“I Am Telling You What I Saw”: A Letter From Georgia’s Women’s Prisons

In June 2023, Rachelle Terry went to Lee Arrendale State Prison in Alto for diagnostics. Eleven weeks after that, she was moved to Pulaski State Prison in Hawkinsville. She stayed there until August 2025. Then she came home.

This September, Rachelle Terry wrote to the people who run the system she’d left. She mailed the letter on September 4 to members of the Georgia General Assembly and to the Department of Corrections, and she sent GPS a copy. You can read it in full below, under her name, with her permission.

“I am not telling you what I heard. I am telling you what I saw.”

She did her time, and she isn’t asking anyone to forget what put her there. What she asks for is specific. Enough trained staff. Accountability that reaches the warden. Medical care that comes in time. Treatment for addiction. Programs that actually run. Public reporting on all of it. Some of that you can check against the state’s own records. Here’s what those records show for the two prisons that held her.

Seventeen deaths, twelve with no cause on record

For 27 months, from June 2023 through August 2025, at least 17 women died at Arrendale and Pulaski. GPS’s mortality registry counts nine at Arrendale and eight at Pulaski. ¹

For 12 of those 17 deaths, no cause has been made public. Two of the Arrendale deaths are recorded in the registry as homicides. Three at Pulaski are listed as natural.

Dr. Terry writes that she watched women wait for medical attention, and that some of them died because of it. That’s her account, from inside. The state’s record can’t answer it. For most of these women, it doesn’t say how they died.

Six contraband reports

She says she was offered illegal drugs herself while she was locked up, and she asks the question that follows: how do drugs get through the doors of a secure facility.

GDC’s public record on that question is thin. While she was inside, the Department’s published contraband arrest reports list six incidents at Arrendale and Pulaski. Two of them involved drugs. In August 2024, a man was stopped near Pulaski with a drone and 927 grams of marijuana in his vehicle. In November 2024, staff at Arrendale found seven hydrocodone pills and an unknown substance on a woman after visitation, and the visitor was arrested. ^{2 3}

A report like that tells you what staff caught. What got past them, it can’t tell you. Those reports, including ones GDC later took off its website, GPS keeps in its contraband dataset.

Staff who weren’t there

Dr. Terry writes that she saw women beaten by other women until they were unconscious. What worries her is that staff weren’t there to stop it.

The U.S. Department of Justice found officer vacancies across the system. Those posts are paid for out of the budget the General Assembly passes and the Governor signs. Her letter goes to lawmakers as well as to the Department. In its October 2024 findings, the Justice Department put GDC’s average correctional officer vacancy rate at 52.5% in 2023, the year she went in. ⁴

She wants the accountability to go higher than the officer on duty. When the same failures keep showing up at the same facility, she writes, it can’t end with whoever happened to be working that shift.

The number nobody keeps

Her most specific ask is also the plainest one. When a class gets cancelled, or a treatment group, or a vocational program, because there’s no officer to run it, she wants Georgia to write it down and count it.

GPS went looking for that count and came up empty. The Department’s yearly inmate services reports describe the programs that ran. None that GPS reviewed counts the sessions cancelled for lack of staff. Without that number, you can’t measure the distance between a program schedule on paper and a classroom door that stays locked.

Who has answered

As of September 24, one state senator’s office had written back to Dr. Terry. It told her the letter had gone to its contact at the Department of Corrections. The copy she mailed to one state representative came back undeliverable. On October 1, she plans to email the letter to every member of the House and Senate.

Here is her letter, in her own words.

A Voice for Women in Georgia’s Prison System

Dear Members of the Georgia General Assembly and Georgia Department of Corrections:

I am writing to you as a formerly incarcerated Georgia woman. I am not writing because I read about the conditions inside Georgia’s prisons. I lived in those conditions. I witnessed them and I experienced them firsthand.

In June 2023, I entered the Georgia prison system and was sent to Lee Arrendale State Prison for diagnostics, where I spent approximately 11 weeks. I was then transferred to Pulaski State Prison, where I remained until my release in August 2025. For more than two years, I lived inside Georgia’s women’s prison system.

I know what it is like to lose your freedom. I know what it is like to live under the rules and restrictions of incarceration. And I know what it is like to watch women around you struggle with addiction, mental-health issues, medical problems, violence, and the challenges of simply trying to survive prison.

