Lockdown status is confirmed when kitchen workers arrived to deliver meals, escorted by an officer who opens the main door just enough for us to file past one at a time and receive an off-brand Styrofoam tray.

Cell phones come out. We learn the reason—another fight between rival gangs.

No one is surprised. Since he first took office in 2019, Governor Brian Kemp (R) has launched the state’s first “gang prosecution unit” and implemented five-year mandatory minimums for all gang-related convictions. Prisoners tagged by GDC as gang-affiliated have rather dim prospects with the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles, the members of which all have law enforcement backgrounds.

At any given GDC facility more than half the officer posts might be empty, so a minor brawl can produce more armed combatants than there are staff members in the entire prison. Coordinated use of pepper spray and Tasers can still disperse a crowd, but it leaves administrators shaken and results in a lockdown of that facility until the relevant cameras and gang leaders can be reviewed for assessment. That could be done in an hour. Or, if the fight is on a Thursday, it could take until Monday.

No visitation, no religious services, no behavioral improvement groups that are mandatory for the parole-eligible. No library access, including the law library. No yard call. No ball games in the gym. Commissary cut by half. Group counseling, education and vocational tech classes—all cancelled.

Industry workers may still sent out though, under escort, to their unpaid full-time chemical or textile factory jobs. Georgia Correctional Industries is going to get theirs unless the plant burns down.

When multiple prisons have gang fights in the same week, it can look like a system-wide war. “Organized crime” is not that organized, though.

Lockdowns are being presented as the new normal, but the state does not have the resources to make that work, at least not in a constitutionally acceptable manner. Yet they continue.

When multiple prisons have gang fights in the same week, all of GDC goes on lockdown. It can give the appearance of a system-wide gang war. “Organized crime” is not that organized, though; it’s not as if members in different prisons are contributing to a national pot. These are just fights between the same gangs at different locations.

The next day, wardens will meet with leaders of the groups involved to check whether this was anything more than a local beef. Over time they’ve learned to call leading members of all gangs to such meetings; if any are left out, their paranoia becomes everyone’s problem. Paranoid is the norm in prison; dots connect at great distances in here.

Gang leadership tends to be those with cool heads who have learned how to talk to The Man, and say whatever’s needed to get their facility’s lockdown status reduced to “modified movement.” You might be surprised how many young hotheads will answer officers with the truth (“We want to kill all the __!”), which does not have the same effect.

Modified movement status means that at least visits and classes resume. Still no yard or gym time.

Corrections departments may tout their zero-tolerance approach to gangs, but the understaffing crisis ensures that wardens and gang leaders have never been closer. Without any experienced officers around, talking to gang leaders is the only way staff get anything to report up the food chain.

Everyone cuts their eyes toward any prisoner seen talking privately to administration, but it’s common now. Used to be that no one would even address a floor-walking guard without at least one witness in tow; if a guard is involved in a bust later that day, it is potentially unhealthy to have been the last one seen speaking to them beforehand.

Contraband cell phones aren’t the cause of gang violence.

In January, one medium-security facility had such a clash between rival gangs that it actually spilled from the walkways outside the living units into the open visitation area, filled with women and children on a Sunday. Three prisoners were killed during the fight, one of whom was days away from being released, and a fourth died later following injuries. All prisons were duly locked down while GDC began an investigation, which eventually resulted in 12 prisoners charged with murder.

Contraband cell phones aren’t the cause of gang violence. Has someone’s outside family ever been extorted through the medium of a contraband cell phone? Sure. But phones also play a huge role in violence reduction. They’re used to verify whether new arrivals are who they claim to be, which immediately shuts the door on a lot of sketchy behavior that leads to violence. They’re used to generate and transfer income. Violence breaks out because the state continuously prices edible food further and further out of reach, and people are hungry.

Violence also breaks out after crackdowns on drones. A single drone delivery can easily represent tens of thousands of dollars invested. When one gang has the drone connection, a peace treaty will allow rival gangs to handle distribution; everyone eats. But when a drone is intercepted, hunger inspires confrontation among those who want their money back. It’s telling that, alongside more traditional contraband like drugs and cell phones, drones are also bringing in food.

Allow local and online businesses to hire prisoners and pay them a living wage. Require parole boards to base their release decisions on time served, and their denials only on disciplinary infractions. Sell vapes at commissary. Or, if that’s just too sensible, then at least turn a blind eye to the contraband tobacco market.

