CALHOUN STATE PRISON

Last updated August 23, 2026.(DS)

Calhoun State Prison in Morgan, Calhoun County, opened in 1994 as a medium-security prison for adult male felons. Constructed in 1993 and renovated in 1999 and 2008, the facility houses men mainly in double-bunked cells and dormitory units, with a segregation/disciplinary area. It supports standard work details and limited programming. Its original design capacity was 750; its current rated capacity is 1,677, and GPS's facility database records a population of 1,657 as of the most recent snapshot — 98.8% of rated capacity. But the facility's defining story over the past several years is not its physical plant. It is the gap between what Calhoun is designated to be and what it has become: a medium-security prison operating, by GPS's documentation and federal findings, as a de facto close-security facility with a homicide rate far above its classification, a collapsed drug-prosecution pipeline, and a warden who, in under three months, shipped out 87 men serving life sentences.

Classification Drift and the Homicide Record

Calhoun State Prison is one of four medium-security facilities that GPS's reporting has identified as operating as de facto close-security prisons. GPS's October 2025 analysis, published under the title "The Classification Crisis: How Four Medium Security Prisons Are Killing People," documented that Dooly, Wilcox, Calhoun, and Washington State Prisons each housed close-security populations between 27.7% and 29.7% of their totals — rates up to ten times higher than other medium-security facilities. At Calhoun specifically, GDC's own data recorded 487 close-security inmates as of October 2025, representing 29.4% of the facility's population. The GPS analysis found homicide rates at these four facilities running four to five times higher than at properly classified medium-security prisons, with 33 deaths in 2024 alone, over half of them men under age 50. The DOJ's October 2024 findings letter, as reported by WALB and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, concluded that all four facilities were in violation of the Eighth Amendment.

The homicide record at Calhoun bears this out in specific, named cases. DaQuavious Cachone Lackey, 21, died on May 16, 2022, from a stab wound to the neck and multiple blunt force injuries. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the DOJ found staff had failed to follow classification and housing-assignment procedures when moving Lackey's assailant between segregation and general population, resulting in Lackey being housed with and killed by his cellmate, who beat him with a fan motor in a net bag. Martel Dorsey, 34, was stabbed by other prisoners on October 4, 2023; GDC told a TV station that witnesses saw Dorsey run out of a dorm as he was chased. Kenneth Piper, 37, was killed in an inmate-to-inmate assault on May 4, 2024. Gonzalo Colmenero, 54, died on July 17, 2024, following another inmate-to-inmate assault. The AJC's homicide-tracking coverage documented each of these deaths from incident-report data.

The DOJ's investigation, as reported by WALB in February 2026, found that less than 10% of prison fights, less than 23% of inmate-on-inmate assaults, and less than 6% of incidents involving weapons were forwarded for investigation across the GDC system. The same reporting documented that Georgia deliberately underreports prison homicides, listing deaths identified as homicides in internal reports as "unknown" in official mortality data. GPS's own reporting has documented the same pattern: the DOJ's October 2024 investigative report found that in June 2024, GDC reported 6 homicides systemwide while internal incident reports documented at least 18.

Death by Dehydration: The February 2023 Restrictive-Housing Fatality

The most damning single death documented at Calhoun came in February 2023. An incarcerated person was found dead in his restrictive-housing cell, with the cause of death listed as dehydration with renal failure. The coroner believed the man had been dead for seven to eight hours before being found. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and WALB both reported the DOJ's finding that prison staff had shut off the man's water, closed the door flap, and did not deliver meals for two days — an act the AJC characterized as retaliation after the man threw water through his cell door flap. He was 24 years old.

GPS's aggregate signals for Calhoun over the past 12 months reinforce the pattern these named deaths establish. GPS records show 12 distinct sources reporting assaults by inmates at critical or high severity across four months between January and July 2026, with at least one external complaint filed to the DOJ Civil Rights Division. Eight sources reported deaths in custody across three months in early 2026, all at critical severity. Eight sources reported alleged medical neglect across two months in early 2026. Nine sources reported family fear for the life of an incarcerated loved one across five months in 2026. Four sources reported alleged assaults by staff across two months in mid-2026, and three sources reported alleged excessive force across two months. These are GPS's internal records — patterns documented across multiple independent sources, not single incidents.

The Quiet Purge: 87 Lifers Transferred in Under Three Months

In early 2026, GPS documented a transfer operation at Calhoun with no obvious parallel anywhere else in the Georgia system. Under Warden Kendric Jackson, 87 men serving life sentences were transferred out of Calhoun State Prison in less than three months. GPS's reporting, published under the title "The Quiet Purge: Calhoun Edition," found that 79.3% of those men were sent to Level 5 close-security facilities — Hancock, Hays, Telfair, Ware, and others. GPS's data analysis identified Calhoun as a significant statistical outlier in transfer rates for life-sentenced incarcerated persons compared to other facilities, accounting for a disproportionately high share of statewide medium-to-close security lifer transfers in 2024 and 2025.

