# Who Are the Victims: Victims Still > Christian Krauch was tortured for three weeks under a bunk at Macon State Prison while GDC filed 168 paper counts saying he was accounted for. He survived. Part 2 of the GPS series Who Are the Victims documents what Georgia does to the people who enter its prisons as victims first — and the federal record now in place. **Published**: 2026-05-21 **Source**: https://gps.press/who-are-the-victims-victims-still/ **Author**: Leo Alexander --- In June 2024, Christian Krauch was tortured for three weeks under a bunk at Macon State Prison while the Georgia Department of Corrections submitted 168 paper counts saying every inmate at the facility was accounted for. [GPS investigation of the torture of Christian Krauch at Macon State Prison](https://gps.press/three-weeks-under-a-bunk-torture-at-macon-state-prison/) When the state finally found him, he had been beaten, stabbed, burned with cigarettes, run through with a machete, and left for dead. Surgeons amputated his right hand and right leg. He sustained multiple brain bleeds. His memory is gone. He is alive. He is not free of what was done to him. Part 1 of this series documented a principle the Georgia legislature has now accepted: that some of the people the state incarcerates were victims before they were anything else. The Georgia Survivor Justice Act, passed in 2025, embedded that recognition in law for one narrow category of incarcerated people — survivors of domestic, family, and dating violence. The science says the same principle applies, at the population level, to a substantially larger group. This article asks a different question. Once the state has incarcerated those people — those who entered its custody as victims first, and the larger population alongside them — what does the state then do to them? The answer, increasingly, is documented. The U.S. Department of Justice, in an October 1, 2024 findings letter following a multi-year federal investigation, concluded that the State of Georgia is "deliberately indifferent" to Eighth Amendment violations across 24 of its prisons. ((U.S. Department of Justice findings letter on Georgia prisons, October 2024, [https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndga/media/1371541/dl?inline=](https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndga/media/1371541/dl?inline=) )) GPS independently tracks 1,797 deaths in GDC custody since 2020 — including 333 in 2024 alone, the deadliest year on GPS record. [GPS Mortality Database](https://gps.press/mortality-data/) The Office of Victim Services at the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles has, to GPS's knowledge, never issued a public statement addressing any of it. The category of "victim" the state recognizes ends at the moment a person becomes incarcerated. The category of harm, the category of violence, the category of injury done by the state itself — none of it counts. This is the second article in a three-part GPS series asking who actually qualifies as a victim under Georgia law and who the state has chosen to look away from. Part 1 documented who entered the system as victims first. Part 2 documents what the state has done to them once they are inside its walls. Part 3 will explain the legal architecture that makes the state's refusal explicit. ## What the State Did to Christian Krauch Glen Christian Krauch was born in 1978. He entered Georgia Department of Corrections custody on an aggravated assault conviction with a maximum release date of February 5, 2025. [GPS investigation of the torture of Christian Krauch at Macon State Prison](https://gps.press/three-weeks-under-a-bunk-torture-at-macon-state-prison/) Like a substantial fraction of the people Georgia incarcerates, he carried with him a long-standing struggle with addiction — a struggle that had preceded his incarceration by years, that the state had not addressed in any community setting before his entry into the system, and that the state would do nothing to address inside its walls. His case fits the population pattern documented in Part 1: addiction and untreated psychiatric vulnerability are among the most consistently identified pre-incarceration conditions in the criminological literature on adult offenders, and they are conditions the state itself has the institutional means to address and chooses not to. In June 2024, somewhere inside a dorm at Macon State Prison — a close-security facility in Oglethorpe, Georgia — Christian Krauch was attacked. He was bound. He was stabbed. He was burned with cigarettes. His feet were slashed. A machete was driven through his chest, piercing his lungs and heart. His jaw was crushed. Every bone in his face was shattered. His teeth were broken out. A necrotic wound the size of a saucer opened on his thigh. His ribs were broken so severely they would later need to be surgically plated. The attack continued, on and off, for three weeks. When his attackers were finally done, they pushed his barely breathing body under a lower bunk and left him to die. Every Georgia prison is required by GDC's own policy to conduct formal inmate counts