Policy & Advocacy

The Fiscal Case for Reform

Georgia spends approximately $1.8 billion per year on its state prison system — $1,913,888,054 in FY2025 actual expenditures and $1,799,204,979 in the Amended FY2026 budget (Fiscal Impact of Post-Conviction Reform in Georgia; GDC Budget FY2026-FY2027). That figure does not capture the full cost of mass incarceration. Families of incarcerated Georgians bear an estimated $350 billion nationally in total hidden costs annually — nearly four times what taxpayers spend on jails and prisons — including $5.6 billion on commissary, phone calls, and basic necessities at markups reaching 600% above retail, and $1.8 billion on prison visit travel (Families as the Hidden Tax Base). GDC alone extracts over $8 million per year in kickbacks from Securus Technologies at a 59.6% commission rate on prison phone revenues (Follow the Money: Georgia Prison MAS Vendors). These are not incidental costs — they are structural features of a system that transfers incarceration's true price tag from the state budget onto the poorest families in Georgia.

The fiscal argument for decarceration is not theoretical. The United States reduced its prison population by 25% between 2009 and 2021 — from over 1.6 million to under 1.2 million — while crime continued to fall (The Case for Decarceration in Georgia: An Evidence Base). Georgia, by contrast, incarcerates at a rate of 881 per 100,000 residents, the 7th highest nationally and higher than any country in the world except El Salvador (Recidivism & Reentry Failures in Georgia). With over 528,000 Georgia residents under total criminal justice supervision — including 191,000 on felony probation alone, the highest felony probation population of any state — the system's footprint is vast, its costs compounding, and its returns diminishing (Georgia Probation & Community Supervision). Every dollar spent warehousing people who could be managed in the community, or who have completed their just sentence, is a dollar unavailable for education, mental health, housing, or the environmental remediation — including lead abatement — that research now confirms reduces crime more effectively than incarceration (Lead Poisoning Drove America's Crime Epidemic).

Sentencing Reform: Truth-in-Sentencing, the Trial Penalty, and the Parole Gate

Georgia's sentencing architecture was shaped in significant part by federal financial incentives that prioritized incarceration over evidence. Between FY1996 and FY2001, Georgia received $82,211,036 in federal Violent Offender Incarceration and Truth-in-Sentencing (VOI/TIS) grants — ranking 9th nationally among recipients — conditioning this funding on requiring offenders to serve at least 85% of their sentences (Truth in Sentencing & Fiscal Impact: The $40 Billion Story). By 2001, 29 jurisdictions had collectively received $2.7 billion through this program. The practical result in Georgia is a prison population that has shifted: since the 2012 criminal justice reforms, the proportion of the incarcerated population convicted of violent offenses has grown by 12% (2024 Georgia Senate Study Committee Report on Prison Conditions), in part because the reform's front-end sentence reductions were offset by back-end release restrictions that kept violent-offense prisoners in longer.

The parole gate compounds this problem. In FY2024, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles considered 19,328 parole-eligible cases and cast 69,375 total votes — releasing only 5,443 people, 420 fewer than the prior fiscal year (Georgia's Parole System: Denial Rates, Life Sentences & Fiscal Impact). Of 2,046 life cases considered in FY2024, only 93 were granted parole — a 4.5% grant rate — while the overall parole grant rate fell to 28%, a record low, down from 38% in 2019. No hearings were held; no written explanations for denials were provided. Georgia's parole successful completion rate of 72% exceeds the national average of approximately 60%, which means the Board is not releasing the people least likely to succeed — it is simply not releasing enough people, period. The cost avoidance from parole in FY2024 was $343 million; the incarceration rate of $86.61 per day compares to $2.89 per day for community supervision, a 30-to-1 ratio. Meaningful sentencing reform requires revisiting the 85% service requirement, expanding parole eligibility for aging and medically vulnerable prisoners, and establishing written, reviewable standards for parole denial.

