Brief written October 18, 2026 from GPS Intelligence System data.(A)

Solutions: A Path Forward for Georgia's Prisons

The rest of the GPS Intelligence System documents what is broken. This page lays out what would fix it.

Georgia does not lack a diagnosis. In October 2024 the U.S. Department of Justice found the state's prisons in violation of the Eighth Amendment. Two months later the state's own consultant, Guidehouse, described a system in "emergency mode." GPS has tracked at least 1,914 deaths in GDC custody since 2020 (GPS-tracked mortality data, a floor that rises as GDC reports causes of death about two months late). The year 2024 set a record with at least 333 deaths.

What Georgia lacks is a remedy that matches the evidence. This brief collects the concrete, costed proposals GPS has put forward in its reporting. For each one it gives the price and names who stands in the way.

The fixes are ordered by leverage per dollar. The cheapest and fastest comes first.

The Short List

1. Separate the Gangs: The Cheapest Fix Georgia Has Never Tried

The problem, in one day

On Thursday, May 21, 2026, gang violence spread through Georgia's prisons on a single afternoon. GPS documented the events in "Separate the Gangs. It Costs Nothing. Georgia Keeps Choosing the Bodies."

• Ware State Prison: people inside reported at least two men dead, another on life support, and a stabbing that happened after the facility was already locked down. GDC had not confirmed those deaths at publication; GPS received the accounts through its report intake.
• Dooly State Prison: nine people were hospitalized, per WGXA.
• Central State Prison: six were hospitalized.
• Augusta State Medical Prison: a man was reportedly killed in the D2 unit.
• Washington State Prison: another man was stabbed inside a lockdown that had been in place since four men were murdered there on January 11.
• Hancock State Prison: two more men were hurt, and one was airlifted out.

By nightfall every state prison in Georgia was on lockdown.

GPS's analysis of that day is the core of the case. A fight at Ware became a crisis at Augusta, Dooly, Central, and Hancock on the same afternoon for one reason: the same gangs are housed in every facility, already on both sides of every fence. As the piece put it, "A statewide lockdown is not a strategy. It is a confession." The state cannot say who is safe in which dorm, so it seals everyone in. Victims, witnesses, and men weeks from release are all confined alike. Then the lockdown lifts and nothing changes.

The pattern has repeated since:

• September 3, 2026, Wilcox: a gang-related fight killed one man and injured nine others, per GDC as reported by 13WMAZ. Three accounts sent to GPS from inside describe the attack beginning just after a tactical squad finished a five-hour search of F2 dorm and the men were let out to shower. GPS published this in "'Contained to One Dorm': The Squad Left Wilcox at Noon. The Coroner Was Called at Two."
• September 16, 2026, Telfair: a gang fight produced yet another statewide lockdown, per 13WMAZ and WGXA.

The violence feeds extortion as well as killing. In "BLUF: This Must Stop" (Georgia Prisoners' Speak — Tell My Story), a parent describes paying more than $2,000 through Cash App since June because her son at Wheeler Correctional Facility said people inside would harm him if the money stopped. "The calls have continued. They have not stopped. The threats have not stopped."

The law is already on the books

The central finding of "On the Books Since 1897: The Separation Law Georgia Refuses to Enforce" is that Georgia does not need a new statute. Under O.C.G.A. § 42-5-52:

"The department shall provide for the classification and separation of inmates with respect to age, first offenders, habitual criminals and incorrigibles, diseased inmates, mentally diseased inmates, and those having contagious, infectious, and incurable diseases."

That language traces to 1897. It sits in Article 3 of the corrections code, titled "Conditions of Detention Generally." Georgia's own legal framework therefore treats separating the people most likely to kill from the people they would kill as a basic condition of lawful confinement.

GPS identifies a second Georgia law that the department also fails to honor: the General Assembly's declaration that every person has a right to be safe from the fear and violence of gangs. In GPS's words, "This is not a story about a gap in the law. It is a story about a state that wrote the rules and then refused to follow them."