eight times every twenty-four hours — at 8:00 AM, 12:00 PM, 4:30 PM, 7:00 PM, 9:00 PM, 11:00 PM, 12:00 AM, and 2:30 AM. Over three weeks, the staff at Macon State Prison would have been required to verify the location of every person in their custody approximately 168 times. Christian Krauch was hidden under a bunk in a dormitory bed-space the entire time. There are only two possibilities. Either staff walked past his bleeding, dying body 168 consecutive times without noticing. Or the counts were never conducted, and the paperwork was submitted anyway, recording that all inmates were accounted for. In both possibilities, the system reported normalcy while a man was being tortured to death inside it. The DOJ's October 2024 findings letter is explicit on this point. It documents that GDC's "grossly inadequate staffing leaves incarcerated persons unsupervised and hampers staff's ability to respond to violence." ((U.S. Department of Justice findings letter on Georgia prisons, October 2024, [https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndga/media/1371541/dl?inline=](https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndga/media/1371541/dl?inline=) )) The Guidehouse staffing assessment commissioned by Governor Kemp found that the majority of Georgia's 34 prisons had reached "emergency levels" of vacancy. In 2024, a federal judge separately found GDC guilty of "false or misleading" record-keeping conduct — including documenting that an incarcerated person had participated in activities after he had already been declared dead. If GDC will falsify a count for a dead man, it will falsify a count for a man dying under a bunk. When Krauch was finally found, he was life-flighted in a body bag to Doctor's Hospital in Augusta. He spent weeks in a coma in the ICU burn unit. The loss of blood supply to his right hand and right leg, caused by the prolonged restraint and the necrosis that had set in, forced surgeons to amputate both. He was right-handed. The brain bleeds produced permanent damage and memory loss. He survived. The state of Georgia, which had taken him into its custody, did not arrest anyone in connection with what had happened to him. It did not issue a press release. It did not make a public statement of any kind. What the state did do, two months after Christian Krauch was found nearly dead under a bunk in a facility they were responsible for securing, was promote the Chief of Security at Macon State Prison. Krauch was held in Augusta State Medical Prison through the end of his sentence. On February 5, 2025 — his exact maximum release date — the State of Georgia walked him out the door. He had no money, no insurance, no place to live, and no medical transition plan. His sister, Patience Franklin, took him in. He sleeps in her two-bedroom apartment when there is room. His wheelchair does not navigate the space. The list of medical specialists he needs reads like a hospital directory. He has applied for disability, Medicaid, and food stamps. All of them, the last time he tried, were backed up for months. "My brother said that his insides feel like they are falling out," his sister wrote in a public fundraiser she launched to keep him alive after his release. This is what the state does to the people it breaks. It uses them up. It counts them on paper while they die under bunks. And then it pushes them out the door with nothing. ## A State Already Adjudicated Deliberately Indifferent On October 1, 2024, the United States Department of Justice issued a findings letter pursuant to the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act concluding the federal government's multi-year investigation of the Georgia Department of Corrections. ((U.S. Department of Justice findings letter on Georgia prisons, October 2024, [https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndga/media/1371541/dl?inline=](https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndga/media/1371541/dl?inline=) )) The letter is not a press release. It is the formal record of the federal government's determination, after years of investigation, that the State of Georgia is operating its prisons in violation of the United States Constitution. The legal language of the findings letter matters. "Deliberate indifference" is not an editorial phrase. It is the specific Eighth Amendment standard the federal courts have applied since the Supreme Court's 1976 decision in *Estelle v. Gamble* and its 1994 elaboration in *Farmer v. Brennan*. To find that a prison system is "deliberately indifferent" to a substantial risk of serious harm is to find that it knows of the harm, it has the institutional ability to act, and it has chosen not to. This is the finding the federal government made about Georgia's prisons. The factual record the DOJ assembled to support that finding is substantial. Georgia's prisons recorded at least 142 homicides between 2018 and 2023, a rate the DOJ described as "extreme" compared to other state corrections systems. In 2022 alone, GDC documented 635 allegations of sexual abuse. The DOJ found that the system fails to investigate violence, falsifies