Children and Incarceration in Georgia: A Complete Guide

Georgia incarcerates people at one of the highest rates in the country. The Georgia Department of Corrections manages roughly 60,000 incarcerated adults across 33 state prisons, four private facilities, 17 transitional centers, and 43 county facilities, plus 150,000 more people on active probation. Most of the major state prisons sit in rural south Georgia: Smith State Prison in Glennville, Valdosta State Prison, Hancock State Prison in Sparta, Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson. A family in Atlanta with a parent at Smith State Prison in Glennville is looking at a three-and-a-half-hour drive into one of the most rural stretches of coastal Georgia. A family in Savannah with a parent at Hancock in Sparta is making the same calculation in a different direction.

I went into the federal system, not the Georgia Department of Corrections. I went in when my kids were 9, 11, 12, 15, 18, and 20. What I know from those 66 months is not specific to any one state, but the circumstances that Georgia builds around the universal experience are worth naming before we talk about what both parents can do. This article is about the choices available from inside any GDC facility, and from any home in Georgia where a parent is doing this alone.

What Georgia's geography does to families

Georgia is a large state by eastern standards, and its prison system is concentrated in the south. The communities most affected by mass incarceration in Georgia are often in the Atlanta metro area and in other urban centers in the northern part of the state. The prisons are largely in the south. That gap is not accidental. It is the result of how rural Georgia's economy absorbed the prison-building era of the 1980s and 1990s, when small towns competed to host facilities as economic development.

What this means for children is a drive. For a family in Dekalb County or Gwinnett County or Cobb County, a parent at one of the south Georgia facilities means three to four hours each way, a full day off work, fuel costs, and the logistical challenge of managing children in a car for six to eight hours so they can spend a few hours in a visiting room. In a state where families already face high rates of poverty and limited transportation options, that drive is not available to every family every weekend. For many children, visits are rare, and what the parent does on the phone and in letters becomes the majority of the relationship.

The notarized form

Georgia requires that consent forms submitted as part of the visitation application process be notarized before they can be processed. A notary public is not always easy to find or access for a family managing multiple children, a job, and the other demands of a sentence being served by a loved one. Banks often offer notary services, as do UPS stores and certain libraries. The requirement is real and the application will be rejected without it.

This matters for children because it is one more barrier between them and a visit. The outside parent who navigates the notarization process, who mails the application to the correct facility, who waits for approval, who then schedules the visit and makes the drive, has done something significant. The incarcerated parent needs to understand and acknowledge that. The outside parent managing Georgia's visitation bureaucracy is doing the work for both of them.

The intake period

When someone enters the GDC system, they typically go first to the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison in Jackson, or a similar intake and classification facility, before being assigned to a permanent institution. During this classification period, the family does not know where the person will ultimately land. The visitation process cannot begin in earnest until the permanent assignment is made. For families trying to establish contact and begin the visitation paperwork immediately after sentencing, this period of uncertainty is disorienting.

The children especially feel it. A child who knew their parent was going to prison but does not know where, for days or weeks, is holding an open question that has no resolution. The incarcerated parent who can communicate during the intake period, even by phone, that they are in the process and will have a permanent location soon, is doing something important for the child's ability to organize the situation emotionally.

The decision that Georgia's system does not make for you

Georgia's system creates real barriers: the rural locations, the notarized forms, the classification period. None of it makes the fundamental choice. Both parents still have to decide, separately and together, that they are not going to use the children as the place where the adult conflict lives.

My wife never said a word against me to our six children during 66 months. She had every reason. She had six kids in a situation I had created, a life I had disrupted, a community that knew what had happened. She chose to let them love me without penalty. What I have with my adult children today is the direct consequence of that choice.

The incarcerated parent inside a Georgia facility carries the same obligation in the other direction. The phone call, the JPay message, the letter, are not the place for the pressure, the criticism, the instructions the outside parent did not ask for. They are the contact the child gets. Use them to actually be there. Ask what happened at school. Ask about the friend they mentioned last time. Ask the specific question that only the parent of this specific child would know to ask. The child who receives that kind of attention from a parent three and a half hours away keeps the relationship. The child who receives obligation calls does not.

What the ages mean in Georgia

My children were 9, 11, 12, 15, 18, and 20 when I went in.

