Policy & Advocacy

Legislative Record: What Georgia Has Actually Passed

Georgia's modern reform era was built through legislation, not litigation. In April 2011, H.B. 265 created the Special Council on Criminal Justice Reform for Georgians — a body with bipartisan representation from all three branches of government — and the Joint Committee on Criminal Justice Reform (Assessing the Impact of Georgia's Sentencing Reforms: Justice Reinvestment Initiative, NCJ 250936, 2017; Georgia sentencing, parole and recidivism studies, NCJRS 1977–2017). State leaders sought support through the Justice Reinvestment Initiative, a public-private partnership jointly funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Bureau of Justice Assistance at the U.S. Department of Justice (#14387), with technical assistance from the Texas Public Policy Foundation's Right on Crime initiative and the Georgia Public Policy Foundation (#8344).

H.B. 1176, signed by Republican Governor Nathan Deal on May 2, 2012, passed the House and Senate unanimously and began implementation July 1, 2012 (#14356, #14357, #19137). Its provisions were concrete: felony theft and fraud thresholds raised from $500 to $1,500 (#14359, #14361); shoplifting thresholds raised from $300 to $500 (#14360); burglary split into two degrees, with second-degree maximums cut from 20 years to 5 (#14358); drug possession graded by weight with reduced minimums and maximums at every weight and removed from the recidivist statute (#14362); and new degrees of forgery created (#14363). The reform package also strengthened accountability courts (H.B. 328 and S.B. 367), diverted low-level youth to community alternatives (H.B. 242), merged probation and parole into the Department of Community Supervision (H.B. 310), and extended parole eligibility to certain drug offenders sentenced as recidivists to terms of 12 years or more (H.B. 328) (#14365, #14367, #14368, #6397, #6462).

The 2017 session produced the mechanisms cited most often in Georgia's probation reform record. Act 226 created Behavioral Incentive Dates — for first-time felony offenders, judges must specify a date at which probation can be reduced from an average of five years to no more than three where the person has no new arrests, has paid restitution, and has complied with conditions (#6439, #14369). It codified graduated sanctions for technical violations, capped revocation terms at 120 days for failure to pay or report, and prohibited pre-hearing arrest warrants where failure to pay is the sole basis for revocation (#6440, #6425). S.B. 174 required the Board of Pardons and Paroles to consider commuting split sentences after twelve consecutive months of successful parole supervision (#8647), producing 88 commutations in FY2018 alone (#8853). A 2021 measure expanded early-termination eligibility subject to a three-year minimum, no new arrests, no revocations in two years, and full payment of financial obligations (#6463).

The measured outcomes were real but bounded. Commitments for offenses affected by H.B. 1176 declined 13 percent and probation commitments fell 9 percent (#14322); overall commitments for affected offenses fell from 28,604 in 2012 to 25,784 in 2015, a 10 percent decline (#19145). Georgia's probation population declined 24 percent since 2011 (#6387) and admissions for supervision violations fell 44 percent between 2018 and 2023 (#6421). The percentage of Black Georgians experiencing incarceration fell from 62 percent in 2009 to 53 percent in 2017 (#3062) — a result attributed to the Deal-era reforms. Two caveats qualify the record: the Georgia Council on Criminal Justice Reform's influence waned after Deal left office in 2019 (#3891), and Georgia still supervises 191,000 people on felony probation, more than any other state (#3210). Georgia's foundational 1994 sentencing statutes — the 'seven deadly sins' and two-strikes law — predate the leaked ALEC model-bill corpus and cannot currently be shown to be textual copies of an ALEC model (#8304), and the 2011–2016 reform push drew technical assistance from a conservative policy network (#8344), so its provenance is documented even where bill text linkage is not.

The Unfinished Agenda: Bills That Died and Statutes Left Intact

The single most instructive vote in this evidence base is one that never became law. H.B. 126 would have codified out-of-time appeals in Georgia. It passed the House 172–1 (#4023) and the Senate 46–7 (#4024), but the Senate passed its substitute version at 12:15 a.m. on sine die — the last minutes of the session — leaving the House no opportunity to vote on the substitute; the bill died (#4022, #4025). As of March 2026, no equivalent legislation had been enacted (#4022). A 2023 Georgia Law Review article called Cook v. State, the decision that eliminated the procedural tool H.B. 126 would have restored, 'a true procedural tragedy' and explicitly asked the General Assembly to pass the bill (#4021).

A partial answer arrived in 2025. Governor Kemp signed H.B. 176 on May 14, 2025, codifying out-of-time appeals and creating a grace period for people whose appeals were dismissed because of Cook v. State to refile before June 30, 2026 (#4053, #4070, #4401). By its own terms the law does not address the Georgia Supreme Court's narrowing of the miscarriage-of-justice exception in O.C.G.A. § 9-14-48(d) or the elimination of motions to vacate void convictions under O.C.G.A. § 17-9-4 (#4054). The underlying structure remains: Georgia imposes a four-year habeas deadline in felony cases and one year in misdemeanors under O.C.G.A. § 9-14-42(c), enacted in 2004 (#4224), legislation that a comparative review found lacked the committee testimony, floor debate, stated justification, and safety valves that accompanied the federal AEDPA deadline in 1996 (#4247). Georgia is the only state combining all six of the restrictions documented in the IAC research — earliest-moment pleading requirement, habeas-only pathway, four-year deadline, no actual-innocence exception, no right to counsel in habeas, and overwhelmed public defenders (#4205).