The Aging Prison Population: Georgia's Most Expensive and Most Neglected Crisis

Georgia's prison population is aging rapidly, and the state is paying for it — in dollars, in lives, and in constitutional exposure — while doing almost nothing to address it. Of 47,391 active inmates in the GPS database, 12,777 (27.0%) are age 50 or older — more than 1 in 4. GDC's own December 2024 Inmate Statistical Profile reports 12,146 inmates age 50 or older (23.64%) out of 51,365 total. The breakdown by age cohort reveals the depth of the crisis: 8,694 inmates (18.3%) are 55 or older; 5,404 (11.4%) are 60 or older; 2,904 (6.1%) are 65 or older; 1,320 (2.8%) are 70 or older; 548 (1.2%) are 75 or older; and 217 (0.5%) are 80 or older. Georgia's 27% rate for people 50 and older exceeds the national average. Nationally, the number of people 55 and older in state prison custody increased 400% from 1993 to 2013, and by 2030, an estimated 400,000 people 50 and older will be incarcerated — one-third of the projected U.S. prison population.

The racial dimension of this crisis is inseparable from its scale. Black Georgians make up 33% of the state's population but 72% of its lifer population. Among inmates 55 and older, 51.0% are Black and 45.2% are white. Georgia holds 8,027 lifers with a mean age of 48.33; 3,528 lifers (44.6%) are 50 or older, and 2,653 are 55 or older. Of those 65 and older, 37.5% are serving life sentences, compared to 12.8% of those under 55. There are 2,256 people serving life without parole; 779 (34.5%) of them are 50 or older. The top offense category for inmates 55 and older is murder (1,976 individuals, average age 63.9), followed by rape (869), child molestation (660), aggravated assault (557), and aggravated child molestation (519).

The cost of incarcerating this population is staggering and growing. GDC's own Aging-Inmate Population Project found that inmates 65 and older cost $8,500 per year in medical expenses alone — approximately nine times the $950 annual medical cost for inmates under 65. The ACLU calculates the national average annual cost of incarcerating a person 50 or older at $68,270 — double the standard rate of $34,135 — with national elderly incarceration spending totaling $16 billion per year and a net savings per released elderly person of $66,294 annually. Applying those figures to Georgia's population: incarcerating the state's 12,777 people 50 and older costs an estimated $715.5 million per year — approximately 46% of the corrections budget for roughly 27% of the population, with a differential above the cost of incarcerating younger prisoners of approximately $415.8 million annually. GDC's healthcare contract alone has increased by $169 million since FY2022, with Centurion Health holding a $2.4 billion, nine-year contract effective July 2024. GDC's total healthcare allocation is $345.8 million, or approximately $19 per day per inmate — well below even that figure's adequacy, given that Georgia ranks 44th of 50 states in per-prisoner healthcare spending ($3,610 versus a $5,720 national median, per Pew 2017). Despite this, only approximately 10% of Hepatitis C and HIV-positive inmates are receiving treatment. Georgia approved $634 million in new corrections spending in 2025 even as it maintains no functioning elderly or geriatric parole mechanism.

Virginia found that just 9% of its inmate population — the elderly and aging — accounts for 86% of medical costs. Florida found that 16% of prisoners age 50 and older account for 40.1% of medical episodes and 47.9% of hospital days. Federal BOP data shows that facilities with the highest proportions of aging inmates spend five times more per person and fourteen times more on medication. Georgia GPS research estimates the total healthcare burden for 10,000 or more inmates over 50 at approximately $85 million annually. The scenario modeling is straightforward: releasing 1,000 to 1,500 people age 65 and older who have served 20 or more years would save $66 to $99 million per year; releasing 3,000 to 5,000 people age 55 and older with 10 or more years served would save $198 to $331 million per year. Columbia University estimates that elder parole in New York alone could save $522 million annually.

The recidivism data is equally clear. People released at age 50 or older reoffend at a rate of 21.3%, compared to 67.6% for those under 21 and 41% overall in the federal system. For people released between ages 50 and 65, the recidivism rate drops to approximately 2%. California's elderly parole program — for people 50 and older who have served 20 or more years — has a recidivism rate below 3%. Louisiana reports approximately 0% recidivism for people who served 26 or more years. When the federal government released more than 11,000 elderly and medically vulnerable prisoners under the CARES Act, only 17 were arrested for new crimes (0.15%) and only 8 were returned for new criminal conduct. Compassionate release overall carries a 3.5% recidivism rate, compared to 41% for the general federal prison population. Virginia saved $6.6 million from releasing just 62 eligible elderly prisoners. The public safety case for continued mass incarceration of aging Georgians simply does not exist.

