Mortality & Deaths in Custody

The Scale of Death: What We Know — and What the State Won't Say

In 2024, Georgia Prisoners' Speak identified 333 total deaths in GDC custody — a figure confirmed across multiple independent research collections (Gang Separation as Violence Reduction Strategy; Who Is Responsible for Violence in Georgia's Prisons?; MAS Technology, Vendors & Deployment in Georgia Prisons; Mass Incarceration as a Public Health Crisis; Who Counts as a Victim: Georgia's Statutory Blindness to In-Custody Victimization). That number exceeded COVID-era totals and represented a 27% increase over 2023's 262 deaths — nearly one death per day. It is, by any measure, the deadliest year in the recorded history of Georgia's state prison system. Since 2020, Georgia Prisoners' Speak has tracked 1,797 deaths in GDC custody — the most comprehensive mortality database for the state (Who Counts as a Victim: Georgia's Statutory Blindness to In-Custody Victimization).

Yet the Georgia Department of Corrections officially acknowledged only 66 homicides in 2024 — roughly 8 times the national prison homicide rate (Mass Incarceration as a Public Health Crisis; Gang Separation as Violence Reduction Strategy). The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, through independent reporting, confirmed at least 100 homicides — a figure 52% higher than the state's own count (Gang Separation as Violence Reduction Strategy; Who Is Responsible for Violence in Georgia's Prisons?). The DOJ's own longitudinal data sharpens the picture further: over the six-year period from 2018 through 2023, GDC reported a total of 142 homicides in its prisons — just 48 in the first three years (2018–2020), then 94 in the latter three years (2021–2023), a 95.8% increase (Who Counts as a Victim). Breaking that down year by year: 7 homicides in 2018, 13 in 2019, 28 in 2020, 28 in 2021, 31 in 2022, and 35 in 2023. Georgia's homicide rate was already alarming before the recent surge: in 2019, the national average homicide rate in state prisons was 12 per 100,000 people; Georgia's rate that year was 34 per 100,000 — almost triple the national average (Who Counts as a Victim). That trajectory has continued into 2026: GPS tracks 95 deaths in the first four months of 2026, with 27 confirmed homicides year-to-date and the remainder pending classification (Who Counts as a Victim).

The gap between 66 and 100 confirmed homicides in 2024 alone is not a rounding error. It is evidence of a systemic pattern of misclassification and underreporting that the U.S. Department of Justice explicitly documented in its investigation of GDC — finding that Georgia routinely categorizes obvious homicides as deaths from "unknown" causes (Mass Incarceration as a Public Health Crisis). That DOJ CRIPA investigation produced more than 19,000 records over three years and documented systemic miscoding of in-custody deaths, establishing a pattern of mortality-data unreliability that extends well beyond homicide classification (Slow Starvation in Georgia Prisons). That pattern of misclassification extends beyond homicide: GDC officially reported the heat-exposure death of 27-year-old Juan Carlos Ramirez Bibiano as "natural causes," despite his body temperature reaching 107°F and his death resulting from cardiopulmonary arrest from heat exposure at Telfair State Prison (Heat, Cooling, and the Eighth Amendment). Only 3 of Georgia's 35 prisons are fully air-conditioned (Who Counts as a Victim). As documented below, the same pattern of terminal misclassification extends to deaths driven by chronic undernutrition — where end-stage organ failure is recorded on death certificates under ICD codes for cardiomyopathy (I42), heart failure (I50), renal failure (N17/N18), hepatic failure (K72), or sepsis (R65), with no reference to the nutritional deprivation that wore the body down (Slow Starvation in Georgia Prisons). Forensic pathology has the diagnostic tools to detect these patterns — GDC simply does not deploy them, and does not publicly release cause-of-death information; all GPS classifications are reconstructed from independent reporting (Who Counts as a Victim).

Sexual Violence: Reported, Substantiated, and Hidden

The mortality data does not stand alone. GDC reported 635 sexual-abuse allegations in 2022 — the most recent year for which a systemwide PREA report is available — following 639 in 2021, 702 in 2020, and 653 in 2019 (Who Counts as a Victim). GDC's own 2022 PREA report documented 1,056 total allegations with only 56 substantiated — a substantiation rate that research consistently identifies as a severe undercount of actual victimization, not an accurate measure of its absence (Who Counts as a Victim). The most recent BJS National Inmate Survey (NIS-4, 2023–24, released December 2025) found that 4.1% of adult prison inmates reported sexual victimization during the prior year — 2.3% by another inmate and 1.8% by staff — figures drawn from confidential self-report rather than administrative records and widely regarded as more reliable than facility-reported totals (Who Counts as a Victim). Nationally, BJS's Survey of Sexual Victimization documented 38,132 sexual victimization allegations reported by correctional administrators in 2019 and 36,264 in 2020 (Who Counts as a Victim). The DOJ found that GDC fails to adequately protect people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) from a substantial risk of serious harm from sexual violence and abuse — a finding with direct implications for a population that administrative records structurally undercount (Who Counts as a Victim).

