Are suicides in Georgia state prisons rising?

Georgia's prison health care has been litigated, contracted out, audited and re-litigated for fifty years, and in October 2024 the U.S. Department of Justice still described it as "abhorrent," "life-threatening" and unconstitutional — with 10-month waits to see a psychiatrist and roughly a tenth of people with hepatitis C or HIV receiving treatment. This page traces the record: the constitutional floor, the vendors who hold the contracts and what they cost, the deaths and settlements behind the legal claims, the mental-health system Georgia runs in place of a hospital system, the food that undernourishment research suggests is killing people under a cause code the state never writes, and the 1,928 deaths GPS has recorded in custody since January 1, 2020.

Georgia's prisons have recorded deaths at a pace unequaled in the state's modern history: 1,928 in Georgia Department of Corrections custody since January 1, 2020, including 333 in 2024 alone, according to GPS's mortality registry. The documented causes — a homicide rate that reached nearly triple the national average, a suicide rate that climbed to 44 per 100,000, and hundreds of overdose deaths — are themselves undercounts, because the Department of Corrections has misclassified at least 44 overdose deaths and stopped publishing cause of death altogether in March 2024. What follows is what the record shows, what it hides, and who decides which is which.

Georgia runs one of the nation's largest prison systems with no independent body empowered to inspect it, no ombudsman outside the Department of Corrections, and no public reporting requirement attached to the $600 million it has been voted for prison spending. A six-year federal civil rights investigation found constitutional violations across the system in October 2024 and recommended 82 remedial measures; more than 230 days after its 49-day litigation deadline expired, no one had been arrested, fired, or sued as a result. What remains is a closed loop in which the department investigates its own deaths, codes its own mortality data, disciplines — or does not discipline — its own staff, and classifies its investigative files as confidential state secrets.