Brief written October 30, 2026 from GPS Intelligence System data.(DS)

GDC Budget: Where the Money Goes

Georgia's Department of Corrections is one of the largest line items in the state budget, and its recent trajectory is the central fiscal fact of Georgia corrections. According to the Governor's Budget Report for Amended FY2026 and FY2027, GDC spent $1,526,654,104 in FY2024, $1,913,888,054 in FY2025 — the peak year in the visible window — and carried an amended FY2026 budget of $1,799,204,979. The FY2027 appropriations act, HB 974, signed by Governor Kemp on May 12, 2026, set total funds at $1,745,523,999, of which $1,720,112,489 is State General Funds, or 98.5 percent of the total.

What follows traces where that money goes: into medical contracts that have grown faster than any other program, into private prison beds and surveillance hardware, into a food line that works out to roughly 55 cents a meal, and into a rehabilitation and education footprint small enough to be measured against rounding error. It also traces where the money does not go — and what the state collects from the people it holds, and from their families, outside the appropriation entirely.

The Shape of the Curve: A 44 Percent Rise and a Peak

The four-year arc is the one most often cited in Georgia corrections reporting: from roughly $1.25 billion in FY2022 to the FY2026 amended figure of $1.799 billion, an increase of about 44 percent, or nearly $500 million annually. GPS's own budget baseline analysis puts the FY2024-to-FY2025 jump at approximately $387 million — the largest single-year increase in the FY2024–FY2027 window — before appropriations eased back in FY2026 and FY2027.

That peak matters for how the rest of the story is read. The "$1.8 billion" figure that circulates widely in Georgia corrections coverage corresponds specifically to the FY2026 amended budget, not to FY2025, which was higher. And the FY2027 enacted total is lower still than both. The department is not on a straight upward line; it crested in FY2025 and has come down modestly since, even as several individual programs — health above all — continued to climb.

The composition of the FY2027 act is worth stating plainly. State General Funds of $1,720,112,489, an Opioid Settlement Trust Fund allocation of $8,641,839, federal funds and grants of $809,589, and other funds of $15,960,082. Nearly every dollar is state money, and the federal and other-fund shares have shrunk sharply: from $103,675,170 in FY2024 to $90,157,406 in FY2025 and a budgeted $16,769,671 across FY2026 and FY2027 combined, per the Governor's Budget Report. The burden of funding Georgia's prisons has migrated almost entirely onto the state general fund.

Health Care: The Fastest-Growing Line, and the Least Accountable Contract

Health is where the money has moved most. GDC's Health program ran $325,613,120 in FY2024 actual expenditures, $389,939,841 in FY2025, $417,255,739 in amended FY2026, and $433,124,187 in FY2027 total funds — a 33 percent increase in three years, and the fastest-growing component of the department's budget. On a per-person basis, the Governor's Budget Report figures work out to $17.23 per inmate per day in FY2024 and $22.08 in amended FY2026.

The FY2027 act carried $55,793,188 in state general funds for health contract increases — physical, dental, mental and pharmacy — and the Governor, on signing, instructed GDC to disregard the language of those lines and put the funds toward existing contractual obligations first. The conference committee had already trimmed the physical health contract increase from the Governor's proposed $47,880,895 to $38,486,479, while the mental health contract increase came in at $12,127,034, roughly six times the Governor's proposal.

The contracts behind those numbers are only partly visible. GPS's review of GDC's open-records production found that the department did not produce the Centurion of Georgia base medical contract at all; what it produced was the predecessor Wellpath contract, plus Centurion amendments 3 and 5. The Wellpath-era contract contained no liquidated damages clause and was structured as target cost plus incentive fee. In GDC's own answers to bidders, the department stated that it "has assessed no penalties against the current vendor for service delivery" and none for failure to staff.

What penalties do exist are small relative to the money. A GDC workbook applying the productive-hours formula to the second half of 2025 records a contract-wide weighted average rate of $41.90, a 75 percent staffing threshold, and a 1.2 multiplier — and produces total facility penalties of $202,072.59 for the half-year, against a health program running above $400 million. Separately, Centurion issued credits to GDC for positions that had not begun work: $538,695.65 for the Johnson State Prison Medically Intensive Infirmary and $143,706.30 for added Augusta State Medical Prison infirmary positions, both for July 2026, plus a $682,401.95 credit for unstaffed positions reflected in the September 2026 invoice.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that GDC awarded a $2.4 billion health care contract to Centurion without the competitive process required under state law, according to a lawsuit filed by the then-current contractor, Wellpath. Georgia Public Broadcasting reported that GDC did not post a request for proposal and instead signed with Centurion under the same 2021 bid, citing the need for an emergency procurement. Wellpath's complaint, as the AJC described it, alleged the company spent $40 million of its own money over three years to uphold the state's constitutional obligation to provide adequate care.