The proposed fixes have been drafted. GPS's model Georgia Post-Conviction Justice Act carries five elements: a statutory definition of 'miscarriage of justice' for § 9-14-48(d); clarification that the exception overrides all procedural bars; amendment of § 17-9-4 to include constitutional violations within 'void for any cause'; reversal of Harper v. State by statute; and codification of out-of-time appeals (#4033). Companion proposals include a statutory bar on waiver-by-timing for ineffective assistance claims (#4214), a right to appointed counsel in habeas for indigent petitioners (#4215), and the right to develop a factual record beyond the trial record (#4216). Chief Justice Nels Peterson's concurrence in Sanders v. State on March 3, 2026 called the post-conviction system 'a mess' and asked the legislature to fix it — an unusual judicial invitation for legislative action (#4116).

The agenda that stalled is broader than post-conviction procedure. No compassionate or geriatric release legislation was introduced or passed in the 2026 Georgia session (#5773). No bill has been introduced in the past five sessions to amend the statutory definition of 'victim' to include incarcerated persons (#7259, #7355), even though O.C.G.A. § 17-17-3(11) expressly excludes any surviving relation who is 'in custody for an offense' from recognized secondary victims (#7305, #7230). One reform did move in the opposite direction: the Survivor Justice Act (H.B. 582), signed May 12, 2025 and effective July 1, 2025, sponsored by Rep. Stan Gunter, created a resentencing pathway for domestic violence survivors and has been described as the most comprehensive survivor-justice legislation in the country (#2189, #2191, #2192). Separately, HR 1530 — a proposed constitutional amendment introduced in 2026 by a bipartisan coalition to remove the slavery exception from Article I, Section I — would require legislative passage and a voter referendum (#3407).

Segregation by Policy: The Tier System in GDC's Own SOPs

Georgia's use of solitary and restrictive housing is not an administrative accident — it is set out in numbered Standard Operating Procedures that state, in the Department's own words, who can be placed in segregation, on what grounds, for how long, and under what conditions. The architecture is governed by Tier I (SOP 209.07, effective 04/30/2015), Tier II (SOP 209.08, effective 04/11/2016), Tier III — the Special Management Unit (SOP 209.09, effective 04/23/2025), generic Administrative Segregation (SOP 209.06, effective 02/19/2021), and the juvenile Restrictive Housing Assignment (SOP 209.11, effective 04/11/2016) (#19247, #19252, #19260, #19271, #19265). Two step-down programs sit alongside the numbered Tier sequence: Tier II STEP (SOP 209.45) and Tier III STEP (SOP 209.55), both effective 04/25/2019 (#19283, #19284). Cell occupancy, out-of-cell time, and every other condition quoted below are governed by a Warden's modification clause — SOP 209.08, Section IV.D.1.l: 'As deemed necessary by the Warden/Designee, all of the above conditions or privileges are subject to modification due to extenuating operational circumstances,' with the identical clause for juveniles at SOP 209.11, Section IV.E.1.n — carrying no time limit, no documentation requirement, no notice to the prisoner, and no reporting obligation to Central Office, in contrast to Tier III (2025), which requires comparable exceptions to be 'recorded in the Electronic Logbook ... and justified in writing' (#19276).

Tier I is short-term segregation available at every GDC facility type; its applicability section names "All State Prisons, County CIs, Private Prisons, Intensive Treatment Facilities, Transitional Centers, Probation Detention Centers, and Probation Boot Camp housing GDC offenders or probationers" (#19247, #19363). It has eight placement grounds, and only one presupposes a pending disciplinary charge; grounds including being "noted as a threat to the safe and secure operation of the Facility," being under investigation, and having "not been classified due to their arrival at a Facility" permit segregation on a staff determination alone (#19248). The policy caps Tier I at 30 days — "to include investigation and disciplinary isolation time" — and exempts offenders in voluntary or involuntary protective custody from that cap entirely, leaving staff-imposed involuntary protective custody with no policy time limit at all (#19249). Review consists of a formal Classification Committee hearing within 96 hours, a counselor well-being review every seven days, and a 30-day review; the Committee "will consist of the Unit Manager, Tier I OIC, assigned counselor and as applicable, the assigned mental health counselor" — all facility staff, with no external or Central Office member (#19250). Written Central Office sign-off is required when protective-custody prisoners are double-bunked beyond 72 hours, creating a discrete, requestable approval record (#19251, #19280). Oversight is thinner than the operative conditions: health care must conduct an initial medical round within 24 hours and then "at a minimum of three times a week excluding weekends and holidays" at state facilities (SOP 209.07, Section VI.F.2) (#19335); the staff-inspection schedule excuses health care, the Chief of Security, the Unit Manager and the Deputy Warden on weekends and holidays, leaving only the Institutional Duty Officer required daily (#19341, #19342); the Segregation/Isolation Checklist must be completed "daily with 30 minute documented checks," documented when they occur and "not at the end of the shift ('gang' entries shall never be permitted on any of the Tier I Segregation/Isolation forms)" (#19346, #19349); rounds are recorded in colour-coded ink — red for Wardens and Supervisors, green for Health Care, blue for Counselors, black for Officers (#19344, #19345); and suicide-risk questioning is required only "a minimum of once per month," with the permissive verb "should be asked," meaning a person could serve an entire 30-day Tier I term and be asked exactly once (#19287).

