2024 Georgia Senate Study Committee on the Department of Corrections — Final Report (SR 570)

Georgia's prison communications system is a two-sided business: Securus Technologies sells the calls families pay for, and Securus-affiliated vendors also sell the technology that blocks the cheaper alternative. Georgia collected $8.06 million in commission from Securus in 2019 at a 59.6 percent cut of call revenue — among the highest rates in the country — while spending roughly $50 million through fiscal year 2026 on managed access systems that have not reduced phone-related incidents, which rose to a record 11,880 in 2024. This page maps the contracts, the rates families pay, the rules governing contact, the vendor network behind the blocking technology, and the documented gaps in what the public is allowed to know.

Georgia's prison system is not merely old; it is failing in ways that its own audits, its consultant assessments, and the U.S. Department of Justice have documented in detail. Buildings designed for 750 people are counted as having capacity for 1,700, plumbing and lighting have failed across entire housing units, cell door locks do not lock, and only three of 35 prisons have air conditioning throughout. This page assembles what the physical record shows, what the state's $600 million repair program is buying, and where the public data still cannot answer basic questions.

Georgia's prison health care system has been found unconstitutional by the U.S. Department of Justice, sued into repeated seven-figure settlements, and documented by state auditors as unable to account for the deaths in its own custody. A privatized delivery chain — Augusta University's correctional health division for 23 years, then Wellpath, then a $2.4 billion nine-year Centurion contract — has run alongside roughly 14,000 people with identified mental health needs, ten-month waits for psychiatric appointments, and a suicide rate that state data and outside reporting place at roughly double the national prison average. This page sets out the constitutional standard, the money, the clinical record, the named dead, and the information Georgia does not publish.

Georgia's prison system kills people at a rate without peer among American states, and then loses the record of how they died. GPS's mortality registry counts 1,928 deaths in Department of Corrections custody since January 1, 2020 — 333 of them in 2024 alone — while the Department reported 142 homicides between 2018 and 2023, a 95.8 percent increase across the period, and misclassified at least 44 drug overdose deaths as natural causes or undetermined. In March 2024 the Department stopped publishing cause of death in its monthly mortality reports altogether, converting a documented crisis into an undocumented one.

Georgia runs one of the largest prison systems in the United States and submits it to no independent oversight body of any kind — no ombudsman, no inspector general for corrections, no external monitor with a right of entry. What exists instead is a chain of self-review: a Board of Corrections that inspects nothing, an Office of Professional Standards that investigates the department it sits inside, and a body of internal records classified by regulation as confidential state secrets. This page traces how that structure produced a six-year federal civil rights investigation, a 93-page findings report documenting Eighth Amendment violations, a contempt order finding that officials falsified compliance documents, and a death-reporting system that federal investigators concluded understates the extent of homicide.

Georgia's prison policy record is a study in asymmetry: the state has repeatedly proven it can pass criminal justice legislation when the reform is administrative, compensatory, or survivor-focused, but it has never passed a bill creating independent prison oversight, expanding parole, repealing its four-year habeas deadline, or capping solitary confinement. The evidence assembled across these collections points to a single structural finding — that the reforms Georgia's own study committees, the federal Department of Justice, and outside experts have identified as necessary are precisely the reforms the General Assembly has declined to enact — while the state has committed more than $600 million in new corrections spending that leaves population, parole, and oversight untouched. What remains is an advocacy landscape defined by a 2026 election in which only 3 of more than 30 statewide candidates have detailed prison reform positions, and by named deaths that the policy inaction has not prevented.

Georgia holds roughly 50,000 people in state custody, and its prison population has risen more than sevenfold since the early 1970s — from 7,113 at year-end 1970 to a peak above 54,000 and back to about 50,000 today. That population is disproportionately Black (about 58 to 61 percent against roughly 31 to 33 percent of the state), aging fast (27 percent are 50 or older) and increasingly serving long and life sentences rather than short ones. The published counts also conflict with one another in ways that matter, because different Georgia Department of Corrections series measure different things and none of them is reconciled to the others.

Georgia reports one of the lowest recidivism rates in the country — roughly 25 to 27 percent — but that figure counts only felony reconvictions within three years of release, excludes technical violations and arrests, and removes people who die during the measurement window. Measured the way the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics measures it, roughly two-thirds of people released from state prisons are rearrested within three years and 83 percent within nine, and Georgia's own analysts estimate the state's real return-to-incarceration rate at closer to 50 percent. Against that, Georgia releases 14,000 to 16,000 people a year into a reentry system with 2,344 transition beds, a $172,000 statewide vocational education contract, and a first-two-weeks death risk 12.7 times the general population's.

Georgia's reform vocabulary is decades old — cognitive skills classes since 1997, reentry centers, a parole-side treatment network, a nationally copied intensive probation model — but the state's own evaluations and the national evidence base agree on a single, unflattering finding: the programs work when they are delivered, and Georgia has systematically under-funded and under-measured them. Vocational completers in Georgia recidivate at 13.64% against a 26% general rate, yet the statewide vocational education budget is $172,000, or $3.44 per incarcerated person. This page assembles what the evidence says works, what Georgia actually operates, what other states have done at scale, and where the record goes quiet.

Georgia confines thousands of people in a three-tier segregation system whose conditions, duration and population the Department of Corrections largely does not publish. Its Tier II program — long-term administrative segregation with no outer time limit — guarantees as little as five hours out of cell per week, and its Special Management Unit held 78 percent of its prisoners more than two years as of July 2017, with 39 percent diagnosed mentally ill. Courts have twice found the Department in contempt over the Special Management Unit; the reforms won there never reached Tier II, where more people are held.

Georgia's prison system has run at roughly half of its authorized correctional officer strength for most of the past five years, and the people it hires rarely stay: 82.7 percent of new officers left within their first year between January 2021 and November 2024. The U.S. Department of Justice's October 2024 findings letter described vacancy rates around 50 percent systemwide and above 70 percent at ten of the largest facilities, and concluded the resulting lack of supervision was a constitutional violation. This page traces how the shortage was measured, what it looks like on a shift, what the state has spent trying to fix it, and the deaths and court findings that follow from it.

Georgia's prison system has been found by the U.S. Department of Justice to violate the Eighth Amendment through a pattern of unchecked violence: 142 homicides reported between 2018 and 2023, a near doubling of killings in the second half of that period, and a homicide rate several times the national average. The violence is driven less by the character of the imprisoned population than by collapsed staffing, broken cell locks, gang control of housing units, and an incident-reporting system that systematically undercounts what happens inside. This page sets out what the federal findings, GDC's own mortality data, facility-level records and GPS's death registry establish — and where the numbers conflict.