AUTRY STATE PRISON

Last updated September 13, 2026.(DS)

Autry State Prison: A Shuttered Building, a Perfect Inspection Score

Autry State Prison (Jimmy Autry SP) is a medium-security men's prison in Pelham, Mitchell County, opened in 1994. It was designed for 500 people; its current rated capacity is 1,698, and GPS's most recent population snapshot records 460 people held there — roughly 27 percent of rated capacity. The physical plant was built around a large number of double-bunked cell units plus dormitory-style housing and segregation/isolation cells. The facility has historically housed many close-custody and sex-offender populations, and it offers limited vocational industries — including footwear manufacturing — along with basic education, counseling, and religious programs. Warden Michael Graham has led the facility since July 2025, with Deputy Wardens Mary L. Banks, Nakia Stephen, and Tanja Copeland.

The central analytical thread at Autry is the distance between what the state's paper record shows and what the building and its water actually did to the people held inside it. GPS's own investigative reporting describes a facility whose water system carried Legionella pneumophila — the bacterium that causes Legionnaires' disease, a severe and sometimes fatal pneumonia — with an incarcerated man at Autry diagnosed with the disease in 2021, and the facility closed in June 2023 for plumbing and HVAC upgrades while the population was relocated. GPS's reporting further describes how, thirty days after the state's public-health agency confirmed the contamination, the corrections department told the men living there in writing that no outbreak existed — and how the contamination, and the antibiotics, followed them to the next prison. Against that record, the kitchen at Autry has never scored below a 90.

Scores Without Sanitation: What DPH Grades and What It Cannot See

The Georgia Department of Public Health's food-safety inspection record at Autry reads as near-perfect. DPH scored the facility 100 (Grade A) on December 12, 2024, a routine inspection with no violations cited. On July 9, 2025, a routine inspection returned 98 (Grade A) with one violation, for sewage and waste water properly disposed. On March 20, 2026, a routine inspection returned 90 (Grade A) with two violations — proper hot holding temperatures, and physical facilities installed, maintained, and clean. And on April 13, 2026, an initial inspection returned 100 (Grade A) again.

GPS treats these scores as systematically unreliable indicators of actual food-safety conditions, and the reasoning is structural rather than facility-specific. The pattern GPS has documented across GDC kitchens is that DPH scores reflect a single announced walkthrough on a single day; they do not capture what arrives on the tray, what happens between inspections, or what inmate maintenance workers observe inside the equipment. GPS's reporting has documented tray-sanitizing dishwashers broken for sustained periods, thousands of roaches inside kitchen equipment at Dooly State Prison, sustained roach and rodent infestation in kitchen and serving areas, and meals served on visibly contaminated trays — a pattern independently corroborated by The Marshall Project's May 16, 2026 investigation of Georgia prison food, which reported rats in kitchens, insects in food, moldy trays, and visible malnutrition across Georgia facilities. The contradiction between high DPH scores and sustained witness reports of equipment failure and contamination is the analytical center of GPS's investigation "Dunked, Stacked, and Served." At Autry, the same facility that earned a perfect 100 from DPH in December 2024 had been shut down entirely two years earlier because its water carried a bacterium that causes a potentially fatal pneumonia. GPS has also documented the professional overlap between inspectors and facility staff in small-county settings — a regulatory-capture dynamic that helps explain how scheduled walkthroughs and witness testimony can diverge so completely.

The economics underneath that divergence are documented in GPS's systemic findings. GDC spends approximately $1.69 per person per day on food, and has proposed $1.60 per day in FY27 — under 60 cents per meal — against the FDA Thrifty Food Plan estimate of roughly $10 per day for an adult man's nutritionally adequate diet. The state spends approximately 14 times more on medical care for incarcerated people, some $432 million, than on their food.

Classification Drift, Staffing Collapse, and the Medium-Security Paradox

Autry is a medium-security prison that has historically housed many close-custody and sex-offender populations. That mismatch is the facility-level expression of a systemic pattern GPS has documented across Georgia: medium-security facilities operating as close-security facilities without the staffing or infrastructure that classification level requires. GPS has published a report titled "The Classification Crisis: How Four Medium Security Prisons Are Killing People," and has separately documented classification drift using GDC's own October 27, 2025 security-level data. The facility profile itself confirms the drift at Autry — a medium-security designation carrying close-custody populations.

The staffing collapse that makes that drift dangerous is documented in GPS's systemic findings. Officer vacancies in Georgia's prisons have run between 49.3 and 60 percent systemwide for multiple years, against a national standard of no more than 10 percent; at Valdosta State Prison the rate reached 80 percent by April 2024. The hiring pipeline cannot close the gap — an acceptance rate under 15 percent, with 82.7 percent of new hires leaving in their first year — and Georgia ranks last of 50 states for correctional-officer pay. The October 2024 DOJ findings letter concluded that "the leadership of the Georgia Department of Corrections has lost control of its facilities" and faulted GDC for placing "too much blame on gangs and insufficient emphasis on understaffing." Approximately 31 percent of the system's roughly 49,000 incarcerated people are validated members of 315 different security threat groups — more than double the national average. DOJ and the Guidehouse 2024 consultant assessment independently concluded that gangs effectively run multiple facilities, controlling access to phones, showers, food, and bed assignments. Tyler Ryals, a former GDC sergeant forced out in 2024 after whistleblowing, told GPS he had personally been the only security person on the entire Telfair compound of roughly 1,250 maximum-security inmates.