Tier II is long-term administrative segregation with no outer time limit. SOP 209.08 defines it as a "Long Term Administrative Segregation stratification plan" with three phases and provides that offenders who "cannot return to general population" — including those with documented STG involvement, "notoriety of crimes," or who "have either been threatened with bodily harm or who have threatened others with bodily harm" — "shall be reviewed every 90 days," but the SOP contains no maximum duration (#19252). Its broadest admission criterion: "The offender is noted as a threat to the safe and secure operation of the Facility," an open-ended test — "may include, but is not limited to," no evidentiary standard, no requirement of a disciplinary conviction or hearing finding — that expressly covers a person who "ha[s] been threatened with bodily harm," i.e. a victim rather than an aggressor; criteria 1, 5 and 10 can each be satisfied without any disciplinary adjudication (#19253). A facility can place a person in Tier II on its own authority, including immediately in an emergency; release requires a Unit Manager recommendation, Warden and Regional Director review, a Security Threat Group investigation by the Criminal Investigations Unit, and the personal decision of the Director of Field Operations (#19256). The appeal of the 90-day review — the decision that continues confinement — goes only to the Warden, the same official who approved the placement in the first instance (#19258). Exit is conditioned on actively participating in and, "if appropriate," completing the "Offenders Under Transition" (O.U.T.) cognitive-behavioral program, and then routes back through up to 30 days in Tier I before release to general population; the SOP contains no provision for what happens if the O.U.T. program is not offered at the facility (#19259). The policy documents both a "Tier II-Mental Health" placement and a pipeline from the Special Management Unit at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison into Tier II Phase 3 (#19255), and its own transfer provision presumes a class of "Level 5" facilities capable of receiving a Tier II Phase assignment, plus a High Max Unit at GDCP, without defining "Level 5" or listing the facilities in that class (#19263). GDC maintains a single statewide "Tier Segregation Manager" whose function is to place individuals within the Tier system — the strongest documentary indication in the SOP corpus that a centralized Tier population record exists (#19257). Within Tier II, SOP 209.08 defines a sub-tier: "Moderated Cells" are "Designated cells in Tier II, Phase I, that are the most restrictive cells designed to house assaultive offenders who are violent, aggressive and refuse to comply with the Tier II conduct program requirements" (#19379). In a moderated cell, "Only State-Issued Property excluding offender boots (replaced by shower shoes) shall be issued," and property is limited to the basic issue (#19380). Medical rounds follow the same three-times-weekly standard as Tier I, "excluding weekends and holidays" (#19336); thirty-minute checks use the "30 Minute/15 Minute Watch Form/Observation Record" (Attachment 10) documented when they occur (#19347); and the same colour-coded ink scheme governs the sign-in log and flow sheets (#19344). On mental health, Tier II admits prisoners at MH Level III; Tier III does not, and prisoners with the higher classifications are routed away from the unit whose conditions were reformed under litigation and remain eligible for Tier II, whose policy floor is five hours out of cell per week (#19254). On tablets, SOP 204.10 (2018) confiscates the GOAL device on Tier II placement until Phase III and caps video visitation at one 25-minute call per calendar month, restricted to Tuesdays and Thursdays — while the later generic SOP 209.06 (2021) grants general-population tablet and visitation access in administrative segregation, an unresolved conflict in GDC's own rules (#19285, #19286). GDC's published summary of SOP 209.08 states that the programme "is not a punishment measure but rather an offender management and stratification process" (#19291), yet SOP 209.01, the discipline SOP, expressly routes confinement past its 30-day disciplinary-isolation cap into Tier II as a sanction-adjacent placement — a tension recorded rather than resolved (#19292). The only duration figures for Tier II appear in PREA audits, not in the SOP: Hays Cycle 2 calls it "long-term segregation/270 days"; Georgia State Prison Cycle 2 says progression "may take up to two years"; Macon Cycles 2 and 4 say "from nine months to indefinite" and "from 270 days to an indefinite date" (#19403, #19418, #19478, #19494, #19496, #19497).

Tier III — the Special Management Unit — is the unit whose conditions were reformed under litigation. SOP 209.09 states a "minimum 13-month (390 days) program" across five wings and five phases (the five wing minimums — 60 + 60 + 90 + 90 + 90 — sum to exactly 390 days), an outer limit of 24 months, and a set of exceptions under which "the Department reserves the right to retain offenders ... for a longer period of time" (murder while incarcerated, escape outside secure fencing, serious bodily injury, hostage taking, offenses "so egregious" that placement was immediate, or a "unique position of influence and authority" posing "an exceptional, credible, and articulable risk") (#19260). The 24-month ceiling is stated and then immediately qualified in the sentence that follows it, so it operates as a presumption subject to Commissioner-level override rather than a cap — but a presumption with a named decision-maker, a named form, a fixed review interval and a multi-disciplinary panel, none of which exists anywhere in Tier II (#19330). Retention past 24 months requires quarterly review by a panel of the Director of Field Operations, the Statewide Mental Health Director, the Statewide Medical Director, and a member of the Office of Legal Services, plus the personal approval of "the Commissioner or Assistant Commissioner for Facilities" (#19261). All Tier III offenders are classified Close Security (#19262, #19307). Its conditions require that "All cells are single occupancy," that cells be "equipped and furnished in a manner consistent with cells in the general population," hygiene three times per week, food of the same quality and quantity as general population with alternative meal service only on health or safety grounds and never longer than seven days, "a minimum of one (1) hour of recreation per day, Monday through Friday," and "a minimum of four (4) hours out of cell time per day, Monday through Friday" that must include at least one hour of recreation, with legal visits excluded from the four hours (#19281). The same section limits all telephone calls to 25 minutes, provides non-contact visits per the phase chart (attorney visits excepted), library access "at least once per week utilizing the mobile book carts," mail "on the same basis as offenders in the general population," and access to the GOAL Devices and Kiosks (#19281). Unlike Tier II, the policy requires that exceptions be "recorded in the Electronic Logbook ... and justified in writing," that when out-of-cell time is cancelled or shortened for three or more consecutive days the SMU Warden notify the North Region Director in writing, and that denial of out-of-cell time as punishment "will not be allowed unless the offender has committed a 'Great' or higher severity level disciplinary offense" — the only mechanism in the Tier corpus that generates a paper trail of actual out-of-cell denial (#19282, #19276). Tier III excludes both MH Level III and Level IV prisoners, who are routed to Specialized Mental Health Treatment Units (#19254).

