Florida's Dozier and Okeechobee reform schools: abused children who later reached death row (FADP, November 2026)

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 was built as a labor agency, not a correctional one — and each time a piece of it was formally abolished, its core functions were rebuilt under a new name. The 1866 convict lease became the 1908 county chain gang, which became the 1937 state prison, which became the system a federal judge seized in 1972 and a federal agency found unconstitutional in 2024. Across 160 years the constants are unpaid work, racial targeting, and record-keeping poor enough that the dead cannot be reliably counted.

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 paroles thousands of people every year, but the share of people serving life sentences who are granted release has collapsed — from 21.9% in the early 2000s to 4.5% in fiscal year 2024 — even as the Board of Pardons and Paroles decides roughly three times as many lifer cases each year. The result is a system where the average violent-offense life sentence now runs nearly three decades before release, parole releases have fallen by roughly 42% since fiscal year 2019, and a majority of people leaving Georgia prisons now leave by maxing out their sentence rather than by parole. The Board's own reports describe a discretionary process with no hearings, no liberty interest in release, and reconsideration intervals of up to eight years.

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'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'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.

Georgia's wrongful conviction record is small on paper and long in years: 60 people exonerated of Georgia convictions since 1989, carrying 704.2 years of imprisonment between them, and 42 of those 60 spent longer than the four years Georgia allows to file a habeas corpus petition. The state's post-conviction system — a 2004 deadline with no innocence exception, no right to counsel, a narrowed miscarriage-of-justice provision, and abolished out-of-time appeals — is the mechanism that keeps most of them inside. Georgia has since created a compensation fund and a partial fix for appeals, but has built almost nothing to help a person prove innocence while they are still in prison.