Facility-level NIS-4 PREA prevalence data has not yet been released for Georgia specifically. PREA administrative-record substantiation rates underrepresent actual victimization because they depend on reporting by people who face retaliation, disbelief, and no meaningful victim-services infrastructure inside facilities (Who Counts as a Victim).

The Staffing Collapse Behind the Violence

The DOJ's October 1, 2024 findings letter concluded that the State of Georgia is "deliberately indifferent" to Eighth Amendment violations documented across 24 GDC prisons — and that those constitutional violations are "exacerbated by serious deficiencies in staffing and supervision" (Who Counts as a Victim). The staffing data bears this out in stark terms. Between 2018 and 2023, GDC staffing levels fell precipitously: the systemwide CO vacancy rate was 49.3% in 2021, 56.3% in 2022, and 52.5% in 2023, peaking at 60% in April 2023 with over 2,800 vacant officer positions (Who Counts as a Victim). Twelve prisons had vacancy rates above that already catastrophic systemwide peak. The DOJ has not yet filed CRIPA enforcement litigation against Georgia as of May 18, 2026 (Who Counts as a Victim).

Who Is Dying: Trauma, Race, and the People Behind the Numbers

The people dying in GDC custody are not an abstraction. The research establishes, with replication across multiple independent datasets, that the incarcerated population carries an extraordinary burden of prior victimization — and that this burden is not randomly distributed.

Childhood trauma is a primary, replicated, dose-response driver of later incarceration (Who Counts as a Victim). Felitti et al.'s foundational 1998 cohort study (N = 9,508) found that people with four or more adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) were 4.6 times more likely to have used illicit drugs, 7.4 times more likely to consider themselves alcoholic, and 12.2 times more likely to have attempted suicide compared to those with zero ACEs (Who Counts as a Victim). Hughes et al. (2017) replicated and extended this finding, documenting an odds ratio of 30.14 for attempted suicide among adults with four or more ACEs (95% CI 16.5–55.0) (Who Counts as a Victim). Reavis et al. (2013) found that male offenders reported a mean ACE score of 3.7 — approximately four times the male normative sample — with eight of ten ACE categories significantly elevated (Who Counts as a Victim). Baglivio et al. (2014) found that 50% of justice-involved youth had four or more ACEs, compared to 13% in the Kaiser sample, and that justice-involved youth were 13 times less likely than the Kaiser cohort to report zero ACEs (Who Counts as a Victim).

The gender dimension is equally stark. Messina and Grella (2006) found that incarcerated women reported childhood physical abuse at 30.6% and childhood sexual abuse at 45.1% — multiples of general-population rates (Who Counts as a Victim). BJS Harlow (1999) documented that approximately 50% of women in state prison and approximately 16% of men report prior physical or sexual abuse — figures widely understood to be underestimates (Who Counts as a Victim). Wolff and colleagues at Rutgers documented childhood physical victimization rates of 44.7% in a male prisoner sample of approximately 4,100 men, with 35.3% of male incarcerated people reporting physical victimization and 10.3% reporting sexual victimization perpetrated by another resident or staff member within a six-month window — rates researchers describe as far exceeding general-population exposure (Who Counts as a Victim).

Lauritsen, Sampson, and Laub's foundational criminological work established the "victim-offender overlap" — the empirical regularity that the same individuals appear in both categories at rates that cannot be explained by chance — and this finding has been replicated consistently in the literature since 1991 (Who Counts as a Victim). As Danielle Sered synthesizes in Until We Reckon (2019): "nearly everyone who has committed harm has survived it, and few have received any formal support to heal." Hagan et al. (2018) found that 28% of recently released individuals screened positive for PTSD symptoms, rising to 43% among those with solitary-confinement exposure (Who Counts as a Victim).

The racial dimension of who bears these compounded burdens in Georgia is not incidental. Black Georgians are 33% of the state population but 60.38% of the prison population and approximately 72% of lifers (Who Counts as a Victim). Black male lifetime imprisonment risk peaked at 35.3% for the 1975–79 birth cohort (Who Counts as a Victim). Skiba et al. (2011) documented that Black students are 3.5 times more likely to be suspended than White students, controlling for socioeconomic status and infraction — establishing that the school-to-prison pipeline is racially structured at its entry point (Who Counts as a Victim). The Torrey/TAC analysis found that more than three times as many seriously mentally ill persons are in jails and prisons than in hospitals, with 16% of inmates having serious mental illness compared to 6.4% in a comparable 1983 study — a fourfold increase over four decades of deinstitutionalization without community investment (Who Counts as a Victim).