Private Beds, Locks, and Cameras: What the New Money Bought

The FY2027 act funds 200 additional non-dormitory beds at $3,214,920 — the conference committee's version of the Governor's proposal to add 160 private prison beds at Coffee Correctional Institution and 103 at Wheeler Correctional Institution for $4,227,620. On signing, the Governor instructed GDC to disregard that line and "utilize the appropriated funds to maximize bed utilization that aligns with the security needs of offenders." The Senate Appropriations Committee had earlier rejected the bed expansion outright, writing that "Space is not compatible with single cell needs of prison population."

The Private Prisons program itself runs $176,756,105 in FY2027 total funds, up from $144,251,930 in FY2024 expenditures. A separate $1,055,658 line increases funding for Jenkins Correctional Institution and Riverbend Correctional Institution to fully utilize available beds at the tier rate added in HB 68.

Staffing received the single largest new operating line: $28,527,189 for additional correctional officer positions "to improve staff-to-offender ratios based on improved retention." The $2,000 correctional officer salary adjustment that the Senate had funded at roughly $15.6 million appears in the enacted budget at $0 across every GDC program, marked CC:No.

Surveillance and security technology drew heavily. The FY2027 act provides $1,443,038 for OWL Unit personnel and $5,521,230 for OWL Unit additional technology; $1,118,244 for an offender call monitoring contract; $1,750,000 for data intelligence annual maintenance; $695,018 for six canine handlers; $377,168 for three security threat group coordinators; and $409,040 for five managed access analysts. Managed access and drone detection were funded at $10,793,600 from existing funds with no new appropriation. GPS's budget baseline analysis puts new security and technology line-item spending across amended FY2026 and FY2027 at approximately $27.1 million combined — and explicitly flags that the "over $120 million" surveillance figure cited in earlier GPS reporting cannot be reconciled with the line items, and likely folds in capital outlays from earlier fiscal years.

Locking systems are their own capital story. The AFY2026–FY2027 Governor's Budget Report recommended $89,596,895 for design and construction to replace locking controls statewide; the House, Senate and conference committee each set $84,596,895. GDC's FY2025 Annual Report lists $114,730,817 under "Locking Control Systems and Support," a figure that reconciles exactly to three AFY2025 enacted lines: $34,262,515 for locking control system replacement, $248,062 for a locking "tiger team," and $80,220,240 for four 126-bed modular units. The FY2026 act added $1,022,013 for the tiger team.

Food at 55 Cents a Meal, Education at $172,000

The Food and Farm Operations line is the starkest per-person number in the budget. The Governor's Budget Report puts the program at $30,914,139 in FY2024 actual, $31,748,617 in FY2025, $31,137,154 in amended FY2026, and $32,233,666 in FY2027 approved. Against a population basis of 51,773, that is $1.64 to $1.71 per person per day — roughly 55 to 57 cents per meal.

GPS's budget baseline analysis compares that to the American Correctional Association's recommended approximately $3.66 per meal, and calculates that meeting that standard at current population would require roughly $211 million a year, about 6.8 times current spending. The same analysis notes that the AJC documented Aramark's GDC contract at $2.973 per day per prisoner at two state prisons in 2015 — approximately 99 cents a meal in 2015 dollars — and that the current system-wide figure represents a real-terms decline of roughly 60 percent, with the caveat that the 2015 number was contract-specific at two facilities while the current figure is system-wide.

Education is harder to find than food, because it is not a standalone line. It sits inside the State Prisons appropriation, which runs from roughly $901 million to $938 million across the two budget years. What can be counted directly is small. Vocational education contracts totaled $172,000 in FY2025 — about $3.44 per active incarcerated person per year — against $1.2 million in AFY2025 and $805,000 in FY2026 for technical and vocational programs and equipment. The high school diploma program received $93,672 in amended FY2026 for accreditation staffing; the FY2027 act cut the program by $104,000 from the Governor's $953,033 proposal and directed GDC to "explore virtual high school options."

Rehabilitation spending across the two budget cycles comes to approximately $1,225,705 in GPS's canonical line-item accounting — $150,000 for an Autry State Prison peer-led pilot that was not continued into FY2027, $93,179 in amended FY2026 for Metro Reentry Facility programming that the Senate zeroed out for FY2027, and the diploma program funds. Set against approximately $27.1 million in new security and technology line items, that is a ratio of roughly 22 to 1.

What the Budget Does Not Contain

Several things are absent from the appropriation by design or by omission. There is no dedicated rehabilitation line item, no standalone education program, and no dedicated reentry line for transition planning or post-release support visible in publicly available GDC budget documents.

There is also no independent oversight attached to the money. Georgia has no prison ombudsman and no independent inspector general for corrections, and no public reporting requirement on corrections spending or outcomes.