Image via Matthew Ansley/Unsplash

The post Lockdowns Are a Dangerous Way for Prisons to Respond to Gang Violence appeared first on Filter.

The Sixth Amendment guarantees the right to a speedy trial and to an effective public defender for those who can’t afford a private one. In Georgia, those rights have evaporated.

About 85 percent of the state’s criminal cases are handled by the Georgia Public Defender Council (GPDC), the agency created by the Indigent Defense Act of 2003. Nationally, the percentage of defendants in state and federal cases who can’t afford a private attorney is generally in the same ballpark.

Georgia is the eighth most populous state in the country, but GPDC has only around 400 attorneys. It’s routine for public defenders to be juggling 500 active cases at once. Thus being provided with counsel rarely means being provided with effective counsel, as that kind of caseload doesn’t leave attorneys time to learn too many details.

In most states, chief public defenders are elected or otherwise appointed independently. The executive director of GPDC, however, is appointed by the governor. So there’s little incentive to rock the boat.

This is not a system capable of ensuring justice to everyone facing loss of liberty.

Often cases remained stalled even after a conflict attorney was found, because that attorney would subsequently resign.

The first harms come to those who are detained and cannot afford bail, and are therefore sitting in jail watching the slow turning of the judicial machine’s gears. In 2024 Filter reported on a Georgia county jail where people routinely waited over two years for their first hearing, and without talking to their public defender more than once. The man at the center of that story had been waiting for more than three years, while his repeated requests to meet with his assigned public defender all went unanswered. In 2024, Dougherty County released a man who’d been languishing in jail for the longest known pretrial detention in Georgia history, and one of the longest in the nation’s history—nearly 11 years.

But then there are the harms from ineffective counsel. Bad plea deals. Wrongful convictions. Unnecessarily long sentences, though one could argue almost all United States sentences are unnecessarily long.

One big problem stems from the fact that many cases have multiple defendants, but the public defender’s office in the circuit where they’re being tried can only represent one of them; obviously there would be some ethical concerns if two people testifying against each other were represented by the same legal counsel. So for the remaining defendants GPDC must provide “conflict attorneys.” But a 2023 Southern Center for Human Rights investigation found that people routinely waited months just to be assigned one. Often cases remained stalled even after a conflict attorney was found, because that attorney would subsequently resign due to lousy pay and resource support.

In 2022, Georgia passed legislation establishing state funding parity between the district attorneys and public defenders. Has this resulted in actual parity? Of course not, because prosecutors get all kinds of additional support from external victim-advocate grants, county budgets, local law enforcement agencies and the heavily funded Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

In 2025 GPDC got a small budget boost for “conflict cases,” bringing its state funding to a little under $100 million. But this mainly covers its attorneys’ salaries, so the costs of testing evidence or anything else that goes into preparing an adequate defense still falls to the counties. Funding for conflict attorneys and other resources has been coming from federal American Rescue Plan Act funding—a well that will run dry at the end of September.

Similar to how Georgia’s prison overcrowding and understaffing could be resolved through the simple and cost-effective option of parole, there is one obvious way to address the problem of too many indigent defendants and not enough public defenders. In February, Oregon dismissed more than 1,400 cases due to its shortage of public defenders. Georgia has yet to consider this option.

Image via Superior Court of Fulton County, Georgia

The post Ignoring Georgia’s Public Defender Crisis, and the Obvious Way to Fix It appeared first on Filter.

That verdict was an early example of jury nullification—a jury voting their conscience to acquit someone who is guilty of breaking an unjust law. If a lone juror votes to acquit in this way, it would likely mean a mistrial and leave the defendant to face a new jury later. But if the 12 jurors reach a verdict, a defendant found not guilty cannot be tried again. Jurors cannot be punished for voting their conscience. If those 12 people agree to acquit, for whatever reason, then that’s that. It doesn’t matter what the law says.

No one is going to tell you during jury selection that you don’t have to vote according to the law, and can in fact vote however you see fit. Prosecutors and judges certainly won’t mention jury nullification, and may even attempt to suppress such discussion by calling it jury tampering. But that really only applies to anyone trying to influence the outcome of a specific case by talking to the jurors in that trial; general education around the subject is protected by the First Amendment.

Defense attorneys can be held in contempt for advising jurors to override the law.

