On the evening of 2 September 2026, a Butts County deputy pulled a car over on Interstate 75 southbound and smelled marijuana. The driver consented to a search. Inside were two large drones and packages of tobacco, marijuana, ecstasy, hydrocodone and other painkillers, shanks, knives, cellphones and chargers 1.
None of it was going to Butts County. Investigators believed the load was bound for a state prison in South Georgia.
Six weeks earlier, on 21 July, deputies from the same office stopped another car on the same interstate and found a large drone, about six ounces of MDMA, 15 pounds of cigarette tobacco, five pounds of marijuana, knives, dozens of cellphones, a PlayStation console and chargers. Two men from Riverdale and Decatur were arrested. Deputies believed that load was headed for Ware State Prison in Waycross, roughly 200 miles south of the traffic stop 2.
Butts County isn’t where this contraband was going. It’s the road it travelled on. And the county is paying to police it.
The sheriff
Gary Long is the sheriff of Butts County, a Republican, an elected law enforcement officer in a county that hosts the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison. He has spent the summer of 2026 saying things about the Georgia Department of Corrections that GDC’s critics normally have to say for themselves.
After the September stop he posted publicly:
“In my opinion, the Georgia Department of Corrections has become the largest taxpayer-funded gang recruitment center in the state.”
He went on: “Another load of drugs, weapons, and contraband intercepted before it reached a state prison. This isn’t isolated. It’s a pattern. Every election, we hear promises about safer communities, but how can anyone promise safer communities outside the prison walls when the state can’t control what is happening inside them?”
In July he’d made the institutional version of the same argument, that when prisons are run by violence and criminal enterprise rather than order, the consequences don’t stay behind the wall. “Many offenders eventually return to our communities, and when they leave prison with stronger ties to criminal organizations than when they entered, the cycle of crime continues to grow” 3.
The state agrees, in writing
The Georgia General Assembly has already conceded Long’s premise. It did so in a budget document.
The House Budget and Research Office, describing the House version of the amended Fiscal Year 2026 budget:
The House also funds $1.5 million for a new reimbursement program to target and relieve the burden on local jails when more than 20 percent of the jail’s capacity is occupied by detainees charged with contraband or drone-related offenses tied to state prisons but are unable to make bail.
The paragraph continues in language worth reading slowly:
Long-term housing of these detainees has become a burden to small counties with limited resources. These rural counties are instrumental in the capture of these detainees; expending their own resources, purchasing drones to help detect contraband runners, and utilizing county personnel to help the state capture the individuals perpetrating dangerous gang-related contraband drops into our state prisons.
Help the state capture. The state’s own budget writers describe rural counties buying drones with county money to catch people delivering contraband to state prisons, then housing those people in county jails for a year or more awaiting trial because they can’t make bail.
The Fiscal Year 2027 budget adds a second line: $1 million to the Judicial Council to contract with the Council of Superior Court Judges, the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council and the Georgia Public Defender Council, for what the General Assembly calls “the express purpose of speedy adjudication of individuals held in county jails charged with crimes specifically related to state prison contraband” 5.
Georgia has created a funding stream for county courts clogged by state prison cases. That’s what the line item is.
What twenty percent looks like
The threshold is 20 percent of a jail’s capacity. Washington County clears it twice over.
Sheriff Joel Cochran, whose county holds Washington State Prison at Davisboro, told 13WMAZ in October 2025 that 75 of the 170 people in his jail were facing prison-delivery charges, or 44 percent. By March 2026 he put it at 33 percent, and called that an improvement 6.
“Right now, I’ve got 44% of my population in the county jail related to prison drop cases there at the Washington State Prison,” Cochran said in the earlier interview. “For me, that seems like a lot, and it’s a burden on the taxpayers.”
The interdiction figures behind those bookings: 21 attempted drone drops stopped at Washington State Prison in 2024, producing 43 to 45 arrests. Five more drops and 11 arrests in the first quarter of 2025 alone 7. Statewide, GDC has logged more than 1,000 drone incidents at or near its prisons since 2022.