I also understand something important: people who commit crimes must be held accountable for their actions. I am not asking Georgia to excuse criminal behavior. I am not asking for prisons to become comfortable places or for consequences to disappear. I am asking Georgia to make its correctional system actually correct.

The Georgia Department of Corrections states its mission as:

“To protect Georgians by operating secure facilities and providing opportunities for offender rehabilitation.”

I believe those words matter. However, after spending more than two years inside the system, I have to ask:

Are we truly providing women with an opportunity for rehabilitation?

And perhaps the harder question is:

How can a broken system help heal women who are already broken?

I am not telling you what I heard. I am telling you what I saw. During my incarceration, I witnessed women using illegal drugs. I was personally offered drugs while incarcerated.

Let that sink in.

A woman is sent to prison because she has broken the law. She is placed inside a facility that is supposed to be secure. Yet while inside that facility, she can be offered illegal drugs. That should not happen.

If Georgia is serious about security, how are drugs getting through the doors? If Georgia is serious about rehabilitation, why are women struggling with addiction still being exposed to drugs? And if Georgia is serious about public safety, what happens when those women eventually return to our communities without having received the treatment they needed?

This is not simply an inmate problem. It is a correctional-system problem. Georgia needs to examine how drugs enter its facilities, how they are distributed, who is accountable when they get inside, and whether women struggling with addiction are receiving meaningful treatment.

Drug use in prison should not be normalized. It should not be accepted as inevitable. And it certainly should not be something an incarcerated woman can be offered.

If a woman enters prison struggling with addiction, prison should be an opportunity to break that cycle. She should have access to meaningful treatment, recovery resources, counseling, and the tools necessary to live a life without drugs. Prison should not be a place where addiction continues unchecked. It should be a place where recovery can begin.

I also witnessed women who needed medical attention and were not treated in what I believed was a timely manner. In fact some of them died because of this inattention. When a person is incarcerated, she cannot simply leave the facility and seek another doctor. She cannot drive herself to an emergency room. She cannot choose another healthcare provider. She is dependent upon the correctional system for access to medical care. That creates an enormous responsibility.

I witnessed women waiting for medical attention while their needs continued. These women may have been incarcerated because of crimes they committed, but they did not surrender their humanity when they entered prison. A sentence should take away someone’s freedom. It should not take away her right to receive appropriate medical care. It should not lead to a death sentence that could have been prevented if treatment had begun in a timely manner.

There is another issue I feel compelled to address, and I want to be very clear about what I witnessed. I witnessed women being beaten so severely that they became unconscious and suffered serious injuries. For the most part, the violence I witnessed was inmate-on-inmate violence. I am not saying that correctional officers were responsible for those assaults.

My concern is that there were times when staff were not available to ensure the safety of the women involved. That raises serious questions about staffing, supervision, response times, and security. A correctional facility cannot be truly secure if there are not enough trained staff available to supervise the facility, respond to emergencies, intervene when necessary, and protect vulnerable women.

I am not sharing this to sensationalize violence. I am sharing it because lawmakers need to understand that serious violence can happen behind prison walls, where the public cannot see it. When an incarcerated woman is seriously injured, there must be accountability. There must be transparency. There must be a meaningful investigation into what happened. And there must be confidence that policies designed to protect incarcerated women are actually being followed.

Security cannot mean that everything that happens behind prison walls stays behind prison walls.

Based on what I personally witnessed, I believe staffing and staff training are significant issues that Georgia needs to examine. Having enough staff is not simply about having enough names on a schedule. It is about having enough properly trained people who are present, prepared, and accountable.

When staffing shortages mean that programs cannot operate, medical needs are delayed, or staff are unavailable when serious incidents occur, the consequences fall directly on the women inside the facility. I believe Georgia should examine staffing levels, vacancies, turnover, overtime, training, and whether facilities consistently have the personnel necessary to safely operate.

I also believe there should be greater accountability at the facility level. If a facility repeatedly experiences serious problems, the answer cannot simply be to blame the person who happened to be working that shift. There must also be accountability for leadership. Wardens and facility leadership should be held responsible for ensuring that their facilities are properly staffed, properly trained, properly supervised, and operating according to state standards. Oversight should reach the top.

