In the Department of Justice report summarizing its years-long investigations into the Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC), it noted that almost 10,000 people in custody were serving life or life without parole (LWOP). This was probably written well in advance of when the report was published in October 2024, but they might have done us the courtesy of updating it; we’d passed the 10,000-mark over the summer.
Less than a year later, we’re already up to 10,232 GDC lifers. This includes the 34 people serving death sentences; the 7,995 people serving life sentences; and 2,203 serving LWOP. Hundreds of people are additionally serving decades-long de facto life sentences.
At the end of 2012, the year the GDC prison population peaked at around 54,000 people, there were 8,097 lifers—95 serving death sentences; 7,220 serving life sentences; and 782 serving LWOP. People often point out that the GDC population has marginally decreased in the past decade, but never mention that during that time the LWOP population has swelled nearly 300 percent.
In 2012 Georgia enacted legislation that was supposed to slow GDC’s population growth, by diverting people with nonviolent convictions to drug courts and the like rather than the prison system. “The expectation is that over time,” GDC stated as recently as April, “these measures will reduce the percentage of first-time non-violent incarcerants in prison.”
But of course, now all GDC talks about is the unprecedented proportion of people with violent convictions the department is tasked with incarcerating.
“What we are seeing in Georgia is a shift in the makeup of the prison population,” GDC Commissioner Tyrone Oliver told Justice Trends in March. “More individuals entering the system have histories of violent offenses. Currently, 96 percent of those inside of our 35 state prisons have been convicted of this type of crime. The average length of sentence is about 42 years. With a total population of 50,000, that presents unique challenges … Because of this, we are moving toward single-man cells in new facilities. The goal is to reduce violence and make it easier for staff to manage the population.”
Oliver is molding some statistics to better fit a narrative—for instance, about 35,000 people are inside GDC’s state prisons while the rest are in private prisons or county jails or transition centers—because of course the goal isn’t to reduce violence. The goal is to build new facilities. Someone has to fill them. If not enough new people are coming into the system, the old ones will simply have to stay longer.
“Violent conviction” is frequently misleading. While many people are here due to unequivocally violent actions that they themselves committed, I couldn’t begin to count the number of men I’ve personally met in counseling groups over the decades who have transcripts showing they were in the car when someone else pulled the trigger. One murder results in multiple life sentences; plea bargains people take to avoid a possible LWOP sentence at trial. Never mind that research consistently shows that lengthy sentences don’t accomplish anything and that lifers released on parole pose very little risk to the community.
Meanwhile, there are now 1,762 people in GDC who’ve been incarcerated for more than 30 years. Of that number, 1,156 including myself are people sentenced to life with the possibility of parole. If we were released on parole, as the system is purportedly designed for us to be, that’d save the state of Georgia upwards of $27 million per year. The state has its own plans: Lock everyone in single-occupancy cells for 23 hours a day, 365 days a year, in the 100-cell block living units of newly constructed prisons.
“Looking ahead, infrastructure will remain a critical area,” Oliver told Justice Trends. “Here in Georgia we’ve done a 60-month projection of our prison population and found that in the next five years, we’ll have at least 1,300 new individuals coming into our system serving life without parole, bringing our number to approximately 3,500 total. That means we have to think about what’s needed long-term … and how we manage a population that isn’t going anywhere.”
Top image and inset graphics (cropped) via Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles
Show Comments