But defense attorneys can be held in contempt of court for advising jurors to override the law. In some states they might have more leeway than others, if jury nullification is supported in the state constitution. Rhode Island, for example, introduced a proposal in January to amend the state constitution by codifying jury nullification as a “proper” defense strategy at trial.

“A criminal defendant shall, as a matter of right,” the legislation states, “have the right to argue that the jury, during its deliberations, should take into consideration, not just the law, but the facts, the nature of the charge and whether the law, which the defendant has been charged with violating, is morally repugnant, outdated or unfair to the citizenry and those accused of violating the law, or that the subject criminal law charged is unconstitutional.”

In late April, on the other hand, Rep. Julia Letlow (R-LA) introduced the No Rogue Jurors Act, which would ban federal funding for any entity “encouraging individuals to seek jury service in any Federal or District of Columbia court proceeding with the intent to vote contrary to the evidence or applicable law, including promoting the deliberate act of voting to acquit a defendant regardless of whether the elements of the charged offense have been established (commonly referred to as ‘jury nullification’).”

Neither bill has moved out of committee, however.

Once prosecutors had no reason to bother, Prohibition was overturned.

During Prohibition, when the public was frustrated with alcohol control laws, it became commonplace for juries to acquit people charged with liquor possession, manufacturing or sale—even when the evidence of guilt was undeniable. In some jurisdictions the majority of such cases ended this way. Eventually prosecutors had no reason to bother, and Prohibition was overturned.

In 2012, New Hampshire enacted a law authorizing juries to overrule judges they believed to be in error, and authorizing defense attorneys to talk about jury nullification even over a judge’s objection. Within a few months, a jury voted to acquit 59-year-old Doug Darrell of felony marijuana charges; Darrell was facing up to seven years in prison after some plants he was growing in his backyard were spotted from a National Guard helicopter.

In 2018, a Georgia jury similarly acquitted a medical cannabis patient who’d openly admitted cultivating marijuana plants, which the state punishes as a felony even at personal-use quantities.

More and more lawmakers are deciding to fight the drug war with higher mandatory minimums, mandatory life sentences and even the option of the death penalty. Jury nullification should be discussed wherever we see people being unjustly prosecuted for drug possession, drug trafficking, human trafficking and so-called “death-by-distribution.”

Juries have power. They should wield it not against defendants, but against overreaching governments.

Image (cropped) via Clinton County, Pennsylvania

The post Everyone Against the Drug War Needs to Know About Jury Nullification appeared first on Filter.

Anyone whose conviction is designated “violent” is automatically classified Close security, by the court clerks in the county where they were sentenced. The idea is that through careful compliance with the rules, one can work one’s way down from Close to Medium, and from Medium to Minimum, which generally means moving from the more dangerous facilities to ones that are slightly more livable. But in reality, this applies to fewer and fewer people.

People sentenced to death, or to life without parole, can never drop below Close custody. Neither can anyone GDC has designated a “sexual predator.”

No one serving time for a sex-related conviction can go below Medium, even those who upon release would be considered the lowest risk for recidivism by the Georgia Sexual Offender Risk Review Board.

No one with an active ICE detainer can go below Medium. No one serving a sentence longer than 15 years can go below Medium. An override can be requested to get there faster, but that’s all.

So for a significant portion of the GDC prison population, it’s not a question of whether they’ve earned a lower security level. It’s a question of whether the rules allow it. 

People with nothing to hope for do not have much reason to follow rules.

In the early 1990s when I began my sentence, before the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 changed political attitudes about the prison system, the system offered us something more. Back then a person serving life with parole could work their classification all the way down to Trustee, if they maintained a favorable disciplinary record. Trustees could apply for furloughs—passes to visit home for the holidays, or attend the birth of a grandchild. People were motivated to work for that.

In 1996, when lifers were pulled from county prisons and their assignment to outside work details stopped, the Trustee passes grew scarce. In 2007 they stopped entirely, with no memo or formal announcement, or any mechanism for the people affected to contest the change. One day they existed, and the next they didn’t.

People with nothing to hope for do not have much reason to follow rules. The concept of hope as a behavioral incentive is the foundation the classification system is built on.

Initial classification happens upon arrival at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson for prisoners in the men’s system, and the McRae Women’s facility for those in the women’s system. The process used to rely on staff judgment. Now it relies on an algorithm.