Another issue that deserves attention is the scheduling of inmate programs and activities. I witnessed women being denied access to programs because staff were not available. This is especially troubling when rehabilitation is part of the Georgia Department of Corrections’ stated mission. If women are given schedules for educational programs, vocational training, treatment, recreation, or other opportunities, those schedules should mean something.

You cannot tell someone to rehabilitate herself and then repeatedly take away the opportunities designed to help her do it. Every missed class matters. Every cancelled program matters. Every treatment opportunity lost matters. Because eventually, many of these women will walk through the gates and return to Georgia communities. Many will return home not fully equipped to handle reentry into their communities.

If staffing shortages prevent a woman from participating in a program, that should be documented. Georgia should know how often rehabilitative opportunities are being cancelled because there are not enough staff available to provide them.

I also witnessed how poorly mental-health treatment was provided. Women entering prison often carry enormous amounts of trauma, grief, addiction, anxiety, depression, and other emotional struggles. Some are separated from their children. Some have lost relationships. Some have experienced abuse. Some are dealing with the consequences of decisions they deeply regret. Prison itself can intensify those struggles.

Yet I witnessed women who were not receiving the level of mental-health support I believe they desperately needed. If rehabilitation is truly the goal, mental health cannot be an afterthought. You cannot expect a person to change her life while ignoring the issues that may have contributed to her destructive choices in the first place. Mental-health care is not simply an inmate issue. It is a public-safety issue because these women eventually return to our communities.

Women in prison have needs that deserve specific attention: medical care, women’s healthcare, hygiene, mental health, trauma treatment, addiction treatment, motherhood and maintaining relationships with their children, education, job training, and reentry preparation.

These are not luxuries. They are part of preparing a person to return to society.

The Georgia Board of Corrections states that its responsibilities include rules concerning the housing, feeding, treatment, discipline, rehabilitation, training, and hospitalization of people in GDC custody. These issues are therefore at the heart of Georgia’s responsibility to incarcerated women and should be at the forefront of every decision that is made.

I know there will be people who read this and say: “They are prisoners. They did something wrong.” I know. I was one of them. I am not asking anyone to forget what I did. I am asking you not to forget what happens to people after they are sentenced. A judge can take away someone’s freedom. That does not mean the state should take away her humanity.

Accountability and compassion can exist together. Security and rehabilitation can exist together. Consequences and second chances can exist together. In fact, if rehabilitation is truly the mission, they must.

I believe Georgia also needs greater transparency between correctional facilities, lawmakers, and the public. Lawmakers cannot make meaningful decisions about prison reform if they are not receiving a complete and honest picture of what is happening inside the facilities. The public cannot have confidence in a correctional system that it cannot see or understand.

I believe Georgia should provide regular, transparent reporting regarding:

• Staffing levels and vacancies
• Staff training and retention
• Program cancellations caused by staffing shortages
• Medical-care delays
• Mental-health services and availability
• Serious inmate-on-inmate violence
• Uses of force
• Drug-related incidents
• Disciplinary incidents
• Access to educational and vocational programs
• Reentry and rehabilitation outcomes
• Complaints made by incarcerated people and how those complaints were resolved

This information should protect individual privacy while still allowing lawmakers and the public to understand whether Georgia’s correctional system is actually meeting its responsibilities.

I made mistakes. I was held accountable. I served my sentence. And in August 2025, I came home. Coming home gave me an opportunity to rebuild my life and become a better version of myself. That experience changed the way I look at the women who are still behind those walls. I cannot simply forget them because I came home. They are still there. I have a voice now that I did not always feel I had while I was incarcerated. So I am going to use it. I am speaking for myself, but I am also speaking about women whose circumstances may prevent them from being heard.

I am asking Georgia’s lawmakers and correctional leaders to do more than read reports and statistics. Go inside the women’s prisons. Talk to the women. Talk to former inmates. Talk to correctional officers. Look at the living conditions. Ask about medical care. Ask about mental health. Ask how drugs are entering secure facilities. Ask how often programs are cancelled because staff are unavailable. Ask about staffing levels and training. Ask whether women are actually receiving the rehabilitation that Georgia says is part of its mission.

And then listen. Not defensively. Not politically. Listen. Because I am one of the women who lived it and I am here to stand up for those women I left behind.