The juvenile programme, generic Administrative Segregation, and moderated cells. The juvenile Restrictive Housing Assignment (RHA-JOAS, SOP 209.11, effective 04/11/2016) governs people under 18, uses the same multi-phase structure and the same Warden modification clause as Tier II, and carries the identical five-hours-per-week exercise floor — and therefore the same derived 23.3 hours per day in cell — as adult Tier II (#19265, #19266, #19272). It is in some respects the more protective policy: RHA-JOAS provides contact visits by phase where adult Tier II provides only non-contact visits at every phase (#19267), and it expressly forbids open-dormitory housing and sight, sound or physical contact with adult offenders, prohibitions with no parallel in SOP 209.08 for adults (#19268). Children held in RHA-JOAS are held under a programme modelled on Tier II and, on turning 18, are reassigned into the corresponding phase of adult Tier II, carrying their phase with them (#19265). Its religious-practice clause — offenders "may individually pray ... in their assigned cells or by their assigned beds" — is drafted on the assumption that RHA-JOAS housing is not uniformly single-cell, as the identical adult clause is (#19277).

Generic Administrative Segregation (SOP 209.06, effective 02/19/2021) guarantees "a minimum of one (1) hour of exercise per day outside of their assigned cells, five (5) days per week," and so sits at the same derived 23.3 hours per day in cell as Tier I and Tier II (#19271, #19272). Its single-celling provision is written as an enumerated exception requiring assignment by medical, mental-health or classification staff with evaluation within 24 or 48 hours — the necessary implication being that multiple occupancy is the ordinary condition of GDC administrative-segregation housing (#19279). Its protective-custody double-bunking prohibition names the Director of Field Operations as the required approver beyond 72 hours, while SOP 209.07 names the Director of Facilities Operations — two GDC SOPs governing the same decision naming two different Central Office signatories, a documented conflict and a records lead, since whichever office holds them the written approvals exist (#19280). SOP 209.06 lists among its own placement grounds that the person is "serving sanctions for a violation of Facility/Center rules," a tension with its published summary stating that segregation "is not a form of abuse or punishment" (#19293). Its 24-hour initial-placement review "will not be subject to appeal by the offender," and the appeal that does exist terminates with the Warden, whose "review and decision on the appeal is final" — there is no neutral or external decision-maker and no right to counsel or non-staff advocate anywhere in the process (#19294). Its provisions on tablet access and visitation conflict with the earlier Tier-specific SOPs, and the corpus does not resolve which governs; GPS should not assert either reading as settled (#19286). Board Rule 125-3-1-.03 requires a formal Administrative Segregation hearing within 96 hours of involuntary placement with written notice (#19355).

Moderated and stripped cells are governed by a cross-reference that does not hold. SOP 209.08 lists eight grounds for moderated-cell placement, several of them non-violent refusals (refusing to allow the tray flap to be closed, refusing to be cuffed) and one open-ended ("Continuous violations of policy, rules, & regulations while assigned to Tier II") (#19381). It routes the question of what a person in a moderated cell is given to another policy — "SOP 209.05 (IIB08-0005) and Post Orders will govern what bedding supplies are provided" — and the juvenile SOP does the same (#19382). SOP 209.05 provides that stripped cells "are only to be used in emergency situations ... never as punishment," with written Warden authorisation, an eight-hour initial maximum, and daily medical authorisation to continue (#19383). SOP 209.08 imports that policy only for the narrow question of bedding supplies, sets no time limit of its own on moderated-cell placement, and lists as a ground an act that is not an emergency and is punishment-shaped — the two policies are not reconciled (#19384). Because SOP 209.05 requires written Warden authorisation and daily medical sign-off, each such placement generates a dated, countable record (#19385). And GDC policy itself recognises that the behaviours leading to a stripped cell — flooding a cell, smearing or throwing bodily fluids, refusing to be cuffed, setting fires — are frequently psychiatric in origin, requiring a clinical determination by MH/MR staff before or alongside the security response, with consultation of the nearest facility with MH/MR staff where none is on site (#19386, #19387, #19388, #19389). Whether that clinical determination is made and recorded in practice is unknown; the record that would show it is the mental-health evaluation documentation required for each stripped-cell placement (#19390).

