You’ve seen one. Maybe it came from a cousin, maybe from a stranger’s page you’d never visited. A phone held low in a dormitory, the picture shaking, a crowd of men and then a sound you wish you hadn’t heard. Or a man on a bunk, eyes open and nobody home, while someone laughs off camera. The comments underneath say what they always say. Animals. Throw away the key.
I understand why. I’ve felt it too. This is a piece about what those videos are actually showing you, and it isn’t what the comments think.
The federal government has watched the same clips. In its findings on Georgia’s prisons, published on October 1, 2024, the Department of Justice described “a steady stream of contraband cellphone videos and photographs appearing to show assaults, incarcerated people with injuries, weapons, and incarcerated people who seem to be under the influence of illicit drugs.” 1 It didn’t read them as evidence against the men in them. It read them as evidence against the state, and concluded that Georgia “fails to protect incarcerated people from violence and harm by other incarcerated people in violation of the Eighth Amendment.”
That’s the whole argument, and the rest of this piece is the evidence for it. But stay with the room for a moment first.
The room the video was filmed in
Picture the dormitory. Sixty, eighty, a hundred men in one open space, bunks in rows, one door. The officer who’s supposed to be on that floor isn’t there, because there isn’t one. The Department of Justice found correctional officer “vacancy rates around 50% systemwide and over 70% at ten of the largest facilities.” 2 Half the posts are empty. At ten prisons, more than two thirds.
Here is what the federal investigators said happens in a room like that:
“With housing units left unsupervised for sustained periods of time, incarcerated persons can engage in illicit activities, including exchanging contraband, abusing drugs, making homemade weapons, fetching contraband via drone drops, and engaging in violent assaults. Violent incidents are more likely to occur. Gangs and other threat groups tend to step in to fill the void in leadership, telling people where they can or can’t sleep and exerting control over prison life.” 3
Read that once more, slowly. Telling people where they can or can’t sleep. The state built a room, put a hundred men in it, and walked away. Somebody was going to run it. The video is a recording of who did.
The drugs come in the same way. The report found that officers who were supposed to be guarding the perimeter were pulled inside to cover the empty posts, “leaving the perimeter more vulnerable to contraband introduction.” 4 The man on the bunk with nobody home didn’t grow what he took. Someone carried it past a fence nobody was watching.
“It’s the people, not the place”
That’s the answer you’ll hear, and it deserves a straight reply, because it’s half true.
Georgia’s own prison agency made the argument to the federal investigators: the violence is the gangs, and the men are there for violent crimes. The investigators checked. The share of men in Georgia’s prisons sentenced for violent crimes rose from about 51 percent in 2016 to 56 percent in 2023, and that, they wrote, “does not explain the dramatic rise in violence in the prisons over the past five or so years.” Prisons with relatively few gang members had high homicide counts too. 5 Same kind of men, far more killing. The thing that changed was the place.
The research says the same, and it says it carefully. Nobody serious claims that character doesn’t matter. What the studies find is that character and conditions multiply each other. One study of 1,054 men in thirty prisons found that age and aggression predicted who assaulted whom, and then found this: “aggressive inmates were found to commit more assaults in prisons that were more crowded.” 6 The disposition is real. The crowding is what turns it loose.
The psychologist who has studied this longest, Craig Haney, wrote for the federal government about what living in a dangerous place with no exit does to a person: hypervigilance, distrust, a readiness to strike first. He was precise about what those are. “It is important to emphasize that these are the natural and normal adaptations made by prisoners in response to the unnatural and abnormal conditions of prisoner life,” he wrote. “They are ‘normal’ reactions to a set of pathological conditions.” 7
Normal reactions. To pathological conditions. That is a scientist’s way of saying what a mother of a man inside says in fewer words: you’d act like that too, if you lived there.
What Georgia did to hope
There’s a second thing the state took out of those rooms, and Georgia is the place it was measured.