Cochran’s second ask shows how deep the cost runs. “Our court system just here in Washington County is really clogged up with these types of cases,” he said. “I actually hope the court system can benefit some from this too, to add on some prosecutors and add on maybe another judge to help move some of these cases along quicker.”
A rural county is asking the state to fund an additional judge, because of prosecutions generated by a state prison.
Every dollar points the same direction
Add up what Georgia is spending on this problem and a pattern emerges in the direction of travel.
- $1.5 million to reimburse county jails holding contraband detainees
- $1 million to speed the resulting prosecutions
- $15.2 million in the amended FY2026 budget for security technology to detect and prevent the introduction of contraband
- $6.96 million in FY2027 for the Overwatch and Logistics unit: cameras, body cameras, transport monitoring, drone detection, licence plate readers, radar
Roads. Woodlines. Airspace. Perimeter. Every instrument Georgia has bought points outward, at the supply chain a deputy can see from a patrol car.
There’s a second channel, and it doesn’t cross a county road.
The front door
In September 2023, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that at least 360 employees of Georgia’s state prison system had been arrested on accusations of smuggling contraband since 2018, with 25 more fired over smuggling allegations without being arrested. At least 13 held the rank of sergeant or above. Commissioner Tyrone Oliver acknowledged in the same reporting that contraband is the driving force behind violence inside Georgia’s prisons and violence that spills into the communities outside them 8.
That number came from a newspaper counting cases one at a time. It didn’t come from the state, and the state doesn’t publish its equivalent.
It used to. Before 2016, GDC’s contraband arrest pages carried a two-part headline: More Than [X] Civilians, [Y] Staff Arrested to Date. In October 2012 it read 516 civilians and 92 staff. By September 2015 it read 792 civilians and 195 staff, so civilian arrests rose 53 percent over the period while staff arrests rose 112 percent. From 25 August 2019 onward, every GDC contraband report has carried a single merged figure: approximately N staff and civilians 9. The split hasn’t been published since.
This matters for the counties specifically, and the reason is structural.
A sheriff can only arrest what crosses his county. Cochran’s deputies catch drone operators on Jordan Mill Pond Road. Long’s deputies catch couriers on I-75. Those arrests are visible, countable, and they land in a county jail, which is why they show up in a state budget document as a line item with a 20 percent threshold attached.
Staff walk in the front door. No county deputy is positioned to intercept them, no traffic stop generates the case, and the arrest, where it happens at all, is made by GDC’s own Office of Professional Standards. The one public series that counted those arrests separately was discontinued. Georgia is now funding, measuring and reimbursing interdiction of the channel it can see, and has stopped publishing the number that would size the channel it can’t.
The number the sheriff doesn’t have
In the same September statement, Long wrote that since 2020, more than 1,500 people have died in the custody of the Georgia Department of Corrections.
GPS’s independent mortality registry records 1,895 deaths in GDC custody between 1 January 2020 and 5 September 2026 10. Long’s floor sits at least 395 below that count, and GPS’s own figure is itself a floor: GDC reports deaths roughly two months late, and stopped publishing cause of death in March 2024 11.
Long isn’t a critic the department can dismiss. He’s a sitting Republican sheriff, aligned with the state’s law enforcement apparatus, making a public safety argument about a state agency. He’s also arguing from a number nearly 400 short, because no state source would have given him a better one.
That’s the same condition the counties are in on contraband. They’re absorbing the cost of a problem they can’t measure, generated by facilities they don’t run, and the entity holding the underlying data publishes the half that points away from itself.
What Georgia bought
Set the appropriations side by side. Georgia’s approved FY2027 budget for the Department of Corrections is $1.79 billion in total funds, and FY2025 actual spending was $1.91 billion 12. Against that, the state has appropriated $1.5 million to reimburse the county jails and $1 million to unclog the county courts.
The counties aren’t asking for much, and they aren’t asking as reformers. Cochran wants a judge. Long wants the legislature to look inside the walls. Neither is arguing that Georgia should incarcerate fewer people.