The 9-year-old in Georgia, in whatever community they live in, needs one thing above all others: to hear directly and repeatedly from the incarcerated parent that none of this is their fault. Children under 10 make private, silent decisions about absence. The decision they reach most often is that they caused it. That belief does not surface in behavior that adults can see. It sits quietly inside a child and shapes how they understand themselves for years. Say it directly. Say it in every call. Say it in every letter. This is not about you. I love you. I am coming home.

The 11 and 12-year-old is in middle school, which in Georgia means different things in different communities. A child in a small south Georgia town with a parent at a nearby facility navigates middle school with both more community context for what happened and more social exposure than a child in a large Atlanta suburb. In both cases, the parent inside cannot attend the games, the performances, the kitchen table moments. What the parent inside can do is track. Ask what is happening in that specific child's specific life. Remember what they said. Ask about it next time. That continuity of attention is what keeps a 12-year-old in a relationship with a parent they cannot see.

The 15-year-old is running an authenticity test on every call. They know the difference between someone calling because they feel they should and someone who is genuinely curious about who they are becoming. Do not lecture. Do not instruct. Ask more than you tell. The 15-year-old in Georgia who still answers the call from Smith or Valdosta or Hancock by the end of the sentence is the one who believed the parent on the other end was real.

The 18 and 20-year-old is an adult making a decision about what relationship to carry forward. That decision is theirs to make. Show up as someone worth the decision.

What the outside parent carries in Georgia

The outside parent in Georgia who is navigating the GDC's visitation process, managing a notarized application, tracking a classification period, making a three-hour drive twice a year, and holding together a household and children in the meantime is doing extraordinary work. They deserve to hear that.

One sentence on a phone call or in a JPay message, naming specifically what you see the outside parent carrying and saying thank you, is the most stabilizing thing an incarcerated parent in Georgia can offer. It does not require extra money. It requires the willingness to look honestly at what is being done on the other side of the sentence and to acknowledge it directly.

For the outside parent: what you say about the incarcerated parent in front of the children determines what relationship the children will be able to have with that parent when the sentence ends. My wife never said anything against me. She gave our kids the chance to form their own relationship with their father over 66 months. What I have now is what that gift made possible.

How communication works in Georgia

The GDC uses Securus Technologies for phone services. Families need a prepaid account established through Securus before receiving calls. JPay, owned by Securus, handles electronic messaging, money transfers, and tablet services. Video visitation is available through JPay at select facilities.

For in-person visitation, the first step is becoming an approved visitor. Complete the Visitation Request Form and mail it with supporting documentation (photo ID, marriage license, birth certificate) to the facility where the offender is housed. Consent forms must be notarized before processing. Email forms are not accepted; everything must go by mail. All visitors must submit an application regardless of age. Visitors with felonies cannot be approved. Children 16 and under must be accompanied by a legal guardian. Once approved, visits are scheduled through the GDC system.

For families navigating the classification period at GDCP or another intake facility, a provisional visitation list can be established during intake, but the full process runs from the permanent assignment.

Physical mail is accepted at all GDC facilities and inspected before delivery. GDC public information line: (404) 656-4661. GDC headquarters: 300 Patrol Road, Forsyth, GA 31029. Inmate search: gdc.georgia.gov.

Federal inmates in Georgia are held in federal facilities under BOP jurisdiction. BOP communication uses TRULINCS for email via CORRLINKS and TRUFONE for phone. The same FCC rate caps apply; First Step Act programming offers 300 free minutes per month.

Where this leaves you

Georgia puts real distance between most of its incarcerated population and the communities they came from. It puts a notary between the family and a visit. It puts a classification period between sentencing and knowing where a parent will be. None of those barriers makes the fundamental choice for either parent.

Both parents in Georgia still have to decide that the children come first. The incarcerated parent who makes every call count, who tracks the child's specific life across the distance and the time, who uses JPay and the phone and the letter as tools for genuine presence rather than obligation, is building something the system is not designed to help them build. The outside parent who protects the children from the worst of the adult conflict, who keeps the door open across years of hard logistics, who finds a notary and mails the paperwork and makes the drive, is doing the same. In a state that makes it as difficult as Georgia does, those choices matter even more. They are not neutralized by the distance or the bureaucracy. They accumulate. Make them.