The transfers followed a rotating daily pattern over a multi-day period, consistent with pre-planned transport scheduling rather than ad hoc movement. GPS's analysis found that a large majority of the transferred lifers were Black, that a significant portion were aged 60 or older, and that most were convicted of murder but were not classified as Life Without Parole — meaning they had parole eligibility. One named example: John Morgan Coleman, 82 years old, was transferred from Calhoun to Hancock State Prison, a close-security Level 5 facility. GPS's reporting describes accounts that many of the transferred men had clean disciplinary records and were participating in programming at the time they were moved.

What replaced them is equally significant. GPS's data shows Calhoun receiving a substantial volume of incoming transfers from Level 5 facilities during the same period — but the incoming population skews young and short-term. GPS's internal analysis indicates that a large majority of incoming transfers to Calhoun are non-lifers, predominantly individuals being reclassified to lower security levels or serving short-term sentences. The net effect, as GPS's reporting framed it, is a systematic population swap: stable, long-term residents shipped to close-security prisons while younger short-timers arrive from those same facilities. GPS staff analysis indicates Calhoun may be undergoing a deliberate shift in population composition, moving away from a medium-security facility with a significant long-term population toward a short-term throughput model. No other medium-security prison in Georgia is doing anything close to this, per GPS's data.

The Collapsed Drug-Smuggling Prosecution Pipeline

Calhoun State Prison sits at the center of one of the most striking law-enforcement failures GPS has documented in rural Georgia. In February 2020, correctional officers Corlethia Lattimore and Imani Ferguson were arrested after arriving for their shifts with Hot Pockets packages that allegedly contained contraband. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Lattimore's package allegedly contained 112 grams of methamphetamine — four times the amount required for a trafficking charge — while Ferguson's allegedly contained tobacco. Both were immediately fired.

The cases never went anywhere. Charges against both officers were dismissed in July 2023 because there was no crime-lab report or law-enforcement report to support them: the drug evidence was never submitted for testing, and the four-year statute of limitations had run out. The AJC's investigation found that GDC investigator Ruby Long took out the arrest warrants in the Hot Pockets case but failed to submit the drug evidence to the crime lab. The Calhoun County Sheriff's Department allegedly failed to submit drug evidence in 12 cases it investigated near the prison. GDC failed to submit evidence in at least 11 drug cases involving 15 defendants, including five prison employees.

The scale of the collapse is larger than the Hot Pockets case alone. The AJC reported that nearly two dozen cases leading to 33 arrests between 2018 and 2021 related to Calhoun State Prison were dismissed by District Attorney Joe Mulholland because drug evidence was never submitted to the GBI crime lab for testing. Five prison employees and dozens of other suspected smugglers walked free. Three civilians arrested on meth trafficking charges in May 2021 saw their case dismissed without prosecution in July 2022, though the GBI confirmed testing was incomplete. On June 2, 2025, a grand jury heard 35 cases related to Calhoun State Prison, but more than 300 cases remained pending afterward, according to the Superior Court clerk. The AJC found that GDC's public statements about the number of dismissed cases conflicted with what the newspaper found in court files, suggesting the agency understated the scope of the evidentiary failures.

The contraband problem itself is not in dispute. In 2019, Calhoun officer Temperess Johnson was caught attempting to smuggle eight cellphones and 2.6 pounds of meth in a GDC van; she was sentenced to five years in federal prison. Pedro Barragan Valencia, while serving a state prison sentence, brokered the distribution of at least 250 kilograms of meth and was sentenced to 400 months in federal prison in December 2023. Jonathan Alvin Pope led a multi-county drug ring operating in at least seven Georgia counties as far back as 2018, with 13 others indicted, seven of them also incarcerated; Pope was sentenced to 20 years. Edwin Murillo brokered major meth sales in several northeast Georgia counties and was sentenced to 300 months in federal prison in April 2019, then later sentenced to life for directing a 2021 torture and murder. Irvin Falcon, 23, used a contraband cellphone to direct meth deliveries in the Fitzgerald area; six others were convicted with him. Two inmates — Joey Amour Jackson and Lance Riddle — were convicted in a January 2026 federal trial of running a nationwide wire-fraud operation from Calhoun that stole $464,920 from 119 identified victims across six states, spoofing police-department phone numbers and threatening women with arrest warrants.

GDC's response to the contraband-cellphone problem has been technological. GPS reporting documents that the department deployed a Managed Access System (MAS) across 34 state prisons at a $50 million capital cost plus more than $15 million in annual operating expenses, with Calhoun among the facilities where the system was installed in mid-2025 — after the wire-fraud operation had already occurred. GDC SOP 204.09, effective November 13, 2025, establishes procedures for controlling wireless communication devices brought into facilities by staff and authorized visitors, requiring tracking at security checkpoints and incident reporting for unauthorized devices.