Conditions and the floor. The out-of-cell guarantees are the crux. Tier I guarantees five hours per week "with at least one (1) hour per day on five days," leaving two days on which the policy guarantees no out-of-cell time at all (#19270). Tier II guarantees "a minimum of five (5) hours per week of exercise" with no daily distribution specified, so the five hours may lawfully be delivered in any pattern across the week (#19269). Generic Administrative Segregation guarantees "a minimum of one (1) hour of exercise per day outside of their assigned cells, five (5) days per week" (#19271). The juvenile programme carries the identical five-hours-per-week floor as adult Tier II (#19266). Derived by arithmetic from these floors, Tier I, Tier II, generic Administrative Segregation, and the juvenile programme all sit at 23.3 hours per day in cell on average, and 24 hours on the two days outside the five-day exercise entitlement; the Tier II and Tier III step-down programs, at four hours out of cell seven days per week, sit at 20.0 hours per day; and Tier III sits at 21.1 hours per day, rising to 24 on weekends when no out-of-cell time is guaranteed (#19272). Read together with the inspection schedule — in which health care, the Chief of Security, the Unit Manager and the Deputy Warden are all expressly excused on weekends and holidays, leaving only the Institutional Duty Officer — GDC's own Tier policies describe a unit that operates on a reduced schedule on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays, with no guaranteed out-of-cell time and no required visit from any of the four supervisory or clinical roles (#19342). Against the UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (the Nelson Mandela Rules), whose Rule 44 defines solitary confinement as 22 hours or more per day without meaningful human contact and prolonged solitary confinement as confinement in excess of 15 consecutive days, the policy floors of Tier I, Tier II, generic Administrative Segregation, and the juvenile programme exceed the 22-hour threshold, while Tier III falls below it on weekdays and the two step-down programs fall below it entirely (#19274). On duration, Tier I's 30-day cap is twice the 15-day prolongation threshold and is disapplied entirely for protective custody (30 / 15 = 2.0); Tier II has no cap at all, making its 90-day review cycle itself six times the threshold and indefinitely repeatable (#19329); and Tier III's 390-day minimum is 26 times the 15-day threshold and its 24-month outer limit approximately 48.7 times it (#19274, #19329). The step-down programs guarantee 5.6 times more out-of-cell time per week than Tier II itself, and Tier III — the unit GDC labels most restrictive — guarantees four times more (#19273). SOP 209.45's four hours, however, expressly include "shower, feeding ... etc.," so they are not four hours of association or programming (#19283). GDC characterises the step-down programs affirmatively as "not a restrictive housing unit" — a definitional carve-out that will exclude the step-down population from any GDC production framed on the term "restrictive housing" (#19333). The Mandela Rules' second element — absence of meaningful human contact — cannot be established from the SOPs and must not be assumed: whether a 23.3-hour-a-day confinement is solitary confinement within Rule 44 turns on cell occupancy, which GDC does not specify for Tier II and does not publish for any facility (#19331).

Cell occupancy. Within one system GDC has written an express single-occupancy guarantee into Tier III and Tier III STEP, an express permission to double-occupy into Tier II STEP, and nothing at all into Tier II (#19278). SOP 209.09 provides "All cells are single occupancy. This applies to offenders in Phase 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5"; SOP 209.45 (Tier II STEP) provides "Cells may be single or double occupancy" (#19278). The two step-down policies, written the same day with near-identical conditions, diverge on this single point: whether a person in a Georgia step-down unit is held alone or with a cellmate is determined by which Tier they stepped down from (#19284). SOP 209.08 contains no provision on occupancy at all, and its religious-practice clause — offenders "may individually pray ... in their assigned cells or by their assigned beds" — is drafted on the assumption that Tier II housing is not uniformly single-cell (#19277). GDC's most recent segregation policy (2021) treats a single cell in administrative segregation as the exception, enumerated and requiring justification (#19279). At the facility level, GDC's own PREA audits document double-bunking as the ordinary described condition: Hancock's G-1 "Tier 2" unit houses "a maximum of 96 inmates, in double occupancy cells located on two tiers," repeated across two audit cycles (#19572); Hancock's J Building Tier 1/segregation unit houses "20 cells" in double occupancy (#19573); Ware's J-Building houses "100 ... Tier 1 offenders, double bunked" (#19429); Telfair's Tier I E-1 and E-2 house 80 and 70 "in two man cells" (#19430); Smith's Tier dorms comprise "48 double bunked cells housing 96 offenders per dorm" (#19427, #19526). At Georgia State Prison the same programme ran both ways at once: Tier II at G Building was double-bunked (218 in double bunk cells) while Tier II at K Building was 100 "in single cell lockdown cells" (#19474, #19475, #19525); at Hays, Tier I units were two-man cells while Tier II units were one-man cells (#19522). Two conditions of confinement are therefore run in the same programme under the same rules — 23 hours a day alone in a cell, and 23 hours a day locked in a cell with another person — and GDC's Tier II policy distinguishes neither, guarantees neither, and reports neither (#19510). Obtaining actual out-of-cell hours and cell-occupancy status for Tier I and Tier II by facility is the highest-value single records request arising from this research (#19331).

Medical oversight and mental health. There is an unresolved conflict in the medical-monitoring standard. SOP 507.04.33 (2022) requires "a daily visit from a health care provider" and daily licensed medical rounds in restrictive housing (#19334, #19338); Tier I SOP 209.07 (2015) and Tier II SOP 209.08 (2016) set three times per week and expressly exclude weekends and holidays (#19335, #19336); and Board of Corrections Rule 125-4-4-.08 likewise requires medical checks three times weekly (#19354). Three visits a week is fewer than half of seven, and GDC has not harmonised the two, with the older, less protective standard written into the policy that governs the Tier unit itself (#19337). SOP 507.04.33 also provides a clinical route out of restrictive housing on health grounds — a nurse's belief that continued placement will adversely affect health, a physician's concurrence, and notification of security — and requires the restrictive-housing flow sheet to be scanned into the electronic health record on removal, so each exercise of the route generates a per-person record, the flow sheet being individual health information carrying its own confidentiality barrier (#19338, #19339). On mental health, Tier II admits prisoners at MH Level III and excludes only Level IV; Tier III excludes both, routing higher classifications to Specialized Mental Health Treatment Units (#19254). Existing GPS datapoint 6614 records that over 70 percent of roughly 300 people in Georgia State Prison's Tier II programme experienced serious mental illness (#19254, #19367). GDC's own mental-health staffing policy (SOP 508.01, effective 2023) places SPECIALIZED Mental Health Treatment Units and Tier II in the highest-need tier of its staffing hierarchy — alongside death row, the SMU and acute care — and assigns "designated SMHTU/TIER II facilities" a 1:20 counselor ratio, behind only crisis stabilization (#19288). SOP 219.01 sets suicide-risk questioning at a minimum of once per month in Tier I and during weekly rounds in Tier II — the unit with the shorter maximum stay carrying the less frequent screening requirement, and the requirement written with the permissive verb "should be asked" (#19287). SOP 508.01 also names a SCRIBE report called "Daily lock down" as a routine mental-health oversight instrument — a named, existing, daily electronic report on lockdown status whose existence undercuts any claim that per-unit confinement data cannot be produced (#19289).