What they’re describing is a state prison system whose failures have become a line item in somebody else’s budget, and a state that keeps counting the deliveries it catches on the highway while it has retired the count of the ones that walk in wearing a uniform.
Where GPS stands
Everything above describes an enforcement problem. GPS’s position is that Georgia is solving the wrong one.
The contraband economy exists because of prohibition. Take away the prohibition and you take away the market, the smuggling routes, the drone flights, the traffic stops, the county jail beds and the gang revenue that all of it feeds. GPS’s position is this: to fix the contraband problem, stop prohibiting so much.
Legalise cellphones. Phones are the single largest driver of contraband demand in Georgia’s prisons, and the harm people rightly worry about is specific: criminal enterprises, mostly gang-run, using contraband phones to run fraud schemes against the public. That harm comes from phones nobody can see. Georgia has already bought the infrastructure to see them. The state is spending $6.96 million in FY2027 on the Overwatch and Logistics unit and put $15.2 million into contraband detection technology in the amended FY2026 budget, and it is currently procuring a new offender communications contract 13. Sanctioned phones running on a monitored network can be screened with AI at scale. Fraud rings would be identifiable in near real time and stoppable immediately. A contraband phone in a wall cavity can’t be monitored at all. Prohibition is what makes these phones invisible.
Legalise tobacco. Tobacco is the other volume driver. Look at what the sheriffs are actually seizing: 15 pounds of cigarette tobacco in the July Butts County stop, 866 pounds of tobacco recovered from drone drops statewide in 2024, 8,649 grams in a single GDCP interception. A legal product, sold at commissary, generates no smuggling route and no gang margin.
Restore family food and clothing packages. Packages sent from home were curtailed on the premise that contraband arrives from outside. Restoring them removes a category of scarcity that the illicit market currently supplies.
Marijuana is the remaining driver. It’s illegal in Georgia, though many states have legalised it, and it accounts for a large share of every seizure listed above.
Legalise these things and the contraband problem largely dissolves, along with much of the economic power the gangs derive from controlling their supply. The drones stop flying because there’s nothing worth flying in.
GPS also reiterates a position it has held throughout: gangs must be separated from one another and from the general population. Georgia’s classification statute has required meaningful separation since 1897 and the state does not do it. No amount of perimeter technology substitutes for housing people so that predatory organisations can’t recruit, extort and kill at will.
The punishment is the loss of liberty. It isn’t supposed to be anything else.
Call to Action: What You Can Do
Washington County's jail hit 44 percent capacity with prison contraband cases while the state stopped counting staff smuggling arrests in 2019. Sharing this story is the least you can do. If you stay silent, the next sheriff asking for a judge is on his own.
Spread the Word — It Takes One Click
Awareness without action changes nothing. Here’s how you can help push for accountability and real reform:
Join the GPS Advocacy Network: Sign up at https://gps.press/become-an-advocate/ and we’ll advocate on your behalf every week. GPS identifies your state legislators, crafts personalized letters on the most pressing prison issues, and sends them directly to the representatives who represent you. You receive a copy of every letter. It takes two minutes to sign up, and we handle the rest.
Send a 60-Second Message: Pick an issue, get a ready-to-edit message with the verified facts already in it, and email your state House representative and senator directly from your own inbox at https://gps.press/send-a-message/. No signup, nothing stored. It takes about a minute.
Tell My Story: Are you or a loved one affected by Georgia’s prison system? GPS publishes first-person accounts from incarcerated people and their families. Submit your story at https://gps.press/category/tellmystory/ and help the world understand what’s really happening behind the walls.
Contact Your Representatives: Your state legislators control GDC’s budget, oversight, and the laws that created these failures. Find your Georgia legislators at https://gps.press/find-your-legislator/ or call Governor Kemp at (404) 656-1776 or the GDC Commissioner at (478) 992-5246.
Demand Media Coverage: Contact newsrooms at the AJC, local TV stations, and national criminal justice outlets. More coverage means more pressure.
Amplify on Social Media: Share this article and tag @GovKemp, @GDC_Georgia, and your local representatives. Use #GAPrisons, #PrisonReform, #GeorgiaPrisonerSpeak.
