OSAH Issues First Known Final Decision Under Georgia’s New Compensation Law

The Office of State Administrative Hearings (OSAH) has issued what appears to be the first publicly documented final decision under Georgia’s SB 244 Wrongful Conviction and Incarceration Compensation Act.

We wrapped up another productive year at the Prison Policy Initiative, and are thrilled to share our 2024-2025 Annual Report with you. We released 5 major reports, 24 research briefings, 2 new resources as part of our Advocacy Toolkit, and several briefings related to our campaign to end prison gerrymandering.

Nearly a million incarcerated people depend on rural hospitals for routine off-site and emergency medical care.¹ Almost 60% of people in prisons and 25% of those in local jails are confined in rural counties, which are home to 3,000 of the nation’s correctional facilities. Following massive cuts to Medicaid passed by Congress this year, many rural hospitals will be forced to scale back operations or close entirely.

This post was updated on November 7, 2025 to include a link to the FCC’s order, and updating the table of rate caps, which changed slightly between the FCC’s proposed order and the final order.

On Tuesday, the Federal Communications Commission voted to increase phone and video calling rate caps for incarcerated people, changing the rules that it adopted last July and then suspended earlier this year. The new rate caps hike prices by as much as 83% compared to the rates announced last year.

With the federal government abandoning proven public safety strategies and doubling down on punishment, the work of state policymakers and advocates to shrink the criminal legal system and make it fairer is even more important. This morning, the Prison Policy Initiative released its 2026 edition of Winnable Criminal Justice Reforms, a report designed to give state and local change-makers the background they need to emulate existing and effective reforms.

This month, the Prison Policy Initiative submitted public comment on a proposed rule change by the Illinois Department of Corrections to begin scanning all incoming mail, giving incarcerated people only electronic or print copies instead of the original, physical mail.

We at the Prison Policy Initiative write our reports with journalists in mind, since journalists play a critical role in bringing harmful aspects of the criminal legal system to light. We also sometimes produce resources geared toward journalists covering the system, highlighting issues worth covering and offering tips for investigations.

Pardons are one of the most important powers presidents have. With a swipe of their pen, they can erase a person’s federal criminal conviction, freeing them from prison if they’re locked up, and erasing the collateral consequences that often haunt people even after they’ve served their sentence. 1

The pardon power can help fix injustices in the criminal legal system and be a meaningful tool to reduce prison populations, but, unfortunately, in recent decades, this power has been severely underused.

2025 was a challenging year. Not only were many states returning to the failed policies that created the nation’s mass incarceration crisis, but a new administration came to D.C., threatening to use the power of the federal government to make the criminal legal system even worse.

Local jails and police departments are key to the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda because they facilitate ICE arrests of people who are already in police custody. In the first year of Trump’s second term, the administration has intensified the criminalization of asylum seekers and immigrants, pushed immigrant detention to all-time highs, and indiscriminately raided city after city.