Compassionate Release and Medical Reprieve: A System Designed to Fail

Georgia has two mechanisms on paper for releasing medically vulnerable and elderly people: medical reprieve, administered through GDC, and parole due to disability or advanced age, administered through the Board of Pardons and Paroles. In practice, both are nearly inoperative. FAMM's October 2022 Report Card gave Georgia failing grades on both mechanisms. Medical reprieve criteria were characterized as "unnecessarily and cruelly strict," and the disability/advanced age parole category received no functional grade because it does not exist as a meaningful pathway.

From 2001 to 2020, Georgia granted 1,224 medical reprieves in total — approximately 61 per year. In 2019, 25 were granted; in 2020, 41; in FY2021, 53. These numbers are negligible against a backdrop of 506 wheelchair-bound inmates, 197 who require assisted living, 288 who cannot work, 332 who require ambulance transport, 37 who are blind in both eyes, 56 with total or severe hearing loss, and — extraordinarily — only 5 inmates classified as having a terminal illness with less than six months to live under GDC's own PULHESDWIT scale. That last figure is not a reflection of good health outcomes in Georgia's prisons. It is a reflection of classification practices that systematically undercount terminal illness in order to minimize release eligibility. Georgia recorded 333 deaths in prison custody in 2024 — the highest on record — with 185 (55.6%) of those deaths occurring among people 50 and older and an average age at death of 51.4. Of all deaths with age data in the GPS Mortality Database, 57.4% occurred in inmates 50 and older. Nationally, more than 30,500 people 55 and older died in U.S. prisons between 2001 and 2018, 97% from illness.

The structural problems are not incidental. The GDC Medical Reprieve Coordinator controls the gateway to medical reprieve consideration, representing a direct conflict of interest for an agency whose budget depends on maintaining census. As one observer noted, it is not unusual for the DOC to recommend against a medical reprieve even when the clinical case is clear. Post-release conditions include 24-hour house arrest, and if a recipient's condition improves, return to prison is ordered — a perverse incentive that structurally discourages medical improvement and that no legitimate healthcare system would countenance. Nearly 40% of nursing home facilities, in a 2025 study, changed their response about bed availability after learning of an applicant's incarceration status, meaning that even approved reprieves frequently cannot be implemented due to community placement barriers.

The conditions in which aging inmates live compound their deterioration. Georgia's prisons were not designed for elderly people: bunk beds without lower-bunk guarantees, inaccessible showers, extreme temperatures, and long distances without wheelchair ramps are standard. A nationwide ADA compliance review of prison facilities has not been completed since 1996. Incarcerated persons are physiologically 10 to 15 years older than community peers of the same age; people 50 and older in prison average three chronic medical conditions; and cognitive impairment affects 15% of incarcerated people 55 and older, compared to 7% in the community. "Prison Activities of Daily Living" — standing in medication lines, dropping to the floor for security alarms — are associated with depression and suicidal ideation in inmates 50 and older. Augusta State Medical Prison, with 1,154 total inmates, holds 477 age 55 and older (41.3%) and 259 age 65 and older (22.4%), making it the facility with the highest concentration of elderly incarcerated people in the state — and a barometer of where the system as a whole is headed.

Twenty-three states plus the District of Columbia have elderly or geriatric parole statutes. Georgia is not among them in any meaningful practice. The legislative and administrative remedies are not complex: establish an independent medical reprieve coordinator outside GDC's chain of command; create a statutory geriatric parole pathway for people 55 and older who have served a defined minimum term; expand the terminal illness classification criteria; eliminate the condition requiring return to prison upon medical improvement; and appropriate transition funding to address the nursing home placement barrier. The fiscal savings alone — conservatively $66 million to $331 million per year depending on the scope of reform — would dwarf the administrative cost of any such program. The human cost of inaction is already being counted in the 333 bodies that did not leave Georgia's prisons alive in 2024.