Message the Board of Corrections: The citizen board that oversees the GDC publishes no contact details for its members. GPS built the missing front door: pick a board member and a policy message and send it from your own email at https://gps.press/write-the-board/.
File Public Records Requests: Georgia’s Open Records Act gives every citizen the right to request incident reports, death records, staffing data, medical logs, and financial documents. Start with the GPS Action Toolkits at https://gps.press/toolkits/. The Open Records Toolkit walks you through what to ask for, gives you ready-to-file request templates, and tells you what to do when the state says no. File directly with GDC at https://georgiadcor.govqa.us/WEBAPP/_rs/SupportHome.aspx.
Attend Public Meetings: The Georgia Board of Corrections and legislative committees hold public meetings. Your presence is noticed.
Contact the Department of Justice: File civil rights complaints at https://civilrights.justice.gov. Federal oversight has forced abusive systems to change before.
Support Organizations Doing This Work: Donate to or volunteer with Georgia-based prison reform groups fighting for change on the ground.
Vote: Research candidates’ positions on criminal justice. Primary elections often determine outcomes in Georgia.
Contact GPS: If you have information about conditions inside Georgia’s prisons, reach us securely at GPS.press.
Further Reading
$150 Million to Watch Them Die: Georgia’s OWL Surveillance Goes Live
The surveillance unit that FY2027 funds with a further $6.96 million, and what it was actually built to do.
What’s Really Behind Georgia’s Prison Crisis?
The structural conditions that make contraband, violence and gang control self-sustaining inside Georgia’s prisons.
Two Commanders Say Georgia Hides Its Prison Staffing Crisis
Named former GDC supervisors on the staffing reality behind the state’s published numbers.
The Swing Space That Wasn’t: 524 New Beds, a Border-Wall Family, and No Contract Georgia Will Show
How GDC spends on capacity, and what the state will and won’t disclose about it.
At Least Nineteen: The Murders the State Didn’t Prosecute
What happens to prosecutions when violence inside a state prison lands in a rural county’s justice system.
GPS Intelligence System
The GPS Intelligence System maintains living research profiles that aggregate data, news, settlements, and analysis on Georgia’s prisons and the issues defining them. The profiles below provide deeper context for the issues raised in this article:
The facility at the centre of Georgia’s drone smuggling corridor, and the source of the cases filling Washington County’s jail.
GPS’s running record of GDC employee arrests, discipline and corruption, the channel no county deputy is positioned to intercept.
Explore the Data
GPS makes GDC statistics accessible to the public through several resources:
- GPS Statistics Portal: Interactive dashboards translating complex GDC reports into accessible formats, updated within days of official releases.
- GPS Lighthouse AI: Ask questions about Georgia’s prison system and get answers drawn from GPS’s investigative archive and data analysis.
- GPS llms.txt: A single machine-readable index of every GPS data resource, published using the open llms.txt standard. Point any AI tool (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity) at this URL and the model can navigate to facility profiles, intelligence briefs, mortality records, statistics, and the full investigative archive, with no other configuration needed. It is the fastest way to ground an AI conversation in verified GPS data.
- GPS Public MCP Server: For AI tools that support the Model Context Protocol (Claude, ChatGPT, and others), connect directly to GPS’s data: 12 read-only tools covering population, facilities, mortality, parole, the Georgia Code, settlements, and more. Every answer arrives with its source link and citation built in.
For a walkthrough of how to put these resources to work with AI, see How to Use GPS Data with AI Tools: a step-by-step guide for researchers, advocates, families, and journalists analyzing Georgia prison conditions, statistics, and policy with tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.
Contact GPS at media@gps.press for access to underlying datasets used in this analysis.
About Georgia Prisoners’ Speak (GPS)
Georgia Prisoners’ Speak (GPS) is a nonprofit investigative newsroom built in partnership with incarcerated reporters, families, advocates, and data analysts. Operating independently from the Georgia Department of Corrections, GPS documents the truth the state refuses to acknowledge: extreme violence, fatal medical neglect, gang-controlled dorms, collapsed staffing, fraudulent reporting practices, and unconstitutional conditions across Georgia’s prisons.