A note on the ACE literature's limits: the original ACE inventory was developed in a predominantly white, middle-class HMO population; community-violence exposure, racial discrimination, and poverty are not directly captured by the standard ten-item inventory. This means the ACE burden documented in the incarcerated population is, if anything, understated for Black and lower-income populations whose formative environments include exposures the instrument was not designed to measure (Who Counts as a Victim). No Georgia-specific systematic ACE prevalence study of GDC's adult population has been published. The Bureau of Justice Statistics has not conducted a Georgia-specific ACE-screened survey (Who Counts as a Victim).

Georgia's Statutory Blindness: When Victims Are Incarcerated, the State Looks Away

The deaths, the sexual violence, and the documented trauma burden exist within a legal and institutional framework that formally refuses to recognize incarcerated people as victims — regardless of what happens to them.

Georgia's Crime Victims' Bill of Rights (O.C.G.A. § 17-17) defines "victim" in a way that expressly excludes any surviving relation who is "in custody for an offense" from the universe of recognized secondary victims (Who Counts as a Victim). The 2018 passage of SB 127 / SR 146 (effective January 1, 2019) elevated those rights to constitutional status under Article I, § I, Paragraph XXX of the Georgia Constitution — Marsy's Law — enshrining the exclusion at the constitutional level (Who Counts as a Victim). O.C.G.A. § 17-15-7(c) categorically bars compensation to incarcerated victims, providing: "No award of any kind shall be made under this chapter to a victim injured while confined in any federal, state, county, or municipal jail, prison, or other correctional facility" (Who Counts as a Victim). The Crime Victims Compensation Program, administered by Georgia's Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, typically pays approximately $11–14 million per year in awards — and $0 of that is paid to incarcerated victims (Who Counts as a Victim). The federal Crime Victims' Rights Act (18 U.S.C. § 3771) similarly excludes incarcerated persons in practice (Who Counts as a Victim).

No bill has been introduced in the past five sessions of the Georgia General Assembly to amend the definition of "victim" to include incarcerated persons (Who Counts as a Victim).

The Office of Victim Services: Designed to Exclude

The Georgia Office of Victim Services (OVS) was formed in 2005 when the Parole Board and Georgia Department of Corrections combined their victim-services offices, and expanded in 2015 to include the Department of Community Supervision (Who Counts as a Victim). Rita Rocker, Deputy Executive Director of the Board, was appointed Director of OVS in September 2020 (Who Counts as a Victim). The Board's stated mission is: "To serve the citizens of Georgia by exercising the constitutional authority of executive clemency through informed decision-making, thereby ensuring public safety, protecting the rights of crime victims, and supporting successful offender reintegration" — language that is silent on in-custody harm (Who Counts as a Victim).

The DOJ findings report explicitly noted that the Parole Board functions only as a passive "reporting entity for sexual abuse allegations," not as a victim-services provider to incarcerated people (Who Counts as a Victim). The Parole Board has issued zero press releases addressing in-custody victimization — including deaths, sexual abuse by staff, or the DOJ findings — as of May 18, 2026. The Parole Board's Office of Victim Services has never publicly addressed the DOJ's October 2024 findings (Who Counts as a Victim). The Parole Board does not publish a dedicated OVS budget line, annual victim-notification volume, or staffing headcount on its public-facing pages (Who Counts as a Victim).

The Victims Visitors' Days program has recorded more than 4,000 victims attending face-to-face meetings since 2006 (Who Counts as a Victim). Victim Impact Sessions were implemented in FY 2022; nine sessions were held statewide in FY 2024 (Who Counts as a Victim). Neither program addresses victimization occurring inside facilities.

What Victims Outside Say They Want

The Alliance for Safety and Justice's Crime Survivors Speak 2022 survey found that by a margin of 3 to 1, victims prefer holding people accountable through options beyond just prison, such as rehabilitation, mental health treatment, and community accountability mechanisms (Who Counts as a Victim). ASJ's 2016 survey found that over 60% of people have been crime victims in the past decade, with half of those being victims of violent crime (Who Counts as a Victim). Sered (2019), citing BJS data, documents that in 2017, only 45% of violent victimizations were reported to police and only 8% of victims received any form of help from any public or private victim-services agency (Who Counts as a Victim). No Georgia-specific replication of Crime Survivors Speak has been conducted; Georgia's Criminal Justice Coordinating Council has not published comparable preference data for Georgians (Who Counts as a Victim).

Georgia's official victim-advocacy apparatus is structurally blind to in-custody victimization as a matter of statute, agency practice, and federal finding. The DOJ's October 2024 findings letter — documenting deliberate indifference to unconstitutional conditions across 24 prisons — received no public response from the Parole Board's Office of Victim Services. The people dying in Georgia's prisons at a rate of nearly one per day are, by statute, not victims. The state has designed it that way.