Lifers are getting transferred back to Close security prisons they’d left behind decades ago.

GDC describes the Next Generation Assessment (NGA) as a “reliable predictor” of what classification is most appropriate, but probably no one else does. Even the Department of Justice directed GDC to audit and generally improve the NGA, in its 2024 report summarizing a years-long investigation that changed nothing.

“GDC personnel claimed that the NGA tool has been validated, although GDC did not provide us with a specific date or year that any such validation took place,” the DOJ wrote in its report. “It appears the last validation was at least a few years ago, and it is unclear whether GDC plans to re-validate the system, and if so when. Despite our repeated requests, GDC did not provide documentation to confirm such validation or re-validation testing or to explain the criteria, formulas, and other scoring mechanisms the system uses to determine custody levels.”

A year-and-a-half later, short-timers are still dying in Close security prisons they arguably should never have been assigned to, and more recently this has spawned a new problem.

Lifers who have spent their lives dutifully navigating the classification system are getting transferred back to Close security prisons they’d left behind decades ago. Their behavior hasn’t changed. There just isn’t enough bedspace at Medium security facilities, and it’s being given to the short-timers who can still work their way down to Minimum. GDC did not respond to Filter‘s request for comment.

This is justified through “exception reviews,” which per GDC policy can be “performed to determine if new circumstances warrant the submission of an immediate security review and Override to justify changing the offender’s Security Classification.” There is no mechanism for a prisoner to contest such a change.

Image via Georgia Department of Corrections

The post Lifers Fall Through the Cracks of the Prison Security Classification System appeared first on Filter.

Public school funding structures will be adjusted to cover salaries for the 1,300 or so literacy coaches. Those school-based coaches will also be supported by additional, highly trained literacy coaches assigned to the state’s 16 Regional Education Service Agencies—including leadership literacy coaches who will work specifically with principals and superintendents. All this is because state officials agree that teachers aren’t equipped to fix literacy shortfalls all by themselves. 

“Our number-one priority in the House this session has been literacy,” House Speaker Jon Burns (R) said, according to Atlanta News First. “When you drill down into this budget, it uplifts every community and every citizen across our state.”

Perhaps not every community. The new budget approved by the House includes an increase of $101 million for the Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC), with $34.9 million for hiring more correctional officers, but only $800,000 is slotted for vocational training.

Research show that prisoners who participate in educational programming prior to release are less likely to be reincarcerated later. Perhaps a state as invested in rehabilitation as Georgia claims to be could scrape together the funds for a few dozen trained literacy coaches, for the warehouses where it collects all the adults who never properly learned to read. In the 30-plus years I’ve been incarcerated in GDC, most of the vocational instructors I’ve known have been former corrections officers, many of them retired and filling part-time positions that failed to attract any actual experts.

An estimated 70 percent of the United States prison population can’t read at a fourth-grade level.

By the most widely used estimates, around 70 percent of the United States prison population can’t read at a fourth-grade level. Literacy instruction inside prisons is limited, caught between teacher shortages and security protocols that always override everything else. GDC has a remedial literacy program for prisoners who read below a fifth-grade level. But it’s easy for people to languish there.

Without fifth-grade reading skills, prisoners are not able to get into the Adult Basic Education classes, which in theory prepare them to take the GED test. When someone enters the prison system without a GED, counselors will tell them that their case plan includes getting their GED as a prerequisite for parole. So not only does a low literacy level make someone more likely to end up in prison, it’ll keep them there longer, too.

When presenting the bill to the House in February, Rep. Chris Erwin (R) said that after the initial K-3 push there are plans to expand to higher grade levels in the public school system. But again, no mention of the other large state system that might benefit from such investment.

In the most recently available data from the Nation’s Report Card, Georgia’s fourth graders were exactly on par with the national average for reading skills. But what that really represents is Black and Hispanic students scoring lower, and white students scoring higher. There’s no mention of this in HB 1193, or the fact that fourth-graders grow up to be adults who are under- or overrepresented in the state prison system. Low literacy in childhood leads to dropping out of high school, which increases the likelihood of incarceration. Not that any legislators are touting the budget as a proactive investment in prison reform.

Georgia lawmakers are investing tens of millions of dollars in early childhood reading programs because they recognize that literacy shapes a person’s future opportunities. Many incarcerated adults passed through those same classrooms years earlier without reaching that milestone. By the time they enter prison, the impacts of their educational lapse have them ready to make the best of a bad situation, if only there were means to do so. 

