The Georgia Department of Corrections assigns every person in its custody a security classification: Minimum, Medium or Close. This classification determines which prisons they can be sent to, what jobs they can be assigned, what programming they have access to and how much their movements are restricted.
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