Classification is moving the wrong way

GDC's own data shows classification working against separation. GPS reported the trend in "Three to a Cell: Georgia's Commissioner Says Single Cells Cut the Violence. Four Prisons Do the Opposite."

• Close-security men in medium prisons. In November 2025, GPS reported that close to 30% of men at four medium-security prisons carried Close security status. Close is the level GDC reserves for people with "assaultive criminal or institutional history." At most medium prisons the share is almost zero.
• The share is rising. GDC's September 2026 open-records production showed the share went up at three of the four.
• Wilcox in particular. Wilcox, classified medium-security, holds 694 Close-security men among 1,824 (GDC spreadsheet, Active Offenders by Facility by Supervision Level, produced to GPS).
• Three to a cell. All four of these prisons house three men in cells built for one. The Commissioner himself told state senators that single cells reduce violence.

The cost of mixing shows up in the death registry:

• Marcus Walker died January 10, 2026, at Wilcox State Prison; GPS's registry lists the cause as homicide. He was 20. State death records describe manual strangulation, and the man in the cell with him was moved to lockdown.
• Maurice Antonio Brown died September 3, 2026, at Wilcox State Prison; GPS's registry lists the cause as homicide. He was killed in the F2 attack described above.
• Corey Jose July died June 17, 2025, at Hancock State Prison; GPS's registry lists the cause as homicide. According to the prosecutor in the case, as reported by 41NBC, surveillance footage showed him chased across the yard, cornered at a locked gate, and stabbed. GPS covered his death in "Death at a Locked Gate."

What "separation" means, and what it does not

GPS's proposal is a housing and classification fix, not a return to mass solitary confinement. It has three parts:

1. Keep rival gangs apart. Validated members of rival groups should not share dorms, yards, or movement schedules.
2. Protect unaffiliated prisoners. Men who belong to no gang should not be housed as prey or as recruits among organized groups. The sheriff quoted by WSB-TV called GDC "the largest taxpayer-funded gang recruitment center." The way to stop that is to stop housing unaffiliated men among them.
3. Enforce the existing classification line. Close-security men belong in close-security housing, not three to a cell in medium prisons.

What the evidence from other states shows, with its caveats

GPS's research library covers gang separation in other systems:

• Texas, 1990–1999. After Texas moved confirmed gang affiliates wholesale into separate housing, gang-related incidents dropped dramatically. Research by Ralph and Marquart (1991) found that segregating or transferring only gang leaders was not enough; wholesale separation of confirmed affiliates produced the major reductions. For Georgia, this means half-measures aimed at "shot-callers" will not work.
• Arizona, Security Threat Group program. An Arizona State University evaluation (Fischer/Griffin, 2002) found over a 50% reduction in assaults and other violations among separated gang members, and a 30% system-wide reduction in total rule violations. Caveat: GPS has not located the raw before-and-after incident counts for Arizona's step-down program.
• California, Ashker settlement (2015). California moved from status-based to behavior-based gang housing. Pelican Bay's long-term isolation population fell from 513 to 2, with no reported violence surge. Georgia should take this as a warning as much as a model: separation must not become indefinite isolation based on a label.
• Exit programs. The NIJ notes that no gang-exit program has yet been rigorously shown to remove people from prison gangs permanently. No rigorous evaluation exists for Texas's nine-month GRAD renunciation program. Exit pathways are worth offering, but they are not a substitute for separation.

Cost and feasibility

The fix reassigns beds GDC already has. It requires no new construction and no new technology contract.

The comparison with surveillance spending is stark. GPS's budget analysis found new surveillance-technology spending of over $120 million, roughly 60 times the cited education total. Gang separation requires classification staff time and the will to use it.

One design constraint matters. GPS's research notes that solitary confinement "requires twice as many guards." Separation done through general-population housing assignment is cheap. Separation done through isolation cells is expensive and harmful.

The obstacles

• GDC leadership. The department holds the statutory duty and has not exercised it.
• Crowding. Some 51,917 people were in custody at the latest snapshot, with another 3,017 in county jails awaiting transfer. Three-to-a-cell housing leaves little room to move people. That is an argument for doing the population work in Vision 2027 and End the Warehouse at the same time.
• Compromised classification. In May 2026 a Tattnall County grand jury indicted former Smith State Prison Warden Brian Adams. Prosecutors allege he took bribes from a gang to let contraband in and to move the gang's leader out of solitary (Georgia Attorney General press release; GPS, "The Game They Learned"). Adams has been indicted, not convicted.

GDC's own contraband reports, assembled by GPS, name 374 of its own staff, officers, and contract staff as part of the contraband supply route (see The Staff Supply Chain). A separation policy needs audit trails so that housing assignments cannot be bought. - Staff alignment with gangs. In "I'll Take Care of It" (Georgia Prisoners' Speak — Tell My Story), a writer recalls watching a warden at Dooly in 2022 huddle with roughly ten gang members after an incarcerated man spoke up. The gang then took the man to his room, and days later he could barely walk. Separation fails if the officers enforcing it are working with the groups it separates.

How to push it forward

• Ask your legislators one question: "Will you require GDC to report, facility by facility, how it complies with O.C.G.A. § 42-5-52?" Find them at gps.press/find-your-legislator.
• Share the two GPS articles by title, "Separate the Gangs. It Costs Nothing." and "On the Books Since 1897," along with the Violence & Safety briefing.
• Report what you see. Families and people inside can send housing and extortion reports through Submit a Report.

2. Vision 2027: Reopening the Post-Conviction Doors

The problem

GPS's Vision 2027 framework, built for the 2027 General Assembly, targets what GPS calls the four load-bearing walls of Georgia's post-conviction system. Georgia's own Chief Justice confirmed the diagnosis. Concurring in Sanders v. State in March 2026, Chief Justice Nels Peterson wrote: "In short, the system is broken. We did a lot of the breaking. But it will require legislative action to fix it."

The full bill-by-bill text lives on the Vision 2027 page. This brief summarizes the barriers the package addresses and the remedy for each, as GPS's research documents them.

Cost and feasibility

• Conviction-integrity commission: GPS's research estimates $2.0–$2.5 million a year, or 0.11–0.14% of GDC's FY2027 budget. That is less than the cost of incarcerating 80 people for a year.
• Peer evidence on legal services: North Carolina Prisoner Legal Services, a state-funded nonprofit, has saved over $12 million in taxpayer costs by correcting illegal sentences.
• Peer evidence on review units: Nationally, conviction integrity units helped secure 62 exonerations in 2024 (National Registry of Exonerations). Official misconduct featured in at least 104 of 2024's 147 exonerations.
• Forensic reform: Colorado's HB 26-1020, signed in March 2026 after passing unanimously with a $0 fiscal note, curbs reliance on colorimetric drug field tests. The Quattrone Center called those tests possibly "the largest" known contributor to wrongful arrests and convictions, with error rates as high as 38% in some contexts. GPS's reporting in "Nobody Told Them" shows Georgia faces the same discredited-science problem.

The obstacle

The obstacle is legislative inertia. GPS's research also names prosecutorial resistance, including recently elected prosecutors who deprioritize conviction review units, as the barrier to statewide conviction integrity. The four-year deadline survives largely because nobody has been made to defend it on the record.

How to push it forward

Sign on to Vision 2027 through the Vision 2027 page. Then ask your senator and representative whether they will co-sponsor the habeas innocence exception. If you or a loved one has been shut out of post-conviction review, the Legal Access briefing explains the barriers, and Tell My Story takes firsthand accounts.

3. End the Warehouse: From Storage to Preparation

The problem

GPS's End the Warehouse plan rests on a simple observation: Georgia chose warehousing, repeatedly, for fifty years.

• The warnings came early. In 1976 the Georgia Advisory Committee called state prison accommodations "dehumanizing" and recommended that education be treated "as a right, not a privilege."
• Hope was removed, and behavior worsened. Economist Ilyana Kuziemko's study of Georgia's 1998 reform found that removing the parole incentive produced more disciplinary infractions and fewer completed programs.
• Programs barely exist. GPS's reporting in "The Only Family Left" documented a typical dorm where three or four men in a hundred hold a work detail, and a prison of 1,600 enrolls a few dozen in classes. The Brennan Center notes Georgia bars incarcerated students from state financial aid. Georgia is also one of seven states that do not pay incarcerated people for most prison work.

A mother writing in "Her Charges Don't Define Her" (Georgia Prisoners' Speak — Tell My Story) says her daughter at McRae Women's Facility has no programs. The counselors quit, she writes, "because they couldn't help the way they wanted to help."

The budget shows the choice

GPS's budget analysis of FY2025 actual spending against the FY2027 approved budget shows where the money moved:

• State Prisons was cut by $187,485,279 (16.78%).
• Private Prisons grew by $20.9 million.
• Health grew by $37.3 million.
• Vocational education contracts totaled $172,000 in FY2025.

The proposal

• Fund education and vocational training at a real level. Raise vocational education funding from $172,000 to at least $15 million, about 1% of the GDC budget, with a goal of 5% within three years (GPS policy demand).
• Adopt normalization as the operating principle. As laid out in GPS's "Reopen the Doors — Normalization," life inside should resemble life outside as closely as security allows, and the punishment is the loss of liberty and nothing beyond it.
• Pilot small living units. Pair mentor-style officers with small resident populations, following the U.S. adaptations of Nordic practice described below.

The return on investment, with caveats attached

• RAND meta-analysis: correctional education participants had 43% lower odds of recidivating and 13% higher odds of post-release employment. Every $1 invested saves $4–$5 in reincarceration costs over three years. The Washington State Institute for Public Policy ranks correctional education as the highest-return adult corrections program.
• Maine: after system-wide reform, three-year recidivism fell from 30.5% (2017) to 21.4% (2022). Resident-on-resident assaults fell 40%, staff use-of-force fell 69%, and self-inflicted injuries at Maine State Prison fell 84% (Brennan Center, March 2026).
• Michigan Vocational Village: 2019 graduates recidivated at 15.6%, compared with 22.1% statewide, a gap of 6.5 percentage points.
• Vera's Restoring Promise: a randomized trial in South Carolina found a 73% reduction in the odds of violence write-ups and an 83% reduction in the odds of restrictive-housing stays.
• Pennsylvania's "Little Scandinavia" at SCI Chester:
• About $310,000 to set up 64 beds, or roughly $4,844 per bed, operating since 2022.
• A 1:8 officer-to-resident ratio, compared with 1:128 elsewhere in the facility.
• A single physical altercation since opening, even as Pennsylvania's prisons overall saw a ~21.6% rise in violence in 2024. Pennsylvania announced expansion to three more facilities in March 2025.
• Caveats: daily per-person cost runs about 1.5 times double-celling, and researchers stress the results are early and mostly non-causal.
• Nordic outcomes: Norway's two-year reconviction rate was 18% in 2018, down from a pre-reform 60–70%. Caveat: Nordic outcomes reflect much shorter sentences (Norway caps sentences at 21 years), smaller populations, and stronger welfare systems. They show that measurable alternatives exist, not that the model transplants one-to-one to Georgia. Recidivism definitions also vary (rearrest, reconviction, reincarceration), so cross-jurisdiction comparisons should be read with care.
• Georgia's own precedent: Governor Nathan Deal's justice reinvestment initiative (2012–2015) cut the prison population by 6%, averted $264 million in incarceration costs, and reinvested $57 million into recidivism reduction.

Cost and the obstacle

The $15 million ask is about 0.8% of the FY2027 approved budget of $1.79 billion. Using the RAND ROI range, it would plausibly pay for itself within three years.

The obstacle is appropriations priorities. Recent budget cycles have funded locks, cameras, beds, contractors, and surveillance. GPS's reporting in "Georgia Keeps Buying Cell Locks. Its Prisons Keep Using Padlocks." shows that even the custody spending has not delivered what it promised.

How to push it forward

Sign on to End the Warehouse at the End the Warehouse page. Ask your House and Senate Appropriations members to fund the $15 million vocational line and to repeal the financial-aid exclusion for incarcerated students.

4. A Fix for Each Documented Failure

4a. Staffing: Retention, and Honest Numbers

What GPS documented. - Federal findings: DOJ reported officer vacancies of "around 50% systemwide and over 70% at ten of the largest facilities." - On-record testimony: Former assistant warden Russell Zirkle, speaking on record, named Telfair, Hancock, Smith, and Valdosta among prisons running 70–80% officer vacancy. He said state staffing figures are "skewed" because fully staffed halfway houses are blended into system averages. - Corroboration: Former officer Tyler Ryals corroborated the account; Zirkle said, "Everything he says is completely true." - Open-records proof: A GPS open-records production showed six officers on duty when the riot at Washington State Prison began. - The Commissioner's own framing: GDC Commissioner Tyrone Oliver told lawmakers, per GPB: "We don't have a problem with recruiting. We have a problem with the retention piece."

See Staffing Crisis.

The fix. 1. Publish facility-level vacancy rates monthly, separating prisons from transitional centers, so that blended averages cannot hide 70% vacancies. This is nearly free. 2. Build a dedicated recruitment and retention unit. Pennsylvania cut its officer vacancy rate from 10.5% to 4.8% in two years after creating such a division in late 2022 and holding 750+ job fairs in 2024. 3. Treat pay as necessary but not sufficient. Alabama's raises left officers 28% less likely to resign, but hiring collapsed by 50% and officer staff still fell 55% over nine years. Georgia has already spent $43 million on officer pay in FY2025 without closing the gap. That is consistent with GPS's argument in "The Game They Learned" that a closed, inside-only promotion pipeline, not pay alone, drives attrition.

The cost case. Alabama calculated that each officer departure costs a weighted average of $64,635 in turnover expense. Retention spending largely funds itself.

The obstacle. GDC controls the numbers and has presented them in blended form. Honest reporting requires either legislative mandate or independent oversight (see 4e).

4b. Medical Care and the Aging Population

What GPS documented. Prison healthcare is run by Centurion under a $2.4 billion no-bid contract, and DOJ called the care it found "abhorrent." Health is GDC's fastest-growing line, rising from $325.6 million in FY2024 to $432.2 million in FY2027, a 33% increase in three years.

Accounts reaching GPS describe the human cost. In "An Email Trail as the Day Is Long" (Georgia Prisoners' Speak — Tell My Story), a woman describes her fiancé, who has stage IV cancer, being cut off medication he was observed swallowing whole. Anonymous inmate witnesses at Hancock reported in recent weeks that injured men patched their own wounds. DOJ documented prisoners dressing their own wounds and a stabbing victim at Ware waiting half an hour while others beat on a window for help. See Medical Neglect.

The fix. 1. Public performance reporting for the health contract. The Legislature is raising the contract every cycle; FY2027 included a $32.6 million physical-health increase and a $12.1 million mental-health increase. Response times, specialty-referral backlogs, and medication-continuity data should be published as a condition of each increase. 2. Elder and compassionate release. This is the largest single lever on medical cost. - GDC's own aging-inmate project put medical cost at $8,500 a year for people 65 and older, versus $950 for those under 65, roughly nine times more. - Release outcomes for older people are strong. Federal CARES Act releases of 11,000+ elderly and medically vulnerable prisoners produced new arrests for only 0.15%. Compassionate-release recidivism ran 3.5%, against 41% for the general federal population. California's elderly-parole reconviction rate is 1.8%. - Virginia saved $6.6 million by releasing 62 eligible elderly people. - Georgia's incarceration cost was $80.31 a day in FY25, versus $3.13 for parole supervision (BOPP Annual Report FY2025).