the records of deaths in custody, attributes homicides and torture to "natural causes" and "suicides," and operates under staffing conditions so degraded that supervision of incarcerated people is impossible by design rather than by accident. The DOJ's investigators found that incarcerated people had been killed during counts that staff later reported as normal, raped in facilities that staff later reported as secure, and left to die from medical conditions that staff later reported as treated. The DOJ found, in other words, the institutional environment that produced what was done to Christian Krauch. Georgia did not contest the factual findings. The state's public response, through Governor Brian Kemp's office, was that the DOJ had "overstated" the issues. [Georgia Recorder coverage of state response to DOJ findings](https://georgiarecorder.com/2024/10/02/justice-department-finds-georgia-prisons-violate-constitution/) No commissioner was removed. No facility was closed. The findings letter did not produce a consent decree or a federal monitor. The state, having been formally told by the federal government that its conduct is unconstitutional, continued operating exactly as before. What was done to Christian Krauch in June 2024 was done in a system the federal government, four months later, would find constitutionally indifferent to exactly that kind of harm. The DOJ did not need Krauch's case to reach its conclusion. Krauch's case is the conclusion, embodied. ## The Numbers The state of Georgia does not maintain a public, verifiable, real-time count of the people who die in its prisons. Georgia Prisoners' Speak does. The GPS Mortality Database has tracked 1,797 deaths in Georgia Department of Corrections custody since 2020. [GPS Mortality Database](https://gps.press/mortality-data/) The year-over-year breakdown is its own story. In 2024 — the year the DOJ issued its findings letter — GDC recorded 333 deaths in custody, the deadliest year on the GPS record. In 2025, the number declined to 301, a marginal improvement that left the death toll above pre-2020 levels by a substantial multiple. In the first four months of 2026, GDC has already recorded 95 deaths, a pace consistent with prior years. The state's response to the federal finding that its prisons are constitutionally indifferent to risk of serious harm has been a death rate that has not meaningfully changed. The categories of death the database tracks are the categories of failure the DOJ documented. Homicide. Drug overdose, in many cases involving substances that should not have been physically present in a secure facility. Medical neglect, including deaths from conditions that are entirely treatable in any setting with functioning healthcare access. Suicide, in environments where the psychiatric care the DOJ also found inadequate is supposed to be available. Exposure, including deaths from heat in summer and cold in winter in facilities where climate control is, by repeated documentation, broken or absent. And the category the system most prefers — the "natural causes" classification, applied with a frequency that prompted the DOJ to flag systematic mis-classification as one of its core findings. These are not random events. They are the predictable outputs of a system the federal government has formally found indifferent to the harm it produces. Each entry on the GPS mortality page is a person Georgia incarcerated and Georgia failed to keep alive. ## Ronald Allen: Two Thin Gloves Christian Krauch is not a one-off. The pattern of in-custody physical injury inflicted on incarcerated people through state action and state inaction has its own active litigation record. In April 2024, at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison in Jackson — Georgia's intake facility, the first prison most newly sentenced Georgians see — a 55-year-old man named Ronald Allen was ordered by prison staff to enter a commercial freezer and separate cases of frozen beef patties by hand. [GPS investigation of Ronald Allen's cold injury and amputation at Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison](https://gps.press/two-thin-gloves-georgia-prison-took-ronald-allens-hands/) He asked for protective gloves. He was given two pairs of thin, transparent, disposable food-service gloves — the kind designed for plating a sandwich. He protested. He was told to do the job anyway. For nearly two hours, he separated frozen meat from a commercial freezer with his bare hands shielded by plastic wrap. In the eight weeks that followed, Ronald Allen submitted health services requests describing his hands as turning red, then purple, then cold. He told mental health staff he was worried about his hands. He told the medical unit his pain was 10 out of 10. He was seen — when he was seen at all — by a nurse practitioner who gave him over-the-counter pain medication and an antibiotic, and by a supervising physician named Dr. Latonya James who managed his care entirely by telephone, never once performing a hands-on physical examination. He was given a virtual appointment by a provider on a screen. He was sent to an emergency