Georgia’s corrections commissioner told senators single cells cut prison violence. At Calhoun, Dooly, Washington and Wilcox, GDC is packing more Close security men into single-man cells that hold three, at prisons built for 500 and holding up to 1,800, and the homicide rate shows it.
On August 25 we sent the same five questions to both nominees for Georgia Attorney General, on the Justice Department’s prison findings, deaths in custody, open records, oversight and habeas. Sen. Brian Strickland answered. No answers were received from Rep. Tanya Miller. His answers are here in full.
Georgia’s legislature wrote the sentences. Five appointees nobody elected decided how much of them people serve, and three times they turned the dial up, once by wiring their floor to judges’ sentences so it rises on its own. The result is a prison system the DOJ says is unconstitutional.
Georgia now reimburses rural county jails when more than 20 percent of their capacity is filled by people charged with delivering contraband to state prisons. Two sheriffs are in open revolt over the cost. Every dollar the state spends chases the supply chain it can see from a patrol car.
State fire inspectors found barrel bolts on every fire exit at Ware State Prison in June and told GDC to remove them. In August they found the bolts still there, new ones on the dorm doors, empty control rooms and staff without keys. Inside Georgia’s prisons, the same hardware is on the cell doors.
Arthur Wimbush was killed at Phillips State Prison thirty days from release. The Chief of Security says every segregation bed was full, so there was nowhere to put a man who needed protecting. The medical examiner certified homicide. Georgia’s bed math is the mechanism.
On July 25 we sent the same eight questions on Georgia’s prison crisis to both nominees for governor. One campaign answered all eight in writing. The other has not responded. We publish the answers we received, without endorsement, and the same offer stands.
Georgia’s Chief Justice told a new House study committee that the state’s post-conviction system is broken — and that the courts broke much of it. Inside the first meeting of the Blue-Ribbon Study Committee on Criminal Post-Conviction Litigation, and what to watch as it shapes the 2027 session.
Georgia poured $2.4 billion in new money into its prisons since 2021 — on top of $12.2 billion spent since 2020 — and bought the deadliest years in the system’s history. Follow the money to see who really built the crisis, and why firing one commissioner fixes nothing.
Two former GDC commanders — a CERT commander pushed out after a sworn warning, and a deputy warden of security who quit rather than comply — independently say Georgia hides its prison staffing collapse by manipulating the numbers it reports to the public.