not stemmed the collapse ("GDC Budget"). The obstacle is the GDC's reliance on overtime and emergency spending rather than the structural fixes (classification, separation, normalization) that would make posts manageable. Read the underlying reporting at https://gps.press/intelligence/issue/staffing-crisis/ and https://gps.press/intelligence/issue/medical-neglect/. ### Heat, Sanitation, and Food **The problem GPS exposed:** Heat used as deliberate punishment, sanitation failures, and food unfit to eat. In **"The Man Who Turned On the Heat"** (Georgia Prisoners' Speak — Tell My Story), an incarcerated worker named Jacs describes a Telfair unit manager turning the heaters **on** in July, in cells already reaching an estimated 110 degrees, telling staff he did it on purpose because "these men are supposed to be punished." GPS analysis has separately identified a pattern of extreme heat in segregation at Washington State Prison (derived/low). On food, GPS's **"Scores Without Sanitation"** investigation shows how A-grade health scores conceal reality: Johnson State Prison scored a 64 with rats, roaches, and rat-gnawed bulk food, then a worse 67 nine days later — the inspector "came back and found the same conditions." Firsthand, in **"Surviving on Scraps"** (Tell My Story), Stony describes a decade of roach-covered trays and "portions for toddlers." **The solution:** Two concrete fixes. First, enforceable heat and sanitation standards with **unannounced inspections** — GPS's reporting shows the entire food-safety gap stems from inspections being scheduled in advance by security necessity, measuring "what the inspector sees" rather than what arrives on the tray. Second, the variance itself proves the fix is achievable: facilities like Central State Prison scored perfect 100s, which means, as GPS frames it, "adequate food safety is achievable within the GDC system — making the failures a matter of management and resource allocation rather than inherent impossibility." **Cost / obstacle:** Low cost; the standards and inspection authority largely exist. The obstacle is the announced-inspection regime and the absence of consequences at the response stage — the system "fails at the response stage rather than the discovery stage" ("Scores Without Sanitation"). Read more at https://gps.press/intelligence/issue/scores-without-sanitation/ and https://gps.press/intelligence/issue/conditions/. ### Death-Reporting Transparency **The problem GPS exposed:** The official death count is an undercount. The DOJ found GDC **systematically misclassified homicides as undetermined causes** and "inaccurately reports these deaths both internally and externally" in a manner that underreports violence (Deaths in Custody; Oversight & Investigations). In 2024, GPS identified **100 homicides against 66 officially reported**. For 2025, GPS found **six individuals missing from GDC's public mortality listing**, a discrepancy the department has not explained. Recent records show contested deaths in real time — at Phillips State Prison, a death categorized as "undetermined" and contested by family that GDC had not officially confirmed (derived, multiple grades); at Valdosta State Prison, deaths with cause "unknown or pending" reported by inmate witnesses (anonymous_tip/low; derived/moderate). **The solution:** Mandatory, timely, independent death certification and public reporting — every death classified by an authority outside the agency whose facility it occurred in, with cause of death and the underlying record made public. GPS already maintains an independent mortality archive precisely because the official one cannot be trusted. **Cost / obstacle:** Low cost; primarily a reporting and certification mandate. The obstacle is the GDC's documented incentive to undercount — accurate reporting would expose the full scale of the violence the agency is failing to control. A federal contempt ruling for falsified records is already on the books (Oversight & Investigations). Read more at https://gps.press/intelligence/issue/deaths-in-custody/ and browse the mortality archive at https://gps.press/georgia-prison-deaths/. ### Oversight **The problem GPS exposed:** The DOJ issued **82 recommendations** in October 2024 after declaring Georgia's prisons unconstitutional, and a federal court has already held the department in contempt for falsified records (Oversight & Investigations). PREA audits rated every Georgia prison "full compliance" while the DOJ found sexual assault "rampant" and **zero of 388 reviewed PREA investigation files met standards** (Sexual Abuse). The audits measure policy on paper, not