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.
Georgia Correctional Industries took $325.7M from GDC over eight years — a mandatory, no-bid “preferred source” running farms and factories on $0 wages. Its books don’t show the food split, its workforce is also its consumer, and the law wrote it that way.
Georgia’s 2024 prison mortality report has a column headed “Cause of Death.” It is empty for all 330 people. For one month in January 2025 the state filled it in — and 41 percent of the deaths were homicides. Then the column disappeared.
Georgia poured $2.4 billion in new money into its prisons since 2021 — on top of $12.2 billion spent since 2020 — and bought the deadliest years in the system’s history. Follow the money to see who really built the crisis, and why firing one commissioner fixes nothing.
There is a moment that repeats itself in the accounts families send to Georgia Prisoners’ Speak, so often that it has stopped looking like coincidence. A person in a Georgia…
Three independent authorities have reached the same conclusion about Georgia’s prisons: they are failing, dangerously, and the state knows it. The U.S. Department of Justice found the system unconstitutional. 1…
Courage didn’t end the injustices we teach as history — documentation did. From John Howard to Ida B. Wells, reformers won by making suffering impossible to deny. GPS is that method turned on Georgia’s prisons, with the entire record now given freely to the world.
Every harm this series documented flows from one choice: Georgia warehouses people instead of preparing them to return. There is a proven alternative — normalization — that is humane, far cheaper, and may be legally required. The finale of End the Warehouse, and the blueprint out.
Georgia treats family contact — the strongest predictor of going straight — as a privilege to ration and revoke: phone lists capped at twenty, visitation lists changeable only in May and November. An investigation into the connection the state severs by design, and the cheap fix it refuses.
Georgia stripped its prisons of work, hope, and a future — and some people answer that emptiness not with drugs or the gang, but by going silent and disappearing while still alive. An investigation into the despair the state manufactures by policy, refuses to treat, and declines to count.