In 1998 Georgia’s Parole Board began requiring people convicted of twenty violent crimes to serve ninety percent of their sentence before they could be considered for release. 8 A Princeton economist, Ilyana Kuziemko, later used the state’s own records on 78,393 people to ask what that did to behaviour inside. Men who lost the prospect of earlier release broke more rules: disciplinary infractions rose by about 0.098 a year against an average of 0.774, roughly a thirteen percent increase. They also stopped bettering themselves. They completed about 0.13 fewer programs a year, when the average man completes under 0.6. 9
Her study also found those men came back to prison more often after release. That finding was later re-examined by another researcher using her own code and Georgia’s data, and he wasn’t persuaded: “I remain unconvinced that imposing the 90% minimums affected return-to-prison rates other than by reducing parole time.” 10 The in-prison findings, the rule-breaking and the abandoned programs, he didn’t re-examine, and they stand. Take from it only what it can carry: when Georgia told men that nothing they did would change their release date, more of them stopped trying. A correctional officers’ union president, quoted in the study, put it in one line: what carrot or stick is there for inmates?
“The state” is a vague word for what happened in those rooms, so let me be plain about who decided. The General Assembly wrote the sentences and votes the budget that leaves half the officer posts empty. The Governor appoints the five members of the Parole Board, and the Board decided, without a vote by anyone the public elects, how much of each sentence would be served inside. The Department of Corrections runs the buildings those choices fill. GPS has written about the Board’s part in The Amplifier. This piece is about the rooms those decisions produced.
Why the videos land the way they do
If the evidence is this clear, why does the comment section say animals?
Part of the answer is old. Researchers have known for a quarter century that watching crime on a screen makes people want harsher punishment. In one landmark study of Los Angeles local news, murder made up 17 percent of the crime stories and less than one percent of the crime, and watching a single violent crime story measurably raised viewers’ support for punitive policy. 11 The phone in the dormitory is that newscast with the editor removed.
Part of it is newer, and it’s about the word itself. Psychologists have tested what happens when people see offenders as less than human. In three experiments, dehumanising a person “predicted punishment independently of the effects of crime type or crime severity.” 12 Independently of what the person did. Once he’s an animal, what he did stops mattering, and so does what was done to him. The same line of research found one thing that reverses it: contact. 13 Knowing one person inside.
The part that might surprise you
Here’s what I didn’t expect to find. The public already knows.
Ask Americans what to spend money on and two thirds say the causes of crime, drug addiction, homelessness, mental health, rather than more enforcement. Sixty-seven percent to twenty-nine. 14 Ask whether prisons rehabilitate the people in them and sixteen percent say yes. 15 The criminologists who have studied public opinion longest concluded that support for get-tough policy is, in their word, “mushy”: people will say tough when asked to choose between tough and nothing, and choose rehabilitation the moment it’s offered. 16
So the person watching that video and typing “animals” also believes, if you ask them a different question, that prisons don’t fix anyone and that the money would be better spent upstream. They hold both. They’ve never been asked to connect them.
The connection is the video. It isn’t evidence that the men inside can’t be reached. It’s evidence of what a building does to people when the state stops running it, filmed by the people it’s being done to, and posted because they have no other way to tell you.
What to see next time
Next time one of those clips crosses your screen, before the comments, ask three questions the federal investigators asked.
Where was the officer? At half of Georgia’s posts, and two thirds at the worst prisons, the answer is nowhere.
Who was running that room? The report’s answer is the gangs, because the state left.
And what would you do, in a room like that, on year six of a sentence with no date on the end of it?
The man in the video is going to come home. Most of them do. The question the video actually asks is what kind of place we sent him to, and what we expect to get back.
Call to Action: What You Can Do
You just read that half of Georgia's prison posts are empty and gangs decide where men sleep. If you don't share this, the next video someone posts will still be read as proof the men are animals, not as evidence the state walked away. Sharing this is the least you can do.
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.
