A mother asked how to get a medical power of attorney or a HIPAA release for her son in a Georgia prison. Here is the answer from GDC’s own policies and the state’s own forms: two documents he has to sign, and one rule that says the warden is supposed to call you first.
A 1984 rule says the warden shall notify a prisoner’s family when he is badly hurt. Family after family since December 2024 found out instead from an intern, a contraband phone, other prisoners or Facebook. The Department told the men at Autry there was no outbreak. And the statute that makes every inmate file a state secret is missing the one sentence the Parole Board’s has.
A tactical squad spent five hours turning out F2 dorm at Wilcox State Prison, then left at noon. The men were let out to shower. By two the coroner was called. GDC’s own policies have four pages on the squad and no page for the hour after.
Georgia ended direct family packages and funneled families to one vendor: Union Supply. Single T-shirts at $4.55–$9.25 plus shipping and tax, packed by incarcerated women at Arrendale — and the state has never disclosed its cut.
When the U.S. Department of Justice concluded in October 2024 that conditions in Georgia’s prisons violate the Eighth Amendment, it relied on the federal Constitution’s familiar ban on cruel and…
Georgia’s public-health agency confirmed Legionella in a South Georgia prison’s water. Thirty days later, the corrections department told the men living there — in writing — that no outbreak existed. The contamination, and the antibiotics, followed them to the next prison.
Georgia has commanded its prison system to separate dangerous inmates since 1897, and the legislature declared every person’s right to be safe from gang violence — yet the state enforces neither. The fix isn’t a new law. It’s finishing the one already on the books.
A sixth statewide lockdown began after deadly gang violence at Ware State Prison. Georgia Prisoners’ Speak has demanded gang separation for fifteen months — a reform that costs almost nothing and that Texas, Arizona, and California proved cuts violence. Georgia keeps choosing the body count instead.
Georgia spends $1.60 a day to feed 53,000 incarcerated adults — about 13,000 of them over fifty, some on these trays for decades. The bodies arrive at the morgue marked cardiac arrest, organ failure, natural causes. The medical literature, going back eighty years, calls it starvation.
Three of Georgia’s 35 prisons are fully air-conditioned. More than 13,000 incarcerated Georgians are 50 or older. As another deadly summer arrives — and federal courts call prison heat unconstitutional — Georgia’s aging prisoners are stacked into uncooled dorms with no published heat ceiling.