room which, in turn, sent him back with a diagnosis the expert who later reviewed the case described as clinically unsupportable. By the time Ronald Allen was finally evaluated by physicians who treated him as a patient rather than as paperwork, the blood supply to his fingers had been cut off for weeks. His left hand — his dominant hand — was amputated. His right hand sustained permanent damage. He cannot work. He cannot dress himself. He cannot hold a phone. On March 5, 2026, Ronald Allen filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in the Middle District of Georgia naming twelve defendants, including GDC Commissioner Tyrone Oliver. The fifty-four-page complaint, supported by a sworn expert affidavit from a board-certified emergency physician, alleges that Allen's amputations were preventable, that the medical providers who managed his care violated the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on deliberate indifference to serious medical needs, and that the system that produced their conduct was a system the federal government had already, six months earlier, found unconstitutional. The pattern Krauch's case represents — physical injury to a person in state custody, produced by state action or state failure, met by silence — is the pattern Ronald Allen's case represents. The difference between them, in this moment, is that Allen has a lawyer and a docket number. The substance of what was done to them, and to thousands of others alongside them, is the same. ## The Science of In-Custody Victimization The clinical literature on what incarceration does to people is now extensive enough that its findings are no longer in serious dispute among researchers. What is in dispute is what to do about them. The first category of finding concerns the prior-victim-to-in-custody-victim pipeline. The Rutgers University study by Nancy Wolff, Jing Shi, and Jane Siegel — the same study Part 1 cited for population-level rates of pre-incarceration physical victimization — found that among both men and women in state prisons, prior childhood sexual victimization was strongly associated with sexual victimization inside prison, by factors of two to five for men and a doubling of the risk for women. ((Wolff, Shi, and Siegel, Patterns of Victimization Among Male and Female Inmates, Violence and Victims 2009, [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3793850/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3793850/) )) The people the system had most reason to know were vulnerable were the people it then failed to protect. The protective failure was not random. It was patterned along the same dimensions as the underlying vulnerability. The second category concerns solitary confinement, which Georgia uses extensively, and which the DOJ findings letter identifies as a setting of particularly acute constitutional violation. The clinical psychiatrist Stuart Grassian, in a 2006 paper in the *Washington University Journal of Law and Policy* drawing on three decades of forensic evaluation of people held in long-term isolation, documented what he termed the "SHU syndrome" — a recognizable cluster of psychiatric symptoms produced by prolonged solitary confinement, including hyperresponsivity to external stimuli, perceptual distortions, severe panic attacks, intrusive obsessional thoughts, paranoia, and overt psychosis. ((Stuart Grassian, Psychiatric Effects of Solitary Confinement, Washington University Journal of Law and Policy 2006, [https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1362&context=law_journal_law_policy](https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1362&context=law_journal_law_policy) )) The University of California psychologist Craig Haney has documented similar findings in supermax populations. ((Craig Haney, Mental Health Issues in Long-Term Solitary and Supermax Confinement, Crime and Delinquency 2003, [https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0011128702239239](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0011128702239239) )) These are not effects on people who were already mentally ill. They are effects produced by the conditions of confinement on people exposed to them. The third category concerns the criminogenic effects of incarceration itself. The criminologist Francis Cullen, in a synthesis of the literature published in *The Prison Journal*, concluded that the empirical evidence does not support the proposition that imprisonment, on average, reduces recidivism, and in fact suggests that for many populations imprisonment increases the likelihood of subsequent offending. ((Cullen, Jonson, and Nagin, Prisons Do Not Reduce Recidivism, The Prison Journal 2011, [https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0032885511415224](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0032885511415224) )) The sociologist John Hagan, working with Holly Foster and others, has extended this analysis to the intergenerational scale, demonstrating that the harms produced by incarceration are not limited to the incarcerated individual but transmit measurably to family members, children, and