I am asking the State of Georgia to seriously examine the conditions inside its women’s correctional facilities and take meaningful action regarding:

• Staffing levels and staff training
• Accountability for facility leadership and wardens
• Independent oversight of women’s correctional facilities
• Medical care and the timeliness of medical treatment
• Mental-health care and accessibility
• Addiction treatment and recovery services
• How illegal drugs enter correctional facilities
• Accountability for failures in prison security
• Serious inmate-on-inmate violence and staff response
• Access to educational, vocational, and rehabilitative programs
• Staffing shortages that prevent women from participating in scheduled programs
• Reentry preparation
• Programs supporting incarcerated mothers and their children
• Transparency between correctional facilities, lawmakers, and the public
• The experiences of formerly incarcerated women when developing correctional policy

I am not asking you to be soft on crime. I am asking you to be serious about corrections.

If the mission is security, drugs should not be making their way inside. If the mission is rehabilitation, women should have meaningful access to treatment, education, mental-health care, and programs that prepare them for life after prison.

If the mission is public safety, women should leave prison better equipped to live successfully in our communities.

If the mission is accountability, that accountability must include the system itself when systemic problems are allowed to continue.

And if rehabilitation is truly the mission, then we must be willing to look honestly at the environment in which that rehabilitation is supposed to happen.

A broken system cannot heal broken people.

But a system that is willing to acknowledge its failures, accept accountability, and make meaningful changes can become part of the solution.

I am asking Georgia to choose the solution. I am asking you to make the GDC mission more than words. Make it reality. I came home. Now I am asking you to remember the women who are still waiting for their opportunity to come home—and to make sure that when they do, they have been given a genuine opportunity to become better than the worst thing they have ever done.

The women inside Georgia’s prisons are not simply inmates. They are human beings. They are mothers. They are daughters. They are sisters. They are wives. They are people who made mistakes—and many of them still have the ability to change. Please give them a system that gives them a genuine opportunity to do the same. I am asking you not to forget the women I left behind.

Respectfully,

Dr. Rachelle Terry

Formerly Incarcerated Georgia Woman

Advocate for Reform in Georgia’s Women’s Prisons

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Call to Action: What You Can Do

Awareness without action changes nothing. Here’s how you can help push for accountability and real reform:

Join the GPS Advocacy Network: Sign up at https://gps.press/become-an-advocate/ and we’ll advocate on your behalf every week. GPS identifies your state legislators, crafts personalized letters on the most pressing prison issues, and sends them directly to the representatives who represent you. You receive a copy of every letter. It takes two minutes to sign up, and we handle the rest.

Send a 60-Second Message: Pick an issue, get a ready-to-edit message with the verified facts already in it, and email your state House representative and senator directly from your own inbox at https://gps.press/send-a-message/. No signup, nothing stored. It takes about a minute.

Tell My Story: Are you or a loved one affected by Georgia’s prison system? GPS publishes first-person accounts from incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people and their families. Submit your story at https://gps.press/category/tellmystory/ and help the world understand what’s really happening behind the walls.

Contact Your Representatives: Your state legislators control GDC’s budget, oversight, and the laws that created these failures. Find your Georgia legislators at https://gps.press/find-your-legislator/ or call Governor Kemp at (404) 656-1776 or the GDC Commissioner at (478) 992-5246.

Demand Media Coverage: Contact newsrooms at the AJC, local TV stations, and national criminal justice outlets. More coverage means more pressure.

Amplify on Social Media: Share this article and tag @GovKemp, @GDC_Georgia, and your local representatives. Use #GAPrisons, #PrisonReform, #GeorgiaPrisonerSpeak.

Message the Board of Corrections: The citizen board that oversees the GDC publishes no contact details for its members. GPS built the missing front door: pick a board member and a policy message and send it from your own email at https://gps.press/write-the-board/.

File Public Records Requests: Georgia’s Open Records Act gives every citizen the right to request incident reports, death records, staffing data, medical logs, and financial documents. Start with the GPS Action Toolkits at https://gps.press/toolkits/. The Open Records Toolkit walks you through what to ask for, gives you ready-to-file request templates, and tells you what to do when the state says no. File directly with GDC at https://georgiadcor.govqa.us/WEBAPP/_rs/SupportHome.aspx.

Attend Public Meetings: The Georgia Board of Corrections and legislative committees hold public meetings. Your presence is noticed.