When education was neglected in childhood, common sense dictates that education should be the foundation of rehabilitation in adulthood.

Image via Nebraska Department of Corrections

The post Georgia Lawmakers’ “Number-One Priority” is Literacy, Except in Prisons appeared first on Filter.

The 2010 injunction was the result of a civil-rights reckoning, with hospitals that were synonymous with death and neglect rather than care. In 2007, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation into the state’s psychiatric hospitals revealed that over the previous five years, more than 100 patients had died as a result of neglect, abuse or the quality of medical care.

A series of Department of Justice investigations and litigation followed, and by 2010 the state had agreed to multiple sweeping settlements. It was no longer permitted to admit people with developmental disabilities into state hospitals, and forced to begin transitioning current patients to community care. As part of a consent decree for the DOJ to oversee the Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities (DBHDD), the state was banned from building new state-run psychiatric hospitals. 

In February 2026, the federal government terminated the consent decree and remaining settlement provisions. A proposal for the first state-run psychiatric hospital to be constructed in more than 60 years was immediately added to the state budget, with strong support from local law enforcement. The Senate approved it 49-1. On March 3, Governor Brian Kemp (R) signed the amended budget into law, clearing the way for the new Georgia Regional Hospital in Atlanta. As a forensic mental health hospital, it will receive people being detained for court-ordered evaluations. Construction is expected to take two to three years.

“For 16 years, our teams, providers and partners have worked tirelessly to strengthen and transform Georgia’s behavioral health system,” DBHDD Commissioner Kevin Tanner stated in February when federal oversight was lifted. “This ruling reflects the extraordinary progress we have made in expanding access, improving quality and building a more comprehensive continuum of care. Most importantly, it represents better outcomes and greater independence for the individuals we serve.”

The hospital will have 300 forensic psychiatric beds. In January, the DBHDD had estimated a need for 800 such beds, projecting that by 2034 the state would run out.

The state did implement many of these changes, but others, like housing vouchers, were never fully realized.

The consent decree and other DOJ actions were more than just a demand for cleaner facilities and better staffing ratios, but a rebuke of the entire system. On paper this meant a pivot from state-run asylums to dozens of community support teams; crisis stabilization teams, including mobile crisis response; peer services; wraparound services for housing and employment. And the state did implement many of these changes, but inevitably others were never fully realized. Housing vouchers, for example—patients were still being discharged from hospitals into shelters. Jails were housing people who had not been booked on violent charges, but kept bottlenecking in custody nonetheless.

“They don’t need to be in jail, but there’s no place to take them. It’s very frustrating,’’ Bill Hallsworth, jail and court services coordinator for the Georgia Sheriffs’ Association, told the Georgia Recorder in 2020. “A lot of them are good folks but they have a hard time getting along in the community.’’

County jails became the largest de facto mental health institutions in the state, housing anyone too visibly ill or disabled or simply too poor to land anywhere else. Republican senators are now treating the end of the consent decree as the lifting of a 16-year prohibition, proclaiming that it’s Georgia’s jails, rather than its citizens, that have been unduly burdened.

Many a prisoner in the Georgia Department of Corrections system, where I’ve been incarcerated for over three decades, has told me stories of a metro police officer dumping them at a county hospital that might have available beds, or sheriff’s deputies in rural counties driving them to an urban clinic for the same reason. No state or local department had the infrastructure to receive them—other than GDC of course, where more than 1,700 people have died since 2020.

GEO Group and the contractor PACs are certainly seeing good returns on their political donations. Even before the new $409-million forensic hospital, Kemp had already pushed through a $436-million investment to build a 3,000-bed “mega prison,” and these two new facilities won’t be the last. Kemp, who has served as governor since 2019, proudly describes himself as having started his first small business decades ago with a pickup truck and a shovel. It shows.

Image (cropped) via Library of Congress

The post Georgia Moves Backwards With New Forensic Mental Health Hospital appeared first on Filter.

Senate Bill 592 is cosponsored by State Senator Steve Gooch (R), a former senate majority leader and current candidate for lieutenant governor. Gooch, a noted proponent of mass incarceration, was also a cosponsor of the 2024 bill that greatly restricted cash bail—decreasing the number of eligible charges, tightening forfeiture rules and establishing a limit of three bonds per person per year. 