communities. What this research describes, taken together, is a system that takes vulnerable people, exposes them to environments documented to produce serious psychiatric and physical injury, fails to protect them from violence, and releases them in worse condition than they entered — both psychologically and in terms of their likelihood of future contact with the criminal justice system. This is not a description of unintended consequences. It is a description of the predictable outputs of a system operating as it has been operating. The state has had access to this literature for decades. The Georgia Department of Corrections operates the third-largest state prison system in the South. The decision to continue operating it in ways the federal government has found unconstitutional, and the research has found criminogenic, is a decision the state has made and continues to make. ## The Cycle the State Does Not Close The release of a person from a Georgia prison, in the data, is not the end of the state's relationship with that person. It is one event in a sequence the system itself produces. Georgia releases incarcerated people on their maximum release dates with no medical transition, no addiction treatment, no psychiatric continuity of care, no guaranteed housing, no guaranteed identification documents, and no realistic access to the disability, Medicaid, and food assistance the state's own waiting lists put months out of reach. For people who entered the system with addiction, mental illness, or untreated trauma, this is the literal opposite of what the research described above identifies as effective intervention. The result, at the population level, is foreseeable. The Bureau of Justice Statistics tracks recidivism systematically. Roughly two-thirds of people released from state prisons in the United States are arrested again within three years; roughly three-quarters within five. ((Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2018 Update on Prisoner Recidivism, [https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/2018-update-prisoner-recidivism-9-year-follow-period-2005-2014](https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/2018-update-prisoner-recidivism-9-year-follow-period-2005-2014) )) For populations with histories of substance use disorder released without treatment, the figures are higher. For populations released to the housing instability and unemployment that disproportionately follow Georgia incarceration, higher still. The state's release statistics do not include the deaths that occur in the months after release. The post-release mortality literature on people leaving state prisons has documented, for years, an overdose mortality rate in the weeks immediately following release that is many multiples of the population baseline. ((Binswanger et al., Release from Prison and the Risk of Death, New England Journal of Medicine 2007, [https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa064115](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa064115) )) Christian Krauch was released from a state prison hospital on his maximum release date with permanent disability, untreated PTSD, the underlying addiction the state had never addressed, and a stack of applications for benefits that were, the last time his family was able to check, still backed up. The literature describes the population his release belongs to. The state knows the literature. It chose the release date. ## What Part 3 Will Answer The state of Georgia has accepted, by statute, that some of the people it incarcerated were victims before they were imprisoned. It has not accepted, by statute or otherwise, that any of them are victims while imprisoned. It has not accepted that any of them remain victims after release. The Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles' Office of Victim Services does not represent any of them. The Georgia Crime Victims Compensation Program is statutorily barred from compensating any of them. That bar is not an accident of administration. It is the explicit text of a Georgia statute. The third article in this series — *Who Are the Victims: The Statute That Erases Them* — will examine the law that makes the state's refusal a matter of black-letter code. It will document what that statute means in practice for the families of people who die in Georgia's prisons, for the survivors of the violence the DOJ has documented, and for the broader population this series has been describing. Georgia's refusal to recognize the people in its prisons as victims is not, as it might appear, a matter of institutional preference or political reluctance. It is law. --- ## Call to Action: What You Can Do Awareness without action changes nothing. The Department of Justice has already done the work of finding Georgia's prison system constitutionally indifferent to the harm it produces. The state has chosen, with full knowledge of the finding, to continue operating exactly as before. Here is how you can help push for accountability and real reform: **Join the GPS Advocacy Network** — Sign up at [https://gps.press/become-an-advocate/](https://gps.press/become-an-advocate/) and we will advocate on your behalf every week. GPS identifies your state legislators, crafts personalized letters on the most pressing prison issues — including the demand for federal enforcement of the DOJ's October 2024 findings — and sends them directly to the representatives who represent you. You receive a copy of every letter. It takes two minutes to sign up; we handle the rest. **Demand the DOJ Move to Enforcement** — The DOJ's October 2024 findings letter is the first step of a CRIPA process that can escalate to a consent decree, federal monitoring, or a lawsuit under the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act. File a civil rights complaint at [https://civilrights.justice.gov](https://civilrights.justice.gov) and cite the October 2024 findings letter directly. The DOJ moves on the cases the public moves on. **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/](https://gps.press/category/tellmystory/) and help the world understand what is really happening behind the walls. **Contact Your Representatives** — Your state legislators control GDC's budget, oversight, and the laws that define who counts as a victim under Georgia law. Find your Georgia legislators at [https://gps.press/find-your-legislator/](https://gps.press/find-your-legislator/) or call Governor Kemp at (404) 656-1776 or the GDC Commissioner at (478) 992-5246. Ask them why the state has not implemented a single one of the structural reforms the DOJ findings letter identifies as necessary. **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. **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 at [https://georgiadcor.govqa.us/WEBAPP/_rs/SupportHome.aspx.](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. **Support Organizations Doing This Work** — Donate to or volunteer with the Southern Center for Human Rights, the ACLU of Georgia, and 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 **[Three Weeks Under a Bunk: Torture at Macon State Prison](https://gps.press/three-weeks-under-a-bunk-torture-at-macon-state-prison/)** *The original GPS investigation of what was done to Christian Krauch, the 168 phantom counts, the silence that followed, and the promotion the state handed out two months later.* **[Two Thin Gloves: Georgia Prison Took Ronald Allen's Hands](https://gps.press/two-thin-gloves-georgia-prison-took-ronald-allens-hands/)** *The eight-week sequence of medical neglect, the doctor who never examined her patient, and the federal lawsuit now naming twelve defendants including the Commissioner.* **[The Six Who Disappeared: Georgia's Prison Death Cover-Up](https://gps.press/the-six-who-disappeared-georgias-prison-death-cover-up/)** *The pattern of falsified mortality records the DOJ identified, traced through six specific cases the state attempted to hide.* **[Two Ways to Starve: Why Georgia's Prison Deaths Don't Say Hunger](https://gps.press/two-ways-to-starve-why-georgias-prison-deaths-dont-say-hunger/)** *The infrastructure of malnutrition inside Georgia's prisons and the documentation pattern that keeps it out of the official record.* **[Who Are the Victims: Before They Were Prisoners](https://gps.press/who-are-the-victims-before-they-were-prisoners/)** *Part 1 of this series — the population that entered Georgia's prisons as victims first, and the Survivor Justice Act that has begun to acknowledge them.* --- ## 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: **[Macon State Prison Facility Profile](https://gps.press/intelligence/facility/macon-state-prison/)** *The living record on the facility where Christian Krauch was tortured for three weeks — staffing data, mortality data, incident records, and the broader operational context.* **[Oversight Investigations in Georgia Prisons](https://gps.press/intelligence/issue/oversight-investigations/)** *The aggregated GPS record on federal and state oversight of GDC, including the October 2024 DOJ findings letter and the absence of meaningful state response.* --- ## Explore the Data GPS makes GDC statistics accessible to the public through several resources: - **[GPS Statistics Portal](https://gps.press/gdc-statistics/)** — Interactive dashboards translating complex GDC reports into accessible formats, updated within days of official releases. - **[GPS Mortality Database](https://gps.press/mortality-data/)** — Comprehensive record of deaths in GDC custody since 2020, by year, facility, and classification. - **[GPS Lighthouse AI](https://gps.press/ask-ai/)** — Ask questions about Georgia's prison system and get answers drawn from GPS's investigative archive and data analysis. - **[GPS llms.txt](https://gps.press/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 — no other configuration needed. It is the fastest way to ground an AI conversation in verified GPS data. For a walkthrough of how to put these resources to work with AI, see **[How to Use GPS Data with AI Tools](https://gps.press/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. ![GPS Footer](https://gps.press/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/GPS-Ad2.jpg) ---