GPS's death registry shows why this matters. Deaths in August 2026 alone include men aged 81, 77, 75, 74, and 69, among others, dying in custody at facilities including Augusta State Medical Prison and Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison.

The obstacle. GPS's research names the Board of Pardons and Paroles' risk aversion and restrictive eligibility criteria. Forty-five states and the federal government have compassionate-release laws that are rarely used. A statutory presumption of release review at a set age, tied to medical cost, would shift the burden.

4c. Food, Sanitation, and the Physical Plant

What GPS documented. - Inspection scores miss the failures. GPS's Scores Without Sanitation found that while most kitchens score in the 90s, failures cluster: - Johnson State Prison scored 64 in December 2023, with rat droppings in bulk food and five broken ovens. - Pulaski State Prison scored 63 in July 2026 after a January inspection found plumbing ripped from the wall and sewage backing up through floor drains. - Smith State Prison had rodent activity noted in every inspection from 2022 through 2025. - Food spending is minimal. Prison Nutrition documents food spending of about $1.62 per person per day, with GDC policy permitting two meals a day on weekends and holidays. - Basic infrastructure is failing. A 2024 Senate study committee found 29 of 34 prisons needing critical upgrades. GPS's "Bolted In" documented fire exits found locked by state inspectors. - Lockdown conditions. Anonymous inmate-witness accounts from Coastal State Prison, which GPS treats as low-weight until corroborated, describe locked-down rooms without working toilets or running water.

The fix. 1. Unannounced inspections and public follow-up. A single announced kitchen walkthrough on a single day cannot capture conditions. GPS's reporting shows good scores are achievable inside GDC, so the failures at Johnson, Pulaski, and Smith are matters of management and resource allocation. 2. Fund the food line to an adequacy floor. The evidence ties nutrition to safety. A double-blind California trial (Schoenthaler, 2023) found 39% fewer serious rule violations among young men given RDA-level multivitamin supplementation. 3. Fix existing locks and exits before buying new hardware.

On heat specifically: GPS does not yet have systemwide public data on cell temperatures or air-conditioning coverage. Firsthand accounts such as "Flying Into the Sun" (Georgia Prisoners' Speak — Tell My Story) describe an un-air-conditioned garment factory reaching 100°+ by mid-June. Temperature logging and publication should be part of any inspection mandate.

The obstacle. Deferred maintenance competes with every other line, and DPH's inspection model was built for restaurants, not for 1,500-person institutions.

4d. Death Reporting: Count Every Death, Tell Every Family

What GPS documented. - Causes of death went dark. GDC stopped publishing cause of death in March 2024. - Homicides without prosecutions. GPS obtained Ware State Prison coroner and state crime-lab records through an open-records request: 231 death-investigation reports covering 84 deaths since 2020. They document at least 19 homicides. The state's own investigations name a suspected attacker in 11 of them. GPS could find no public record of any charge in any of those 11 ("At Least Nineteen: The Murders the State Didn't Prosecute"). Among the dead: - Squaier Lamar Jiles died September 16, 2024, at Ware State Prison; GPS's registry lists the cause as homicide. The autopsy records that he bled to death from sharp-force injuries. - Christopher Eli Gresham died September 30, 2021, at Ware State Prison; GPS's registry lists the cause as homicide. He was stabbed by at least three other prisoners. - Misleading language. GDC called the Wilcox killing an "altercation," a word for an argument, for an event that put two men on a helicopter and one in the morgue. - Families left in the dark. "The Warden Shall Notify" traced the information blackout to a Board of Corrections rule in force since December 4, 1984. Families now crowdsource lockdown news in Facebook groups. - Classification disputes. Derived records show GDC recorded at least one death at Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison as suicide months before the medical examiner certified the manner of death.

See Deaths in Custody and the mortality archive.

The fix. 1. Restore publication of cause and manner of death, updated when certified. 2. Mandatory, timely family notification for serious injury and death, replacing the 1984 rule. 3. Homicide-referral reporting: for every death ruled homicide, publish whether it was referred to a district attorney and the outcome. 4. Accurate public statements: incident releases that state the number injured, hospitalized, and dead.

Cost and obstacle. The cost is close to zero, since GDC and county coroners already hold the data. The only obstacle is the department's preference for opacity, and the Legislature can override it by statute.

4e. Independent Oversight: The Fix That Makes the Other Fixes Stick

What GPS documented. Georgia has no independent prison oversight: no ombudsman outside GDC and no inspector general for corrections. The Brennan Center's March 2026 report names Georgia as lacking such mechanisms. GDC's internal Office of Professional Standards investigates GDC.

The record that unchecked system produced includes: - 273 consecutive PREA audits without a failed standard, while DOJ found sexual assault "rampant" and GDC substantiated just 3.5% of 15,542 allegations. - A gap in staff-arrest reporting: in 2022 GDC published no report naming a staff contraband arrest at all, the only such year since 2010. - At least $50,633,556 in settlements across at least 261 claims, a floor compiled from Georgia DOAS Risk Management open records.

See Oversight & Investigations and Legal Settlements.

Models that work. - New Jersey: an independent corrections ombudsperson with a $2,806,000 budget (FY2025) and 26 staff, overseeing ~13,000 people. It has subpoena power, unannounced-inspection authority, and confidential communications, and it was strengthened by the 2020 Dignity Act. - Washington: an Office of Corrections Ombuds created by statute in 2018, with $2.5 million and 15 staff for ~13,075 people, about $191 per person per year. Its statutory purpose explicitly includes reducing litigation exposure. - Lower-cost options: Minnesota runs at ~$147 per person and Connecticut at ~$75. - A design lesson from England and Wales: HM Inspectorate of Prisons publishes dozens of reports a year but "cannot enforce" its findings. Georgia should pair inspection with an enforcement or mandatory-response requirement.

What it would cost Georgia. Applying those per-person costs to Georgia's 51,917 people in custody gives a range of roughly $3.9 million (at Connecticut's rate) to $9.9 million (at Washington's) a year. That range is GPS's own arithmetic, not a fiscal note. Either end is a small fraction of the $50.6 million settlement floor, and under 0.6% of the FY2027 budget.

The obstacle. GPS's research is direct on this point: neither GDC nor the Governor's office has supported an independent office, and enabling legislation is required. Oversight is the reform the department has the most reason to resist.

What Already Works Elsewhere: A Quick Reference

How You Can Move These Forward

If you are a member of the public or an advocate: 1. Sign on to Vision 2027 and End the Warehouse through Vision 2027 and End the Warehouse. 2. Contact your legislators at gps.press/find-your-legislator. Ask three things: - Will you require GDC to report its compliance with O.C.G.A. § 42-5-52? - Will you co-sponsor an actual-innocence exception to the four-year habeas deadline? - Will you fund an independent corrections ombudsperson? 3. Share the gang-separation case. Send "Separate the Gangs. It Costs Nothing." and "On the Books Since 1897" to your networks, your church, and your local paper. Each argument rests on Georgia's own statute and GDC's own records. 4. Document what you see. Report through Submit a Report or tell your story at Tell My Story.

If you are a legislator: start with the two near-zero-cost fixes, gang-separation compliance reporting and death-reporting restoration, in the coming session. Then put an ombudsperson statute and the Vision 2027 package before the committees. The Legislative brief carries the fiscal detail.

If you are a reporter: ask GDC for its facility-by-facility classification counts and its O.C.G.A. § 42-5-52 compliance policy, and ask county district attorneys about the Ware homicide referrals. The Media brief and facility data are open for use.

The cheapest fix is already Georgia law. The General Assembly wrote "shall" in 1897. What remains is to make the department obey it. Sign on, call your legislators, and share the gang-separation case.