“The One Strike Act elevates the penalty for a first-time violent felony to life in prison without parole,” Gooch stated in a February 27 video posted to social media. “One violent act should be enough to remove a predator from our streets permanently.”

The federal government and more than half the states have some version of a “three strikes” law, which typically mandate life in prison on the third conviction of certain felonies. Georgia is one of a handful of states with a “two strikes” law, which it applies to convictions known here as the Seven Deadly Sins (SDS): rape, armed robbery, kidnapping, aggravated sodomy, aggravated child molestation, aggravated sexual battery and murder. For a first-time conviction of an SDS other than murder, the mandatory minimum sentence is 10 years. Murder has a mandatory life sentence on a first-time conviction, and on a second conviction all of them do.

But much of the One Strike Act covers non-SDS convictions.

Perhaps most egregiously, the One Strike Act would remove the possibility of parole for scores of people currently serving parole-eligible sentences.

For example, the mandatory minimums for various circumstances of aggravated assault would be raised from one year to three, from three years to five, from five years to 10, and from 10 years to 20. The maximum for all of them, currently 20 years, would be raised to life.

Perhaps most egregiously, the One Strike Act would remove the possibility of parole for scores of people currently serving parole-eligible sentences. These convictions range from murder to simple assault to drug distribution. Parole would also be removed for anyone determined to have gang affiliations, regardless of conviction. The Act would also restrict eligibility for early termination of parole.

It’s unlikely that everyone eligible for the maximum sentence would be getting it. But raising the mandatory minimums, encouraging sentences that last decades instead of a few years and removing the possibility of parole will only assure more homicides and suicides, staff shortages and ballooning prison budgets.

Places like Buckhead are seeing Atlanta crime spread to their streets thanks to lawless liberals who refuse to hold violent criminals accountable. When I’m Lt. Governor, it’ll be one strike – YOU’RE OUT! Thanks to Buckhead Republicans for letting me share about my One Strike Act! pic.twitter.com/PGIUgM386N

— GoochForGeorgia (@GoochForGeorgia) March 2, 2026

The state prison population began to surge in the 1990s after the “two strikes” law was signed by then-governor Zell Miller, a former parole board member. The budget of course surged too, to $900 million by 2005 and more than $1.8 billion today. 

There are already over 10,000 people serving life sentences in Georgia. In 2024, parole was considered for 2,046 of them and granted to just 67. But instead of expanding parole, the state now proposes to erase it further.

There has never been any solid evidence showing that longer prison sentences are a deterrent, and the One Strike Act doesn’t waste time trying to make that argument. It’s about retroactive punishment. But the state cannot manage such an expansion. 

Georgia already has among the highest incarceration rates of any state. It’s unequivocally failing to manage its current prison population of approximately 50,000 people, but even a years-long Department of Justice investigation describing these failures isn’t stopping the state from getting more money to build more prisons and incarcerate more people. The One Strike Act would fuel unsustainable growth in an already strained system.

Image via Superior Court of Fulton County

The post Georgia “One Strike Act”: Even More Life Sentences, Even Less Parole appeared first on Filter.

The numbers are available in the Board’s latest annual report, released earlier in January. After the requisite glossy bios reminding us that there’s a new addition to the Board and that all five members still have backgrounds in law enforcement, we eventually learn that 20,364 people were eligible for parole in 2025. Not a good reflection on GDC’s rehabilitative programming that the Board saw fit to release so few.

Nothing about this is decarceration. Per Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC) annual reports the prison population grew by about 684 people in 2025. To those of us inside GDC’s prisons these are not numbers, but human beings sleeping on floors and in mop closets and in shower stalls.

Parole is the mechanism that could fix this, or at least provide substantial relief. The Board constantly references the imperative of public safety and yet, as suicides and homicides continue to rise inside GDC, not once do these reports ever reference the safety of the incarcerated population.

Proponents of mass incarceration characterize parole as if it opens the floodgates for people who are somehow cheating the system. But in addition to the fact that the system considered them parole-eligible, the people being released were about to be released anyway.

An analysis by Georgia Prisoners’ Speak found that in 2024, nearly one in four people granted parole were within six months of their release date. To be sure, those months make a big difference to prisoners and their families, but the Board gets to tout the statistic that 73 percent of Georgia parolees were “successful” in 2025, comparing favorably to the national average of 60 percent. Lifers who do make parole have exceptionally low recidivism rates, but no one seems to consider this reason to release more of them.