Staffing, training and inspection. The statewide correctional-training SOP (SOP 506.08) creates a centrally delivered curriculum for the single-site Tier III / SMU programme and none for the multi-site Tier I and Tier II programmes, where training is delegated to each Warden; SOP 209.07's promise that "Specialized departmental training will be developed" is written in the future tense in a policy effective in 2015 (#19290). Of the officials required to inspect Tier housing and to "observe and evaluate conditions of confinement and speak with offenders," only the Institutional Duty Officer must attend on weekends and holidays; health care, the Chief of Security, the Unit Manager and the Deputy Warden are all expressly excused (#19340, #19341, #19342). The sign-in logs and flow sheets are, by design, self-auditing as to which category of official attended and when — colour-coded by role — making them unusually probative records for testing whether the inspection schedule was kept (#19344, #19345).

The scale of the system: what GDC publishes and what it does not. The only system-wide quantification of the Tier system GDC has ever published is a bed count. Its FY2014 Annual Fiscal Report states: "Developed and implemented the Tier Segregation Management System at all Level V facilities. As part of this system, 2,721 beds were converted to Tier beds." This establishes the Tier system was built at a scale of thousands of beds, not hundreds, and supplies the meaning of "Level 5 facility" in SOP 209.08 — Level V is the GDC facility security class at which the Tier Segregation Management System was installed (#19297). GDC also publishes the Tier III Special Management Unit population, but only as a side effect of the SMU being a standalone facility with its own GDC facility code: it appears as a facility row in the monthly Inmate Statistical Profile, held 154 people as of 2026-09-01, and ranged from 149 to 195 across 75 monthly snapshots from 2020-07-01 to 2026-09-01 (#19304, #19376). Against the SMU's 192 stated single-bunked beds, that implies the unit has run below bed capacity throughout the published series (#19302, #19484). SMU admissions and releases are also published and are very small — 5 admissions in FY2025, 0.06 percent of state-prison admissions, which counts people admitted directly at the SMU and not transfers into Tier III (#19305). GDC has published one per-facility Tier cell figure: 178 cells in all Tier units at Valdosta State Prison (#19301). In the PREA audit corpus, individual Tier programmes at single prisons are documented at a much larger scale than the SMU: Hays State Prison's Tier I and II units held a stated capacity of 303, larger than the entire Tier III SMU (#19393, #19523); Georgia State Prison comprised 13 Tier Program dorms and 424 stated Tier beds, more than twice the SMU's 192 (#19394, #19477, #19524). The Southern Center for Human Rights' September 2021 complaint alleged approximately 300 people in Georgia State Prison's Tier II programme alone, over 70 percent experiencing serious mental illness — the only facility-level Tier II population figure in any source GPS holds, and an allegation in a complaint, not a finding, describing a prison that closed on 2022-02-19 (#19328, #19367, #19369, #19483). A derived, flagged comparison: if one Tier II programme held roughly 300 people while the entire Tier III SMU holds around 154, Tier II at one facility was roughly twice the size of the whole Tier III programme — offered only to show why a system-wide Tier II count matters more than the SMU figure GDC does publish, and not to be extrapolated to a system total (#19368). Summing the most recent audit per facility that states a count gives a system-wide total of at least 3,401 segregation cells across 30 facilities — a cell count, not a bed count and not a population count, and a floor, not a total (at least six state facilities with published audits contribute zero because no audit states a figure), mixing vintages from Cycle 2 (2017–2019) through Cycle 4 (2021–2025) and counting all segregation, of which Tier units are a subset (#19398). Restricting to state-operated facilities gives 3,182 across 28; the Cycle 2 structured questionnaire total is 2,967 across 23 state facilities, rising to 3,078 across 25 when Wilcox and Montgomery are added from narrative (#19504, #19505, #19506). This must not be presented as a trend against the FY2014 2,721-bed figure, because the two are unlike measures (#19417). A systematic review of the GDC-published report corpus found no published count of the Tier or restrictive-housing population anywhere: not in the eleven Annual Fiscal Reports (restrictive-housing language in five years, a reduction percentage and a delta in two, never a population); not in the 22 editions of Daily Population by Facility (eleven facility-TYPE rows, three columns, no housing type, no security level, no segregation status); not in the 34 distributions of the monthly Inmate Statistical Profile; not in eleven PREA Annual Reports; not in any admissions, releases, services-impact, reconviction, cost, or length-of-stay series (#19306). The Tier population is contained within GDC's published Close Security count but cannot be isolated from it, because GDC publishes security classification and not housing status — the published data structure makes the Tier population arithmetically unrecoverable rather than merely unpublished (#19307). No GDC policy requires anyone to compile a Tier population figure: the term "Central Office" does not appear in SOP 209.08 at all, and Tier placements flow upward as individual approvals, with only a facility-level SCRIBE module (live March 2019) and a Warden's Dashboard field for "number of days an offender has spent in restrictive housing Tier II" (FY2020) confirmed to exist — which is why the data exists but no published count does (#19300, #19308). GDC's restrictive-housing reporting language disappears from the annual reports after FY2020: the last year in which GDC published any figure about the size or trend of its restrictive-housing population was FY2019, and there is no published figure for FY2021 to FY2025 (#19303).