Contact the Department of Justice: File civil rights complaints at https://civilrights.justice.gov. Federal oversight has forced abusive systems to change before.

Support Organizations Doing This Work: Donate to or volunteer with Georgia-based prison reform groups fighting for change on the ground.

Vote: Research candidates’ positions on criminal justice. Primary elections often determine outcomes in Georgia.

Contact GPS: If you have information about conditions inside Georgia’s prisons, reach us securely at GPS.press.

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Further Reading

Pulaski State Prison Crisis: Untested Warden, Deadly History

A closer look at Pulaski State Prison, where Dr. Terry spent most of her sentence.

The Empty Column: Georgia Won’t Say How Prisoners Die

Why so many deaths in Georgia’s prisons are recorded without a cause.

Zombie Dorms: Drugs, Death and Idleness in Georgia Prisons

How drugs and idleness shape life in Georgia’s prison dorms.

Nothing to Do: Inside Georgia’s Prison Warehouse

What happens to people when the programs meant to prepare them for release disappear.

Two Commanders Say Georgia Hides Its Prison Staffing Crisis

Two former commanders on the staffing numbers the state doesn’t show.

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GPS Intelligence System

The GPS Intelligence System maintains living research profiles that aggregate data, news, settlements, and analysis on Georgia’s prisons and the issues defining them. The profiles below provide deeper context for the issues raised in this article:

Medical Neglect in Georgia Prisons

The record on delayed and denied medical care across Georgia’s prisons, the concern at the center of Dr. Terry’s letter.

Staffing Crisis in Georgia Prisons

Vacancies, turnover and what happens inside when there aren’t enough officers to run a prison.

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Explore the Data

GPS makes GDC statistics accessible to the public through several resources:

• GPS Statistics Portal: Interactive dashboards translating complex GDC reports into accessible formats, updated within days of official releases.
• GPS Lighthouse AI: Ask questions about Georgia’s prison system and get answers drawn from GPS’s investigative archive and data analysis.
• GPS llms.txt: A single machine-readable index of every GPS data resource, published using the open llms.txt standard. Point any AI tool (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity) at this URL and the model can navigate to facility profiles, intelligence briefs, mortality records, statistics, and the full investigative archive, with no other configuration needed. It is the fastest way to ground an AI conversation in verified GPS data.
• GPS Public MCP Server: For AI tools that support the Model Context Protocol (Claude, ChatGPT, and others), connect directly to GPS’s data: read-only tools covering population, facilities, mortality, parole, the Georgia Code, settlements, and more. Every answer arrives with its source link and citation built in.

For a walkthrough of how to put these resources to work with AI, see How to Use GPS Data with AI Tools: a step-by-step guide for researchers, advocates, families, and journalists analyzing Georgia prison conditions, statistics, and policy with tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.

Contact GPS at media@gps.press for access to underlying datasets used in this analysis.

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About Georgia Prisoners’ Speak (GPS)

Georgia Prisoners’ Speak (GPS) is a nonprofit investigative newsroom built in partnership with incarcerated reporters, families, advocates, and data analysts. Operating independently from the Georgia Department of Corrections, GPS documents the truth the state refuses to acknowledge: extreme violence, fatal medical neglect, gang-controlled dorms, collapsed staffing, fraudulent reporting practices, and unconstitutional conditions across Georgia’s prisons.

Through confidential reporting channels, secure communication, evidence verification, public-records requests, legislative research, and professional investigative standards, GPS provides the transparency the system lacks. Our mission is to expose abuses, protect incarcerated people, support families, and push Georgia toward meaningful reform based on human rights, evidence, and public accountability.

Every article is part of a larger fight: to end the silence, reveal the truth, and demand justice.

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Footnotes

1. GPS Georgia Prison Deaths Database, https://gps.press/georgia-prison-deaths/ [↩]
2. GDC contraband arrest report August 19 2024, https://gdc.georgia.gov/contraband-report/2024-08-19/contraband-arrests-multiple-state-prisons [↩]
3. GDC contraband arrest report November 12 2024, https://gdc.georgia.gov/contraband-report/2024-11-12/contraband-arrests-multiple-state-prisons [↩]
4. U.S. Department of Justice findings report on Georgia prisons October 1 2024, https://www.justice.gov/crt/media/1371406/dl [↩]