The Georgia Prisoners’ Speak analysis also indicates that almost all the lifers currently out on parole have been out for a very long time—estimating that the state has only 17 lifers out on parole whose convictions likely took place within the past 20 years. Per the new annual report, in 2025 the Board considered 2,277 parole-eligible lifers for release, and released 123 of them.

Nearly 200,000 people in the United States are serving life sentences, and nearly half of those are eligible for parole. But parole is essentially a bygone era.

More than a dozen states don’t even pretend to offer parole. Those that do are steadily pulling it out of reach of those of us with life sentences.

In the early 1990s when I began my sentence, lifers were eligible for parole after seven years. By the time I’d served seven years the bar had been raised to 14 years, and by the time I’d served 14 years it had been raised to 30 years.

Since the 1970s, Colorado has progressively raised lifers’ parole eligibility from 10 years to 20 years to 40 years to effectively removing parole for life sentences entirely. Louisiana has charted almost the same trajectory. Tennessee requires a minimum of 51 years served before parole—the longest of any state.

Meanwhile, each state’s parole or other executive clemency processes are overseen by a group not too dissimilar from Georgia’s Parole Board: a small handful of retired sheriffs and district attorneys who aren’t beholden to much if any transparency about their decisionmaking. 

It should not be lost in all this that parole is hardly a mercy. It is dragging vulnerable people to the brink of human endurance and then kicking them back out into an unfamiliar world with $35, and often a one-way bus ticket back to prison intake.

Top image (cropped) via Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles. Inset graphic via Filter.

The post The Last Days of Parole appeared first on Filter.

Gizmo is our resident Fix-It Guy. There are many Gizmos in many prisons across the country, and their hustle is considered an honorable one. Corrections departments profit off selling us electronics at a markup, so it’s no surprise that they offer no way to fix anything that breaks.

Radios, for example, cost $50 at commissary, and to discourage concealment of contraband are also encased in a brittle clear plastic. Falling three feet from the table to the floor is all it takes. Gizmo will weld the broken casing back together using empty ink pen cartridges, and get the radio working again for the price of a bag of coffee.

Here in Georgia Department of Corrections prisons the contracted optometrist only visits quarterly, which means broken glasses can take four months to replace if the timing’s unlucky. Then another month to deliver the new pair. For a modest fee, Gizmo likely has the right earpiece or tiny screw to fix the pair you have, today.

Perhaps the power adaptor for a contraband phone has been confiscated, but the charging cable remains. Gizmo will use salvaged wire and plastic cling wrap to make a “pigtail”—a coil of copper wire surrounding but not touching a central post made of the same wire—soldered to the cord and sized to fit whatever it needs to.

Prisoners who are isolated in the Special Management Unit have no wall outlets. For $5 plus cost of materials, Gizmo will assemble AA battery packs to send them. If you’ve ever been able to talk to your loved one while they were in the hole, chances are you can thank their prison’s Gizmo.

Anyone who smokes anything in here needs a way to light it. Using a pencil, paperclip and piece of copper wire Gizmo will fashion a “popper” that can be plugged into a wall outlet to create a spark. The price is one soup.

A standard wall outlet can be removed from the wall and outfitted with wires to turn it into a multiplug. If the number of devices that need charging exceeds the number of outlet ports in a cell—two— Gizmo will turn an old adaptor into a three- or four-port multiplug using tape, three layers of wood or glued cardboard and two slivers of steel shims. 

Need an extension cord? After appropriating a length of electrical cord from one of the floor buffers, or power cords from any unattended DOC machinery, Gizmo will use two wires of equal size to make an extension cord attached to a wall outlet or a multiplug. With two of those you can charge eight devices at the same time from the same cell. Someone from the maintenance crew may have to come flip the circuit breaker back to the ON position.

Gizmo also makes “bugs” for boiling water—necessary to heat soups and coffee, and to add a bit of warmth and humidity to one’s living space during cold, dry winters. Tie two metal plates together with a wire attached to each, and a tongue depressor part in between them. Plug it into a wall outlet, submerge the other end in a bucket of water, place the food to be heated inside a plastic bottle or bag and then place that into the water. 

