One of the last of the original Thirteen Colonies and named after King George II of England, Georgia was also the last confederate state to be admitted back to the Union after heavy losses of human life in the Civil War. Today, Georgia has fourteen of the country's top one hundred fastest growing counties, second only to Texas.

Georgia is a wonderful state that is full of mountains in the north and has beaches in the east. Georgia is also home to many famous and inspirational Americans including James Bowie, one of our US presidents James E. Carter, famous wrestler Hulk Hogan, civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr., famous singer Gladys Knight, and many more.

Georgia's Incarceration Rates and Costs
An incarceration rate is how many people out of 100,000 are sent to jail each month. Georgia's incarceration rates can varry between seventy-four people a month to well over one thousand depending on the county. Counties such as Grady, Troup, Richmond and Chatham all have very high incarceration rates. Counties such as Bibb and Burke, have a slightly lower incarceration rate of seven hundred to eight hundred, but counties such as Cobb and Treutlen have even lower incarceration rates between seventy-four and three hundred.

With our country's debt problems Georgia has to look for ways to cut costs. In other states costs are being cut in the jails and prisons, but not in Georgia. With Georgia's prison system being the fifth-largest in our country, Georgia does not want to cut costs and free prisoners they may not afford to keep with economic cuts.

With new laws that keep prisoners from getting out of jail sooner and escalating methamphetamine problems, Georgia's prison population has gone up quite a bit in the past few years. With an increasing incarceration rate, Georgia's incarceration costs have passed 1 billion dollars a year.

Though many belive that if "you do the crime, you do the time," others belive that Georgia cannot keep up with the increasing cost to keep so many inmates housed. They should look for alternative ways to deal with law breakers instead of keeping them locked up in prison, even for minute offenses.

Macon State Prison and Smith State Prison
Though there are many fights that take place in prisons all across the country, including Georgia, these two state prisons in Georgia have had problems with guards beating inmates for "no reason." The families of these two different people were not allowed to see their family member, only pictures after they had learned of what had exactly happened to them.

No matter how problematic this may sound there could have been many reasons as to why the guards did what they did. With the issues of the jails being extremely full the reasons could be related to racial or ethnical differences.

No matter the reason, just be sure you talk to someone who works at the prison or read articles by other inmates who have lived in either of these prisons on countyjail.net to get reassurance that your loved ones will not be harmed while they are in either of these two places.