And a substantial flow of money moves outside the appropriation entirely. GDC's contract with Securus Technologies specifies a commission rate of 59.6 percent of gross revenue paid to the department — among the highest in the nation — which GPS's analysis of the contract puts at more than $8 million per year, with a minimum monthly guarantee of $325,000 and a one-time $4 million signing bonus. In 2019 the annual commission was $8,062,200.60; in 2022, total commissions were $7.04 million. The 2024 FCC order banned site commission kickbacks nationally. How GDC allocates the commission revenue it has received has not been publicly reported.

Families pay into the same system from the other side: $3.50 to $6.50 per JPay money transfer, $0.20 per email stamp in bulk, and commissary prices that GPS's investigation of 20 staple items found running from competitive with retail to ten times retail — generic ibuprofen at $4.00 for 20 to 24 tablets against a Walmart per-tablet price of about two cents. A FY2021 cut of more than $5 million in commissary spending was offset by price increases on basic hygiene products, shifting the cost to incarcerated people and their families. The state's own Inmate Welfare Funds, which hold commissary and telecommunications revenue, are not subject to legislative appropriation.

The People Behind the Line Items

Budget lines are abstractions until they meet a name. GPS's death registry records the following, each of whom died inside the system these appropriations fund.

Marcus Walker died January 10, 2026, at Wilcox State Prison; the registry lists the manner as homicide, age 20. Torrey Wayne Forrester died July 1, 2024, at Washington State Prison; the registry lists the cause as natural/medical, age 41. Reginald Jerome Jacobs Jr. died February 6, 2023, at Calhoun State Prison; the registry lists deliberate indifference, age 24. James Merritt Byrd died January 23, 2022, at Effingham County Prison; the registry lists medical neglect, age 30. Brandon Allen Peters died November 23, 2020, at Georgia State Prison; the registry lists medical neglect, age 44.

Three more come from the Department's own cause coding for 2015–2019, obtained by the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project through an open records request. These are GDC's coded determinations, not autopsy findings. Agnes Bohannon died September 18, 2019, at Arrendale State Prison, coded "Undetermined," age 59. Jimmy Lucero died June 30, 2016, at Augusta State Medical Prison, coded "Natural," age 20. Bonnie Rocheleau died March 19, 2015, at Pulaski State Prison, coded "Other."

The AJC has reported settlements in several of these matters: $1.5 million finalized in 2023 in the Bohannon case, alleging she complained for days of cardiac and respiratory distress at Lee Arrendale without adequate evaluation before dying of cardiovascular disease in September 2019; $750,000 finalized in 2023 in the Peters case, alleging officials failed to intervene as he suffered for days from severe belly pain, fever and bowel problems before dying in his cell in November 2020; $925,000 finalized in 2018 in the Rocheleau case, alleging she failed to get adequate care at Pulaski when she developed pneumonia; and $550,000 in the Lucero case, alleging the 19-year-old lay in a catatonic state at Augusta State Medical Prison as he starved to death with little to no medical care in 2015.

GPS has independently tracked 1,928 deaths in GDC custody since 2020 — a floor, since GDC reports deaths roughly two months late.

Reading the Budget Against Its Own Mission

The FY2027 act's Health line carries a stated purpose: "to provide the required constitutional level of physical, dental, and mental health care to all inmates of the state correctional system." The State Prisons line, at $878,105,927 in total funds, carries the weight of everything else — staffing, food service, education, vocational programs, maintenance — with no sub-line for most of it.

Against that, the numbers that can be counted directly are these: $433 million for health, $176.8 million for private prisons, $84.6 million for locking controls, $32.2 million for food, $1.2 million for rehabilitation programming across two budget cycles, and $172,000 for vocational education in FY2025. The ratio between what the state spends to hold people and what it spends to prepare them to leave is not a matter of interpretation; it is a subtraction.

Georgia's corrections budget crested in FY2025 and has come down since. What has not come down is health spending, which grew 33 percent in three years, or the private prison line, which grew from $144.3 million to $176.8 million. What has come down, or never rose, is nearly everything else.

Sources

This analysis draws on Georgia's enacted appropriations acts and conference committee reports — HB 68 (FY2026), HB 974 (FY2027), HB 67 (amended FY2025), HB 19 (FY2024), HB 915 (amended FY2024) and HB 916 (FY2025) — together with the Governor's Budget Reports for Amended FY2026 and FY2027 and for earlier cycles, and the House Budget and Research Office conference committee report of April 2, 2026. Program-level figures and per-inmate and per-meal calculations come from GPS's budget baseline analysis of FY2025–FY2027 appropriations data. Contract terms and penalty records come from GDC open-records productions covering the Centurion, Wellpath, MHM and CorrectRx agreements, and from the Securus and managed-access contract records underlying GPS's reporting on prison communications. Deaths and settlements are drawn from GPS's mortality registry, the Department's own cause coding for 2015–2019 obtained by the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project, and Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporting on individual settlements. Commissary pricing comes from GPS's investigation of 20 staple items. Testimony from people held in Georgia prisons appears in Tell My Story, published by Georgia Prisoners' Speak.