Policy & Advocacy: Monitor-Not-Block, Scamming, Legal Path & Cost Model

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 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 reports one of the lowest recidivism rates in the nation — a 25 to 27 percent three-year felony reconviction rate — but that figure counts only new felony convictions, only within three years, and only among people who survive the window. Georgia's own reconviction rate has climbed every year since 2019, reaching 30.7 percent for the 2022 release cohort even as the state spends more than a billion dollars a year on corrections, releases 12,000 to 16,000 people annually with almost no preparation, and funds vocational education at $172,000 statewide. The evidence on what works is unusually clear — education, vocational training, cognitive-behavioral programming, and transitional beds all correlate with substantially lower recidivism — and Georgia has systematized almost none of it at scale.

Georgia's rehabilitation system exists mostly as a set of program names. The evidence for cognitive-behavioral treatment, correctional education, and structured reentry is strong and replicated — and Georgia's own 1997–2001 cognitive skills experiment produced a 17% reduction in returns to prison among people who completed the classes. What the record shows instead is a state that adopts programs, funds them at a fraction of a percent of its prison budget, and rarely publishes whether they worked.