Part of Something Bigger
This article is part of the GPS Reform Agenda, two active campaigns to transform Georgia’s criminal justice system.
Three model bills for the 2027 Georgia legislature. The legislature doesn’t need new laws. It needs to enforce two dormant statutes it already passed.
End the Warehouse THIS SERIES
Transform Georgia’s prisons from punishment to rehabilitation. Two tracks: litigation to reduce overcrowding + evidence-based programs that work.
Read the full GPS Reform Agenda
Further Reading
The Amplifier: How Five Unelected Officials Turned Georgia’s Prisons Into a Constitutional Crisis
How the Parole Board took the part of the sentence meant to be served in the community and moved it behind the wall.
Georgia’s $40 Billion Mistake: How Bad Science and Federal Bribes Created a Constitutional Crisis
The laws behind the ninety percent policy, the federal money that rewarded them, and the research showing what they did.
How four overlapping policies turned parole in Georgia into a promise the state rarely keeps.
The Board That Stopped Saying Yes
Georgia’s lifer parole collapse, told in the Parole Board’s own numbers.
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 running record of assaults and homicides in Georgia’s prisons, the facilities where they cluster, and what the state has said about them.
Vacancy rates by facility and over time, and the federal findings on what an unsupervised housing unit becomes.
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 →- DOJ findings report on the investigation of Georgia prisons October 1 2024 page 21, https://www.justice.gov/d9/2024-09/findings_report_-_investigation_of_georgia_prisons.pdf [↩]
- DOJ findings report on the investigation of Georgia prisons October 1 2024 page 4, https://www.justice.gov/d9/2024-09/findings_report_-_investigation_of_georgia_prisons.pdf [↩]
- DOJ findings report on the investigation of Georgia prisons October 1 2024 page 29, https://www.justice.gov/d9/2024-09/findings_report_-_investigation_of_georgia_prisons.pdf [↩]
- DOJ findings report on the investigation of Georgia prisons October 1 2024 page 52, https://www.justice.gov/d9/2024-09/findings_report_-_investigation_of_georgia_prisons.pdf [↩]
- DOJ findings report on the investigation of Georgia prisons October 1 2024 page 19, https://www.justice.gov/d9/2024-09/findings_report_-_investigation_of_georgia_prisons.pdf [↩]
- Lahm 2008 Inmate-On-Inmate Assault A Multilevel Examination of Prison Violence, https://doi.org/10.1177/0093854807308730 [↩]
- Haney 2001 The Psychological Impact of Incarceration US Department of Health and Human Services, https://aspe.hhs.gov/reports/psychological-impact-incarceration-implications-post-prison-adjustment [↩]
- Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles FY2004 Annual Report page 26, https://pap.georgia.gov/document/document/annual-report-2004/download [↩]
- Kuziemko How Should Inmates Be Released From Prison Quarterly Journal of Economics 2013, https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjs052 [↩]
- Roodman reanalysis of the Kuziemko Georgia parole study, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2007.10268 [↩]
- Gilliam and Iyengar 2000 Prime Suspects The Influence of Local Television News on the Viewing Public, https://doi.org/10.2307/2669264 [↩]
- Bastian Denson and Haslam 2013 The Roles of Dehumanization and Moral Outrage in Retributive Justice, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0061842 [↩]
- Viki and colleagues 2012 The Role of Dehumanization in Attitudes Toward the Social Exclusion and Rehabilitation of Sex Offenders, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1559-1816.2012.00944.x [↩]
- Gallup October 2025 Americans prefer tempered crime-fighting methods, https://news.gallup.com/poll/697244/americans-prefer-tempered-crime-fighting-methods.aspx [↩]
- Gallup November 2025 prison system rated high on security low on reform, https://news.gallup.com/poll/697472/prison-system-rated-high-security-low-reform.aspx [↩]
- Cullen Fisher and Applegate 2000 Public Opinion about Punishment and Corrections, https://doi.org/10.1086/652198 [↩]