operational reality. **The solution:** Independent, ongoing external oversight with the authority to conduct **unannounced** inspections and to verify operational reality rather than paper compliance — the same principle that fixes the food-safety gap, applied systemwide. The DOJ's 82 recommendations provide a ready-made roadmap. **Cost / obstacle:** Moderate — standing oversight requires funding and statutory authority. The obstacle is that genuine oversight threatens the "full compliance" fiction the agency has relied on; meaningful external review removes the agency's ability to grade its own homework. Read more at https://gps.press/intelligence/issue/oversight-investigations/. ### The Family Tax **The problem GPS exposed:** GPS's investigation documented a **$47 million annual extraction scheme** — commissary markups of 54–323% above already-inflated wholesale, with retail overcharges of 83% to 1,150%, and a 30% across-the-board price increase imposed in November 2025 (Family Communication). The same reporting connects the **cell-phone crackdown** — which severs incarcerated people's only link to the outside — to quadrupled homicides and deepening gang control ("Georgia's Cell Phone Crackdown: Security or Silence?"). **The solution:** Cap commissary and communication markups, and preserve — not sever — family contact, because the severed family is one of the harms that drives people toward the gang ("The Only Family Left"). Maintaining connection is both a humane fix and a violence-reduction strategy. **Cost / obstacle:** Negative cost to families; the obstacle is the revenue the agency and its vendors extract. The actors who block it are the GDC and the prison-phone and commissary contractors who profit from the markups. Read more at https://gps.press/intelligence/issue/family-communication/. --- ## What Already Works — and Where GPS Has Cited It Every solution above has a working precedent GPS has documented: - **Gang separation:** Texas, Arizona, and California built housing-based separation, intelligence-driven classification, and structured exit programs decades ago, with documented results ("315 Gangs, Zero Strategy"). - **Normalization / rehabilitation:** Scandinavian systems and, on American soil, **California's emerging rehabilitation-centered redesign** demonstrate that punishment can be limited to the loss of liberty while preparing people to return home ("Normalization: The Principle That Changes Everything"; "Reopen the Doors"). - **Food safety:** Georgia's own facilities — Central State Prison's perfect 100s — prove adequate standards are achievable inside the existing system ("Scores Without Sanitation"). - **Sentencing reform outcomes:** The Prison Policy Initiative's recent analysis of what early release looks like in states that eliminated discretionary parole offers a real-world evidence base for Vision 2027's sentencing reforms ("Since you asked: What does early release look like…," Prison Policy Initiative). None of these is theoretical. Each is a place where the alternative is already running. --- ## What You Can Do — Now Georgia's prison crisis was built by a series of choices. It can be unmade the same way. Here is how a reader moves each solution forward: 1. **Share the gang-separation case.** It is the cheapest, highest-leverage fix on the board, grounded in a law Georgia has held since 1897. Send **"Separate the Gangs. It Costs Nothing. Georgia Keeps Choosing the Bodies."** and **"On the Books Since 1897"** to anyone who still believes the violence is unsolvable. It is not. The state is choosing the bodies. 2. **Sign on to Vision 2027.** Read the seven-bill package and add your name at https://gps.press/intelligence/issue/vision-2027/. 3. **Sign on to End the Warehouse.** Read the transformation plan and the ROI case at https://gps.press/intelligence/issue/end-the-warehouse/. 4. **Contact your legislators.** Find them at https://gps.press/find-your-legislator/. Tell them three things: enforce O.C.G.A. § 42-5-52 and separate the gangs; pass Vision 2027; redirect the warehouse budget toward programming and reentry. 5. **Submit what you know.** If you have information about conditions, deaths, or retaliation inside a Georgia facility, report it at https://gps.press/submit-a-report/ or tell your story at https://gps.press/tellmystory/. The mortality archive at https://gps.press/georgia-prison-deaths/ exists because the official count cannot be trusted — and it grows more accurate every time a family or witness comes forward. The doors of the warehouse were bolted by choice. They can be reopened. Start with the one that costs nothing.