Twenty-Two Deaths, Half of Them Unclassified

GPS's mortality database records 22 deaths at Autry State Prison since tracking began on January 1, 2020 — a figure that is a floor, since GDC reports deaths roughly two months late and GPS's canonical methodology treats every count as an undercount. Eight deaths were recorded in 2020, five in 2021, one each in 2022, 2023, and 2024, five in 2025, and one so far in 2026. Eleven of the 22 — exactly half — carry a cause label of Unknown/Pending. Eight are classified as natural or medical, two as "Other," and one as suicide.

The deaths skew heavily toward older men. Richard Cleveland Castleberry, 72, died April 23, 2026. Chaudhry Abudl Rashid, 74, died November 11, 2025. Richard Merritt, 75, died October 20, 2025. James Melvin Tudor, 86, and Alton Anson Kelly, 61, both died August 23, 2025. Harvey Jack Woodard, 69, died May 8, 2025. Alerick Campbell, 56, died December 22, 2024. Earlier in the record, Clarence Steven Wallace, 67, died January 9, 2023; Stanley Eric Hamilton, 51, died October 30, 2022; Henry Sheffield Jr., 51, died December 10, 2021; William H. Oglesby, 61, died September 11, 2021, classified as a suicide; Glamorous Lane, 60, and David Curtis Shores, 53, both died in 2021 with causes classified as "Other"; Carlie Edward Burch Jr., 65, died January 13, 2021. The 2020 deaths include Cordell James Shipman, who was 22 — the youngest person in the record — along with Mark Ramos, 59; Richard Office, 80; Thomas Edward White, 75; James Mitchell Blankenship, 67; Willie J. Bell, 68; Dennis Lee Hammons, 62; and Darren Nicholas Wehrle, 32.

The pattern of older men dying with causes still pending is consistent with the broader systemic finding GPS has documented: infrastructure collapse and deferred maintenance function as a force multiplier for mortality across GDC facilities. Most GDC facilities are 30 to 40-plus years old, with documented patterns of deferred maintenance producing systemwide failures — broken cell-door locks (a 2012 Hays audit found roughly 42 percent non-functional, which the 2024 Guidehouse assessment confirmed), inoperative surveillance and fire-alarm systems, mold and water failures, broken kitchen sanitization equipment, and pest infestations. The DOJ's October 2024 findings, the Guidehouse 2024 assessment, and Commissioner Oliver's public "end of life" statements all corroborate that pattern.

Liability Payouts and the Cost of Conditions

The State of Georgia's own settlement ledger, obtained through open records from the GA DOAS Risk Management division, records five liability payouts tied to Autry State Prison between 2016 and 2020. The largest was $70,000 to Susan Brown, tied to a February 2020 incident. Nicole P. Ellis received $35,000 for an April 2018 incident; Christopher L. Jones received $7,500 for a September 2018 incident; Patricia Ann Kierce received $500 for an October 2016 incident; and Damon Young (GDC 1030956) received $350 for a February 2016 incident. The ledger does not describe the underlying incidents. The pattern — five payouts across five years, ranging from a few hundred dollars to $70,000 — is consistent with the liability exposure GPS has documented across GDC facilities operating under classification drift, staffing collapse, and deferred maintenance.

A 2014 Killing Ordered From Inside

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that in 2014, an Autry State Prison inmate ordered a hit on a woman, who was shot eight times while holding her infant son. The baby, nine months old, was killed. The case illustrates the reach of contraband communication networks from inside Georgia's prisons — a dynamic GPS has documented systemically. GPS's fact-checked reporting on Georgia's $50 million deployment of phone-blocking technology across 35 prisons describes homicides quadrupling and violence erupting within weeks at every facility where GPS confirmed activation dates, with the crackdown destabilizing the power structures that had kept people alive. The same reporting documents that the Managed Access System deployment correlates with record homicides and violence, and that a Bloods gang war at a GDC facility produced multiple life flights. Those events belong to the facilities where they occurred; the Autry case is the facility-level illustration of the contraband-communication problem, not a claim that the phone-war violence happened here.

Litigation Barriers Inside the Walls

GPS has received recurring reports from Autry State Prison describing a pattern in which incarcerated people attempting unit-level conditions litigation faced significant literacy and procedural barriers to maintaining federal pro se pleadings. According to those accounts, a single petitioner had drafted legal filings on behalf of a broader group of incarcerated people in a specific unit before a court order required separate litigation; once forced to proceed individually, most participants dropped their claims. The pattern — collective legal action collapsing under individual procedural burden — is one GPS has observed as a structural barrier to incarcerated people seeking remedy for the conditions documented on this page.

Sources

This analysis draws on Georgia Department of Public Health food-safety inspection records; the GA DOAS Risk Management settlement ledger obtained through open records; reporting from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The Marshall Project; GPS's own investigative reporting, including "There's Nothing Wrong with the Water," "Forced to Drink: Blue Water Scandal at Washington Prison," "The Crackdown That's Killing," "Dunked, Stacked, and Served," and "The Classification Crisis: How Four Medium Security Prisons Are Killing People"; the October 2024 DOJ findings letter and the Guidehouse 2024 assessment; GPS's mortality database and facility records; and inmate and family accounts collected by GPS staff.