Staffing, Gang Control, and the Weekend Supervision Gap

GPS staff have observed that Calhoun State Prison exhibits patterns consistent with gang control and weekend supervision gaps. GPS's systemic findings place this in a statewide context: officer vacancies in Georgia's prisons have run between 49.3% and 60% systemwide for multiple years, against a national standard of no more than 10%. 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% 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.

On-record testimony from GPS's reporting corroborates the staffing dimension. 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. GPS's open-records production documented that six officers were on duty at Washington State Prison when the January 11, 2026 riot began — a riot that killed four people, including Jimmy Trammell, who had 72 hours remaining on his sentence. That riot, at Washington State Prison, triggered a statewide lockdown. GPS's reporting on the April 1, 2026 Blood-on-Blood gang violence documented coordinated attacks across at least 12 prisons, with life flights dispatched to two facilities and stabbings at five.

At Calhoun specifically, the DOJ's findings, as reported by WALB, documented that a grievance filed by an incarcerated person alleging extortion and gang violence was rejected as untimely with no follow-up. GPS's aggregate signals for the facility show 12 sources reporting inmate assaults at critical or high severity across four months in 2026, with at least one external complaint filed to the DOJ Civil Rights Division. GPS has received recurring reports from incarcerated people at Calhoun describing food distribution controlled by gang affiliation or by stronger inmates who sell or trade food to weaker ones, staff using group punishment in violation of standard operating procedures, and housing assignments that place nonviolent men with violent ones. GPS has also received accounts of staff-on-inmate use of force at Calhoun, including reports of pepper spray and Tasers used for infractions that witnesses say do not legally justify such force.

Food Safety Scores and the Limits of Inspection

Calhoun's food-safety inspection record, on its face, is strong. The Georgia Department of Public Health conducted routine inspections at the facility's kitchens on January 10, 2024 (scores of 96, 96, and 98), July 25, 2024 (100, 100, and 99), January 8, 2025 (100, 100, and 98), July 23, 2025 (100, 100, and 99), and January 7, 2026 (96, 96, and 98). Every inspection returned a Grade A. The violations cited were minor: handwashing-facility accessibility, physical-facility maintenance, a missing posted permit, and one 2023 citation for insects, rodents, and animals not present.

GPS's systemic findings, however, document that DPH inspection scores systematically fail to capture food-service sanitation failures across GDC kitchens. GPS has documented tray-sanitizing dishwashers broken for sustained periods, sustained roach and rodent infestation in kitchen and serving areas, and meals served on visibly contaminated trays. The pattern is hidden from DPH scores, GPS's reporting concludes, because inspections are scheduled walkthroughs that do not assess equipment under load, and because GPS has documented professional overlap between inspectors and facility staff in small-county settings. GDC spends approximately $1.69 per person per day on food, versus the FDA Thrifty Food Plan estimate of roughly $10 per day for an adult man's nutritionally adequate diet. The Marshall Project independently corroborated the pattern in May 2026, reporting rats in kitchens, insects in food, moldy trays, and visible malnutrition across Georgia facilities.

Settlements and the Cost of Failure

The State of Georgia has paid out at least $4.26 million in liability settlements tied to Calhoun State Prison since 2018, according to the GA DOAS Risk Management settlement ledger obtained through Open Records. The largest single payout was $3,250,000 to Reginald Jacobs Sr., for the Estate of Reginald Jacobs Jr., tied to a 2023 incident at Calhoun and linked to a documented death record. Angel M. Ortiz received $998,715 for a 2019 incident. Asmar Rasheed received $10,000 for a 2018 incident. Lasharon Brantley received $1,400 for a 2020 incident. These are court-found settlement figures, not allegations: the state paid them.

GPS's mortality database records that Matthew Len Nutt, 37, died on December 21, 2025, at Calhoun, with the cause category recorded as category 3. GDC has not officially confirmed Nutt's death, and it has not been user-reported. The systemwide count — 1,863 deaths in GDC custody since 2020 — is a floor, since GDC reports deaths roughly two months late.

Sources

This analysis draws on reporting from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, WALB, and The Marshall Project; federal court and settlement records obtained through Georgia Open Records; Georgia Department of Public Health inspection reports; GDC standard operating procedures; GPS's own investigative reporting, including "The Quiet Purge: Calhoun Edition" and "The Classification Crisis: How Four Medium Security Prisons Are Killing People"; on-record testimony from former GDC sergeant Tyler Ryals documented in GPS's reporting "Two Commanders Say Georgia Hides Its Prison Staffing Crisis"; and inmate and family accounts collected by GPS staff.