At the facility level, a review of all 273 GDC-published PREA facility audit reports found named Tier programme housing in the audits of exactly nine facilities — Georgia State Prison, Smith, Hays, Valdosta, Telfair, Macon, Hancock, Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison, and Ware — all of them close-security prisons, without exception (#19359, #19360). Of the twelve currently active close-security state prisons, eight have documented Tier programme housing; the three whose audits contain no Tier language are Baldwin (K1, K2, K3 described as "Isolation/Segregation," never Tier), Phillips (100 isolation/segregation cells, no Tier language), and Augusta State Medical Prison; McRae Women's Facility has no PREA audit under that name in the corpus (#19361, #19372, #19373, #19374). The seven facilities GDC designates as Tier I and II — Hancock, Hays, Macon, Smith, Telfair, Valdosta and Ware — are all men's prisons, and on the documented record the Tier II programme operates only in men's prisons, though the Tier SOPs are written in gender-neutral terms and SOP 209.07 applies Tier I system-wide, so women in GDC custody are subject to Tier I segregation (#19364). The seven-facility designation rests on 2018 and 2019 GDC fact sheets and may be stale; no SOP in the corpus lists the designated facilities, and the single most load-bearing missing document is the current GDC document that designates facilities as Tier I, II, II STEP, III and III STEP sites, together with the current facility security-level assignment list (#19264, #19366, #19370, #19371, #19377). Crucially, the Tier label marks where GDC concentrates long-term administrative segregation programming — it does not mark where segregation cells exist. Every state prison in the corpus that reports a number reports segregation cells, close security or medium security, and segregation capacity does not track close security: Calhoun State Prison, whose Cycle 2 audit gives its security level as "4/Medium," reports 197 segregation cells — more than close-security Baldwin (167), Ware (125) or Phillips (75); Wilcox, described in its own audits as "housing medium security, general population inmates," reports 168 segregation cells in Cycle 3; Coffee Correctional Facility, a private medium-security prison, reports 170; Dooly, medium security, describes housing unit J2 as "designated housing of Administrative Segregation, Isolation and Mental Health Observations ... 96 inmates in double bunks in a cell setting" (#19399, #19485, #19511, #19530, #19467, #19532). Any account of Georgia's use of isolation that follows only the Tier designation will miss the majority of the facilities that operate segregation housing (#19512).

Litigation and its reach: Gumm, Wilkinson, and the DOJ. The Gumm v. Ford litigation (No. 5:15-cv-00041-MTT-CHW, M.D. Ga.) reached the SMU and Tier III, and no other part of the Tier system. Every operative settlement term is written in SMU and Tier III vocabulary; the class arose from conditions at the Special Management Unit at Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison, a single facility; and GDC codified the settlement into SOP 209.09 alone, whose 2025 revision carries the 24-month ceiling, the mental-health exclusion, the 60-day and 90-day evaluations, the four-member quarterly panel, and the Commissioner-level approval. SOP 209.08, governing Tier II, has none of it and has not been revised since 2016-04-11 — nearly three years before the settlement — and no duration cap, no mental-health exclusion, no panel, no mental-health evaluation requirement, and no out-of-cell minimum beyond five hours per week appear in it (#19321, #19324). Existing GPS datapoint 6598 conflates Tier II with the SMU; the Haney inspection and the certified class were the SMU, and the Gumm record supplies no findings about Tier II conditions at any other facility — the five-hours-per-week out-of-cell figure in the Gumm record is an SMU finding from 2017 that happens to coincide with the figure SOP 209.08 still sets as the Tier II policy floor today, but they are two separate facts about two different programmes and must not be presented as one (#19325). At the 2017 inspection the SMU held approximately 180 people, of whom 70 were designated mentally ill; residents were confined in cells "smaller than the average parking space," with as little as five hours per week out of cell, no outside light, no congregate religious or educational programming, and frequently locked food-port flaps; Timothy Gumm himself was held continuously for seven and a half years despite fourteen transfer recommendations over four years (#19326). On April 19, 2024, Chief Judge Treadwell found that GDC had "no desire or intention" to comply with the settlement, ordered an independent monitor and fines of $2,500 per day, and documented that officials falsified therapy records, including recording that a man attended treatment sessions after he was already dead (#19322). On constitutional law, Wilkinson v. Austin, 545 U.S. 209 (2005), held that Ohio's supermax conditions — near-total solitary confinement, indefinite duration, and parole disqualification — imposed an "atypical and significant hardship" giving rise to a Fourteenth Amendment liberty interest requiring procedural protections. Applied to Georgia, the factor Wilkinson identified as central, indefinite duration, is present in Tier II, where SOP 209.08 sets no outer limit, and absent from Tier III; on Wilkinson's own reasoning the due-process argument is therefore stronger for Tier II than for the programme the litigation actually reformed — an argument from a holding, not a holding, and no court has applied Wilkinson to Georgia's Tier II programme (#19327). Externally, in April 2024 the U.S. Department of Justice expanded its CRIPA investigation of Georgia prisons to include restrictive housing, disciplinary practices and special education services; the findings report issued 1 October 2024 addressed only the violence and sexual-abuse prongs and found that "GDC fails to control violence even in its segregated housing units and exposes incarcerated persons to an unreasonable risk of harm due to its inappropriate use of segregated housing." The restrictive-housing findings have not been released, and the absence should be treated as a live, dated gap rather than as evidence about Georgia's Tier population either way (#19311). No court has made a finding that Georgia uses Tier placement to retaliate for protected activity; GPS's case-law corpus returns nothing for retaliatory segregation in Georgia, but the corpus is post-conviction and habeas weighted and its silence is not itself evidence of absence (#19312). SCHR's Georgia State Prison class action (filed September 2021) is the closest thing to Tier II-specific litigation in GPS's corpora, and it is a serious-mental-illness and conditions case, not a retaliation case (#19328). Two structural facts bear on the retaliation question: SOP 227.02 prohibits retaliation for filing a grievance but makes involuntary assignments to Administrative Segregation non-grievable, routing the remedy into the classification appeal that tests whether placement criteria are met and does not test motive, and which terminates with the Warden (#19319); and SOP 227.02 requires that "A Grievance must not be placed in the Offender's file or referred to in SCRIBE case notes," while SOP 209.08 conditions release from Tier II on the Unit Manager's review in SCRIBE of disciplinary reports, case notes, incident reports and other records — the one record that would show a grievance preceded a Tier placement is, by GDC policy, absent from both the file and the SCRIBE case notes that help determine whether a person leaves Tier II (#19320). The records that would settle the retaliation question for any individual are the SCRIBE Tier assignment record and the 90-day review forms set against that person's grievance filing dates; in aggregate, Tier II and Tier III placements by facility and month cross-tabulated against grievance filings by the same individuals, and the Director of Field Operations' Tier release decisions with stated reasons (#19314).