Through confidential reporting channels, secure communication, evidence verification, public-records requests, legislative research, and professional investigative standards, GPS provides the transparency the system lacks. Our mission is to expose abuses, protect incarcerated people, support families, and push Georgia toward meaningful reform based on human rights, evidence, and public accountability.
Every article is part of a larger fight: to end the silence, reveal the truth, and demand justice.
The Architecture Is the Evidence
Georgia built prisons for 24,657. They warehouse 52,771.
Dorms tripled. Cells double- and triple-bunked. Medical, kitchens, libraries — unchanged. Every facility, every design figure, every source.
See the receipts →- WGXA, 1 arrested after drone contraband drop thwarted in Butts County, 3 September 2026, https://wgxa.tv/news/local/1-arrested-after-drone-contraband-drop-thwarted-in-butts-county-sheriff-calls-for-change-in-georgia-department-of-corrections-prison-system-fcc-cell-phone-jamming [↩]
- Jackson Progress-Argus, Sheriff urges change in prison system after contraband bust, 24 July 2026, https://www.jacksonprogress-argus.com/news/sheriff-urges-change-in-prison-system-after-contraband-bust/article_2c503662-1c4e-4603-bae1-1a589b7a3089.html [↩]
- news-daily.com, Butts County sheriff urges change in prison system after contraband bust, 24 July 2026, https://www.news-daily.com/news/butts-county-sheriff-urges-change-in-prison-system-after-contraband-bust/article_6113778d-86b1-506f-9c2f-0f3ee0c033f4.html [↩]
- Georgia House Budget and Research Office, Amended Fiscal Year 2026 House Highlights, 5 February 2026, page 6, https://www.legis.ga.gov/api/document/docs/default-source/house-budget-and-research-office-document-library/2026-fiscal-year/amended_fy_2026_house_highlights.pdf?sfvrsn=fb5ddfa5_2 [↩]
- Georgia House Budget and Research Office, Fiscal Year 2027 Highlights Conference Committee Final, 2 April 2026, page 7, https://www.legis.ga.gov/api/document/docs/default-source/house-budget-and-research-office-document-library/2027-fiscal-year/fy_2027_highlights_cc_final.pdf?sfvrsn=1c44f2ce_2 [↩]
- 13WMAZ, Georgia House budget targets rural jails strained by prison contraband arrests, 18 March 2026, https://www.13wmaz.com/article/news/crime/georgia-house-budget-targets-rural-jails-strained-by-prison-contraband-arrests-heres-what-we-know/93-8217abd9-3f6c-40af-bff7-0757142f641f [↩]
- WGXA, Dangerous Deliveries: Washington State Prison battles rise in drone contraband drops, https://wgxa.tv/news/local/dangerous-deliveries-washington-county-prison-battles-rise-in-drone-contraband-drops-state-prisons-drones-fcc-faa-sheriff-joel-cochran-gdc-prison-contraband-trade-narcotics-weapons-guns-drug-trade-john-fowler-gangs-daviboro-ga-cell-phone-jammers-crime [↩]
- Associated Press and Atlanta Journal-Constitution, At least 360 Georgia prison guards have been arrested for contraband since 2018, 25 September 2023, https://www.wabe.org/at-least-360-georgia-prison-guards-have-been-arrested-for-contraband-since-2018-newspaper-finds/ [↩]
- Georgia Department of Corrections, Contraband Arrests at Multiple State Prisons, 13 October 2020, https://gdc.georgia.gov/contraband-report/2020-10-13/contraband-arrests-multiple-state-prisons [↩]
- GPS Mortality Database, https://gps.press/mortality-data/ [↩]
- GPS, How We Count, https://gps.press/how-we-count/ [↩]
- GPS Budget Data, https://gps.press/budget-data/ [↩]
- Georgia Procurement Registry, Offender Communications Services RFP 46700-GDC0001179, https://ssl.doas.state.ga.us/gpr/eventDetails?eSourceNumber=46700-GDC0001179&sourceSystemType=ps [↩]