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

Georgia's prison communications system is a closed market in which a private-equity-owned duopoly charges families for contact while paying the state commissions, and the state has layered roughly $50 million in managed-access blocking technology and a centralized surveillance apparatus commanding well over $150 million on top of it. Phone-related incidents, cell-phone seizures, and homicides have all risen alongside the spending, and the procurement record behind the largest contracts is absent from every public registry. What families pay — and what the state earns — remains largely undisclosed.

Georgia's prison system is running a physical plant that its own consultants described as requiring "immediate intervention": facilities designed for 750 people holding 1,835, cell locks that do not lock, plumbing failures putting raw sewage in living areas, black mold throughout housing units, and full air conditioning in 3 of 35 prisons. Statewide overcrowding measures range from 216% of original design capacity to a 70.6% systemwide utilization figure that masks exactly where the crowding lands. Georgia's answer is a $600 million capital program that the GDC commissioner himself says will take years beyond its 18-month funding window — and that was announced five years after the DOJ began finding the same conditions unconstitutional.

Georgia's prison healthcare system has been the subject of repeated constitutional findings — from the 1976 Advisory Committee that found no full-time psychiatrist in the system to the U.S. Department of Justice's October 2024 findings letter calling the care 'abhorrent,' 'life-threatening,' and 'unconstitutional.' Across five decades, three healthcare contractors, and a health budget that has grown to more than $400 million a year, the documented pattern is consistent: delayed and denied care, untreated mental illness, chronic undernutrition, and deaths that the state's own reporting system cannot fully account for. This page assembles that record, including the people GPS's death registry names.

Georgia's prison system has recorded its deadliest years on record since 2020 — 333 deaths in custody in 2024 and 301 in 2025 — a 63.6% increase over the 2015–2019 annual average measured on GDC's own single-methodology count. But the state's machinery for determining and disclosing how people died is structurally compromised: GDC has misclassified at least 44 drug overdose deaths, categorizes obvious homicides as 'unknown,' stopped publishing cause of death in March 2024, and operates inside a coroner system with no medical training requirement and a death-investigation statute that makes autopsy discretionary. On the evidence, the counting is sound and the naming, the cause-finding and the accountability are not.

Georgia operates one of the nation's largest prison systems with no independent oversight body of any kind — no external ombudsman, no corrections inspector general, no oversight commission, and no public spending or outcome reporting requirement. The October 2024 DOJ CRIPA findings documented Eighth Amendment violations across the system and recommended 82 remedial measures; as of 2026 no consent decree has been reached and no enforcement action filed. Every accountability mechanism that does exist — the grievance procedure, death investigation, accreditation, and staff discipline — is controlled by the same agency under investigation.

Georgia's policy and advocacy landscape is defined by a decade of bipartisan reform followed by a sharp reversal — the state approved the largest corrections funding increase in its history while leaving every structural driver of its prison crisis in place. A defined reform agenda has emerged around post-conviction repair, parole restoration, independent oversight, sentencing second looks, and market reforms to the commissary and communications extraction economy, but the Georgia General Assembly has never passed an independent prison oversight bill, and no compassionate or geriatric release legislation was introduced in the 2026 session. The 2026 statewide races have become the primary advocacy window, with only 3 of 30+ candidates offering detailed prison reform positions.

Georgia holds roughly 50,000 people in state custody at any given moment and supervises more than half a million residents across every correctional system it operates — a footprint that in 2022 ranked it fourth per capita among the states. Inside, the population is about 60 percent Black in a state that is roughly one-third Black, is aging faster than the national average, and is shaped by a parole system that has cut its supervised population by more than half since 2011. What Georgia does not count — people held in Tier segregation, accurate Latinx breakdowns — is as consequential as what it publishes.

Georgia sizes its reentry system with a single narrow number — felony reconviction within three years of release — which runs roughly 25 to 27 percent and excludes rearrests, technical violations, offending after year three, and the people who die inside the window. Measured the way the federal government measures it, 83 percent of people released from state prisons are rearrested within nine years, and Georgia's 2022 release cohort posted the highest reconviction rate in GDC's published series. Meanwhile the parole valve has narrowed 42 percent in five years, 54.55 percent of calendar-year 2025 releases left with no supervision at all, and death risk in the first two weeks after release runs 12.7 times the general population rate.

Georgia's prison system names two cognitive-behavioral curricula as its core rehabilitation model, operates 12 reentry and cognitive programming centers with 2,344 beds, and funds vocational education at $172,000 statewide — $3.44 per person. The research literature on correctional education, cognitive-behavioral therapy, vocational training and structured reentry is unusually strong, with recidivism reductions of roughly 20–43 percent and returns of $3.05 to $5 per dollar invested; the evidence on how much of that Georgia actually delivers is thin, and the state's own audit rules, the U.S. Department of Justice's 2024 findings, and two decades of Parole Board reporting describe programs that are underbuilt, unevaluated, or shrinking. What other states have built — Maine's system-wide redesign, Vera's randomized Restoring Promise trial, Michigan's Vocational Villages, California's incarcerated-mentor pipelines — shows what scale looks like; Georgia's own budget lines show what it costs not to build it.

Georgia's solitary confinement system is not a single unit but a four-program architecture — Tier I, Tier II, the Tier III Special Management Unit, and two STEP step-down programs — operating inside ordinary prisons statewide, plus a separate restrictive-housing program for children. The Georgia Department of Corrections publishes no population count for any of it except the SMU, which appears as a facility row only because it happens to be a standalone unit holding 149 to 195 people. The documented record shows a system built at a scale of thousands of Tier beds, in which the one unit whose conditions federal litigation reformed is the smallest and most protected part.

Georgia's correctional officer vacancy rate has held at or above roughly 50 percent since mid-2021, with the U.S. Department of Justice documenting rates above 70 percent at ten of the largest state facilities and 20 of 34 prisons operating at what state consultants called emergency staffing levels. The department has lost more than half its officer corps since 2014, 82.7 percent of new hires leave within their first year, and the resulting gaps in post coverage are documented in homicide case files, federal findings, and officer testimony. Repeated pay and hiring investments — including millions in the FY2026–FY2027 budgets — have not produced a documented staffing recovery.

The U.S. Department of Justice concluded in October 2024 that violence in Georgia's prisons is a systemic Eighth Amendment violation — 'near-constant, life-threatening violence' functioning as the norm, with gangs controlling housing units, sexual assault 'rampant,' and a homicide rate that rose from 7 in 2018 to at least 66 (GDC's own count) in 2024. The evidence points to a documented causal chain: correctional officer vacancies at roughly 50% systemwide leave housing units unsupervised, gangs fill the vacuum, and violence, contraband, and death follow — while GDC systematically underreports the harm.