2024 Georgia Senate Study Committee Report on Prison Conditions

Georgia's prison communications system runs through a single vendor family — Securus Technologies for phone calls, its subsidiary JPay for tablets, email and money transfers — under a contract that pays the state 59.6 percent of gross call revenue. Families pay per-minute charges, per-stamp email fees, transfer fees and tablet content prices that bear little relation to consumer telecom costs, while the state simultaneously spends roughly $50 million on managed access systems meant to block the contraband phones that compete with that paid network. GPS's research finds the blocking approach has not reduced phone-related incidents, has produced no accountability for staff smuggling, and rests on tens of millions of dollars in procurement that left no public paper trail.

Georgia's prison system is physically failing: a stock of buildings whose average age exceeds 30 years and whose design life the state's own commissioner puts at 15 to 20, run at multiples of their original design capacity, with locks that do not lock, plumbing that does not drain, mold that is not removed and housing that is not cooled. A 2024 federal findings report, a 2024 Senate study committee and a December 2024 consultant assessment all reached the same conclusion in different words — that the physical plant is an emergency. The state's answer has been a $600 million construction-and-repair program whose own timelines, the commissioner has said, will run years past the funding window.

Georgia's prison healthcare system fails the constitutional floor on a documented, repeated basis: the federal Department of Justice concluded in October 2024 that medical care in Georgia prisons is 'abhorrent,' 'life-threatening' and unconstitutional, with people waiting months for treatment and roughly 10% of those with Hepatitis C or HIV receiving it. The state has outsourced the duty to a succession of contractors — Georgia Correctional HealthCare until 2021, Wellpath for three years, and Centurion Health since July 2024 under a $2.40 billion nine-year contract — while the Health program appropriation reached $432,247,728 for fiscal year 2027. What the record leaves is a delivery system that cannot staff itself, a mortality record the Department stopped explaining in March 2024, and named dead people whose settlements the state pays years later.

Georgia's policy and advocacy landscape is defined by a paradox: a decade of bipartisan sentencing reform that measurably reduced incarceration and racial disparity, followed by a sharp reversal toward prison construction, surveillance technology, and record spending attached to no independent oversight. Legislative victories on wrongful conviction compensation, survivor justice, and out-of-time appeals sit alongside bills that died in the last minutes of session — an independent prison ombudsman, restrictive housing limits, parole transparency — and a post-conviction system the Chief Justice of Georgia calls 'a mess' that only the legislature can fix. The 2026 statewide elections and an unresolved federal investigation are the two live pressure points advocates are organizing around.

Georgia's prison system has run correctional officer vacancy rates above 50 percent since 2021, with ten of its largest facilities above 70 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Justice's October 2024 findings and the state's own budget testimony. Turnover compounds the shortfall: 82.7 percent of officers hired between January 2021 and November 2024 left within a year, and Georgia ranks last among the 50 states in correctional officer pay. Federal investigators, state-hired consultants and the Georgia Senate Study Committee have each identified staffing as the primary mechanism behind the violence, delayed medical response and unchecked gang control documented inside the system.

Georgia's prisons kill people at a rate the U.S. Department of Justice measured as almost triple the national average in 2019 and roughly eight times the national rate by 2024, with 142 homicides reported between 2018 and 2023 alone. A three-year federal civil rights investigation concluded in October 2024 that the State violates the Eighth Amendment by failing to protect incarcerated people from violence and sexual abuse, in a system where correctional officer vacancies near 50 percent have let gangs control housing units and weapons are recovered by the tens of thousands. This page sets out the homicide data, the federal findings, the case-level record of how the violence happens, and the accounting failures that keep the official numbers low.