Records strategy and documentary conflicts. The records that would answer the scale question are named in GDC's own policy and annual reports, and the strategy is to ask for existing records, not analysis — because GDC's standard objection is that compiling a count creates a new record, an objection answered by GDC's own FY2019 and FY2020 annual reports and by the Accountability Log being printed daily by policy. The primary ask is a report or query extract from SCRIBE listing, as of a date certain, every person assigned a Tier II, Tier II STEP, Tier III, Tier III STEP, administrative segregation, disciplinary isolation or protective custody housing status or profile, with facility, housing unit or wing, phase, date of initial assignment and cumulative days in that status, produced in native electronic format (O.C.G.A. § 50-18-71(f)), naming the Tier II SCRIBE module (live March 2019) and the Warden's Dashboard field for "number of days an offender has spent in restrictive housing Tier II" (FY2020) explicitly (#19300, #19309). Fallback asks include the Accountability Log required by SOP 209.06, 209.07 and 209.09 — a same-day, cell-by-cell, bed-by-bed census of each Tier unit recording cell number, bed number, offender name, offender number, race, in or out time, assignment and destination, "printed daily after 1800 hours"; the segregation admissions and releases register; the Restrictive Housing Rounds Log (form M40-01-01) required weekly by SOP 508.20; the Sick Call Encounter Log for Restrictive Housing (form P-03-0005-11); Division Director approvals for isolation beyond 30 days under Board Rule 125-3-2-.10(f); the quarterly over-24-month Tier III panel reviews (Attachment 12) plus the Commissioner's personal approvals; the SMU Warden's written notices to the North Region Director under SOP 209.09 Section IV.E.1.l; the Electronic Logbook door sheets and unit logs; and the current Tier facility designation and facility security-level assignment lists (#19296, #19309, #19350, #19351). The request should run across the whole vocabulary — Tier I, Tier II, Tier III, extended restrictive housing, restrictive housing, administrative segregation, disciplinary isolation and protective custody — because GDC's terminology drifts by year and because SOP 209.45 and 209.55 state affirmatively that "The Tier II STEP is not a restrictive housing unit" and "The Tier III STEP is not a restrictive housing unit," a definitional carve-out that will shrink any production framed on a single term (#19309, #19333). GDC has demonstrated that it will run and produce a per-facility housing count query — request R024615-101925, filed 2025-10-19 and completed, requested a count of inmates by security designation at each state prison, and GDC produced per-facility tables — which materially strengthens a request for a per-facility Tier placement count and undercuts a burden or new-record objection to one. No GPS open-records request has yet asked for Tier or segregation population data (#19310). Against this, SOP 219.01 asserts that "Offender records are confidential state secrets under O.C.G.A. § 42-5-36(c)" and directs that individual-record requests be forwarded to the GDC Office of Legal Services; a request framed around individual records will meet that exemption, but a request framed around aggregate counts, unit rosters stripped of names, and designation and capacity documents will not (#19296). The corpus also contains documented defects in GDC's own published record that any figure drawn from it must account for: Georgia State Prison's "Cycle 3" PREA audit is the Cycle 2 audit republished, identical after whitespace normalisation, and must not be counted twice; Emanuel Women's Facility's Cycle 5 audit is published twice; Telfair's Cycle 4 audit internally contradicts itself on administrative-segregation beds; several prisons' Pre-Audit Questionnaire segregation fields contradict the same audit's own narrative; and label defects leave the unit of measure undetermined in the Washington, Dooly and Pulaski audits (#19400, #19408, #19409, #19411, #19413). The word "tier" in a PREA audit usually means the upper or lower gallery of a cellblock, not the Tier programme, and is excluded throughout; a single sentence of GDC policy boilerplate about delayed PREA education appears in roughly 60 audits of facilities with no Tier housing and produces a badly inflated facility list on a naive keyword search (#19401, #19402, #19515). GDC's PREA audit URLs are not uniformly patterned and must never be constructed by pattern (#19569, #19570, #19571). The record also contains unresolved conflicts that GPS should record rather than resolve: SOP 209.08's internal numbering is defective (two consecutive sections lettered D, a broken cross-reference, a miscount of the eligibility criteria), and the copy in the inmate library is the document a person would check the rules governing indefinite segregation against (#19295); ACA restrictive-housing standards are cited by number as the authority for the Tier SOPs but are not public and are not held by GPS, so GPS currently cannot say whether Georgia's Tier programmes meet the standards GDC itself cites as their authority (#19332). Whether GDC operates a Tier II programme for women, and if not what long-term segregation mechanism applies to women, is not answered anywhere in the SOP corpus or the published fact sheets GPS holds; the record that would answer it is the current facility designation document (#19365). And a keyword search for "Tier II" across all published GPS posts returns zero results: GPS has published extensively on retaliation and on conditions without ever publishing on the Tier system (#19316).