Gizmo also buys broken electronics, if he can use them to repair other broken electronics. He recycles a lot of what most people would consider trash—dead cell phones and radios, broken headphones, paper clips, rubber bands, ink pens, the twist ties from bread, any and all scraps of copper wire. From these he builds his screwdrivers, clamps, brushes, electric soldering irons and other tools. 

Solder, the metal alloy easily melted to fuse parts together, can be heated, removed and reused. Gizmo cools the recycled solder into pellets he stores in empty tubes of ChapStick. The ChapStick itself serves as a substitute for flux, the paste that allows the soldering process to work properly. More elaborate soldering irons can even be made using plastic cling wrap, a toothbrush, heavy wire, solder and an ID card clip.

There’s only so much Gizmo can do to repair the cell phones themselves; the internal circuitry is so small that soldering is nearly impossible. Screens and batteries can be replaced, but it’s hard to find the parts to do so since those are themselves the parts that are in highest demand. If your phone gets fried by a high-voltage adapter, you just have to keep the SIM and SD cards and hope they’re compatible with the next phone, at whatever point you’re able to get another one.

Corrections departments despise contraband cell phones, and prisoner self-sufficiency in all its forms, but they owe a lot to the Gizmos in their custody for fixing what would otherwise stay broken, including things the state paid for like communal microwaves and TVs.

Despite the anti-cell phone propaganda, contraband phones allow us to prepare for re-entry and maintain relationships with friends and family. Radios can be the difference between suicide and making it through one more day. Without multiplugs, there’d be a lot more fights between cellies over who gets to use the outlet and for how long. Electronic device repair is a valuable job skill that every corrections department should be helping develop through formal vocational programs, but so far they don’t seem inclined to support the next generation of Gizmos.

Images via Anonymous

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On November 21, the Board and the Georgia Department of Agriculture hosted the state’s Turkey Pardon Ceremony. The five-member Board was represented by Chair Joyette Holmes and Executive Director Christopher Barnette. There were actually two turkeys: Tom and Jerry. Everyone seemed to find these names very funny.

Holmes, holding a large framed document addressed (presumably) to Tom, said that the board had been able to review Tom’s investigation and all the documents sent on his behalf, and decided to grant the pardon.

“Tom has lived a law-abiding life, since having his sentence previously commuted and being released from the initial farm where he was,” Holmes said before turning to the turkey on her other side. “I know you see Jerry over here and you’re thinking, ‘Well, where is Jerry’s pardon?’ Jerry has a couple more documents to submit.” 

Everyone laughed. Stupid Jerry. No pardon for Jerry. Why don’t we actually remand Jerry to farm custody for not being able to figure out the electronic-only application. Hahahaha.

They couldn’t even bring themselves to pardon two turkeys. One was just there so they could make a point. There were also jokes about senators needing to stay on the Board’s good side in case their help would be needed later. Incarceration is a punchline.

It should be noted that Tom and Jerry weren’t standing during the 12-minute ceremony. Two handlers were hugging the enormous, strangely placid birds to their chests the whole time.

Pardons are for people who have completed their sentence, including parole. They’re nice but don’t actually expunge one’s record or confer any specific material change. Parole, on the other hand, allows one to leave prison and serve the rest of the sentence under supervision in the community.

In 2024 a total of 19,328 GDC prisoners were considered for parole. This means all had met the statutory requirements for release, including minimum time served. Only 5,443 were granted parole. 

Though the Board has guidelines for its decision-making process of whether to grant or deny someone parole, it doesn’t have to apply them to lifers. In 2024 the Board denied parole to 1,953 parole-eligible lifers, and allowed 93 to go home.

The Board has lately been posting a lot of photos to social media, showing the members engaged in field trips around the state. Advocates and families are sick of seeing them. So much time showing the public how great and important their work is. So much investment in the propaganda that citizens must be protected from themselves. So few people being pardoned or paroled.

In 30-plus years of incarceration, I’ve never received a parole denial on time. After eight years of waiting for a decision that’s then a month or more overdue, the most you’ll get out of a counselor is, The Board’s running behind on its caseloads; just be patient.

While Board members make around $160,000 a year, GDC prisoners fight over food, clothes, shelter and any other basics that the state is supposed to provide people in its custody.

I didn’t want Tom to get pardoned. I wanted to eat him.

Top image (cropped) via Georgia Department of Agriculture/YouTube. Inset graphic via Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles.

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