Of the 51,284 people currently incarcerated in Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC) prisons, 7,937 people are serving life with parole. Out of that number, 1,072 of us have been here over 30 years.
Given that the GDC is under an unusually bright spotlight for its soaring rates of homicides and suicides, and that the crux of the violence is too many prisoners and too few corrections officers, it’s obvious what the state should do with the thousands of older, mostly disabled people who’ve long been eligible for release: Keep them right where they are, and eventually profit off them all over again as they parole out into the for-profit prison aftercare industry.
The longer parole-eligible lifers remain in prison, the more care our bodies require. And the fewer connections we have to free-world communities—the fewer options for housing, if we do get a shot at parole. The GDC won’t release you without a release address. How fortunate that there will be private assisted-living facilities built specifically for aging and infirm parolees who have nowhere else to go.
The concept began a decade ago with Bostick Nursing Center. Georgia-based CorrectLife LLC broke ground on the center in 2014, around the time it made a slew of campaign donations to Republican Party candidates. The state quickly saw the potential of these kinds of public-private nursing homes, and Musso’s lucrative prison aftercare empire has since expanded into other states, too.
The Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles has the authority to release any prisoner over age 62, even those sentenced to life without possibility of parole.
“Our prisons have an ever-growing number of elderly inmates who are at or near the end of their sentences, and Bostick Nursing Center will fill a need,” CorrectLife founder and CEO Carlo Musso stated in 2016. “This will benefit Georgia taxpayers who currently foot the bill for expensive health care treatments for the chronically ill in our prisons, and it will also provide good jobs.”
When Bostick first opened, less than 400 of GDC lifers had been in 30-plus years. Times have changed. On top of all the parole-eligible lifers no longer being paroled, add in all the non-lifers who come into GDC on sentences with mandatory minimums of 25 years. They too will need for-profit aftercare if they live long enough to be released.
Bostick is an apple that fell close to its tree. It has a 50-percent nurse turnover rate. Federal inspection have cited it for failure to protect residents from physical and sexual abuse. The most recent slap on the wrist was in May 2024, for failure to “provide enough food/fluids.”
In May 2023, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services severed the facility’s contract, stating that it wasn’t complying with health and safety regulations at a level that justified Medicare dollars. Two weeks later, CMS walked back the decision and stated that the facility was in good standing after all.
The Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles has the authority to release any prisoner over age 62, even those sentenced to life without possibility of parole. The Board has never once exercised this authority. That’s somewhere around 4,000 people who, by virtue of age alone, are no more suited to inflict violence out in the free world than they are to defend themselves from it in here. Yet the Board members tour Bosnik doing photo ops while the prisons stay well-stocked with lifers.
Eventually the Board will throw a lucky few in Musso’s direction, after their bodies and minds and connections to outside communities are broken down by decades of violence and isolation. By food deprivation and extreme heat. We don’t get screened for lung cancer no matter how many decades of smoking higher-risk cigarettes in here, but I’m sure anyone diagnosed with something late-stage the moment their Medicare kicks in will be comfortable at Bostick. The public will be assured that preventable cancer is what keeping the neighborhoods safe looks like. This is “tough on crime.”
On October 17, the Atlanta Constitution-Journal reported that a new record of at least 44 people in GDC have been murdered so far in 2024. This number already surpasses the 38 homicides for all of 2023 and the 31 homicides for all of 2022. Since 2020, the data show that at least 13 of the people murdered while in GDC custody—almost all of whom were beaten to death or strangled or both—were in their sixties or seventies. Six of them were over age 62.
Photographs at Bostick Nursing Center via Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles