#HumanRightsInPrison

The Price of Love: How Georgia’s Prisons Bleed Families Dry

For many families in Georgia, having a loved one behind bars doesn’t mean only missing birthdays and phone calls—it means chronic financial strain. A new national study finds that families who provide direct support to incarcerated relatives spend on average 6 % of their household income each month just to cover direct costs like commissary items, hygiene products and phone calls. 
When that national figure meets the realities inside Georgia’s prison system—sky-high commissary mark‐ups, inadequate meals that force reliance on overpriced snacks—the results are devastating.

Prisneyland: What Prison Should Be

California is proving what real reform looks like.
At Valley State Prison, there were zero homicides and only one serious violent incident last year.
In Georgia, there were 333 deaths and more than 100 murders.
The difference? California invests in education and rehabilitation, not concrete and isolation.

“Prisneyland” isn’t soft — it’s smart. It’s what prison should be.

Georgia’s “Hardened” Solution: Another Fortress Instead of Reform

Georgia is spending hundreds of millions on new “hardened” prisons while people inside are starving, dying, and losing hope.

The state calls it reform, but it’s really just repackaged repression — concrete solutions to moral failures. The Department of Justice has already declared Georgia’s prisons unconstitutional, yet instead of addressing the root causes — chronic understaffing, violence, medical neglect, and starvation — the state keeps doubling down on construction contracts and calling it progress.

Prisoners are wasting away on trays of cold grits and two slices of bologna while $600 million is poured into walls, gates, and locks. If Georgia redirected even a fraction of that money to food, healthcare, and staffing, violence would drop, lives would be saved, and rehabilitation might finally mean something again.

Until Georgia chooses reform over repression, its new walls will stand as monuments to failure, not justice.