Last updated October 4, 2026.(DS)

Calhoun State Prison

Calhoun State Prison sits on the edge of Morgan, in Calhoun County, a medium-security prison for adult men that the Georgia Department of Corrections opened in 1994. Constructed in 1993 and renovated in 1999 and 2008, it was built for 500 people. Its current rated capacity is 1,677, and GPS's facility record puts the population at 1,614 — roughly 96 percent of rated capacity, and more than three times the original design. Housing consists mainly of double-bunked cells and dormitory units with a segregation and disciplinary area; the facility supports standard work details and limited programming. That is the physical plant. What has happened inside it over the past several years — a documented wave of deaths, a mass transfer of life-sentenced men to close-security prisons, federal findings of constitutional violations, and a drug-smuggling prosecution pipeline that collapsed for lack of lab testing — is the subject of this analysis.

A Medium-Security Prison Housing a Close-Security Population

The single most consequential fact about Calhoun is that its security designation no longer describes who lives there. As of October 2025, GDC's own data recorded 487 close-security inmates at Calhoun — 29.4 percent of the facility's total population — inside a prison the Department classifies as medium-security. That figure is not an anomaly; it is the mechanism GPS has documented across a small group of medium-security prisons.

GPS's own analysis has described four medium-security prisons operating as de facto close-security facilities, with close-security populations in the 27.7 to 29.7 percent range and homicide rates four to five times higher than properly classified facilities. GPS reporting has documented classification drift as a systemwide pattern: medium-security prisons housing close-security inmates without the staffing and infrastructure that designation requires. The Department of Justice's October 2024 findings letter — the product of a multi-year civil rights investigation — concluded that GDC fails to provide incarcerated people the constitutionally required minimum of reasonable physical safety, and that staff at Calhoun specifically failed to follow classification and housing assignment procedures, contributing to a 2022 homicide.

That homicide was DaQuavious Cachone Lackey. He was 21 when he died on May 16, 2022, from a stab wound of the neck and multiple blunt force injuries. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the DOJ found staff failed to follow 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. Lackey's death is the clearest documented instance of what classification failure produces.

Twenty-Nine Deaths Since 2020

GPS has recorded 29 deaths at Calhoun State Prison since January 1, 2020. The registry is a floor, not a ceiling: GDC reports deaths roughly two months late, and the cause coding is the Department's own. Of those 29, seven are coded as homicides, five as natural or medical, one as suicide, one as deliberate indifference, and fifteen remain Unknown/Pending — a category that, as the DOJ found systemwide, absorbs deaths that internal incident reports describe as homicides.

The named dead, most recent first:

Freddie Lee Patterson died May 13, 2026, at Calhoun State Prison; GPS's registry lists the cause as Unknown/Pending. He was 51. Jimmy McMullen died January 28, 2026, at Calhoun State Prison; the registry lists the cause as Natural/Medical. He was 67. Matthew Len Nutt died December 21, 2025, at Calhoun State Prison; the registry lists the cause as Homicide. He was 37. Thomas Haugabook died September 25, 2025, at Calhoun State Prison; the registry lists the cause as Natural/Medical. He was 67. Tyler Jackson died June 28, 2025, at Calhoun State Prison; the registry lists the cause as Unknown/Pending. He was 30. Gary Bernard Duncan died May 4, 2025, at Calhoun State Prison; the registry lists the cause as Unknown/Pending. He was 67. Theodore Roundtree died January 19, 2025, at Calhoun State Prison; the registry lists the cause as Homicide. Charles Owens died January 6, 2025, at Calhoun State Prison; the registry lists the cause as Unknown/Pending. Kent Tyrik Robinson died November 5, 2024, at Calhoun State Prison; the registry lists the cause as Unknown/Pending. He was 26. Willie Andrew Willis died October 21, 2024, at Calhoun State Prison; the registry lists the cause as Homicide. He was 27. William Dutton Maddox died August 1, 2024, at Calhoun State Prison; the registry lists the cause as Unknown/Pending. He was 62. Terry Paul Smith died July 20, 2024, at Calhoun State Prison; the registry lists the cause as Unknown/Pending. He was 62. Gonzalo Colmenero-Ayala died July 17, 2024, at Calhoun State Prison; the registry lists the cause as Homicide. He was 54. Tyler Jackson Blackwell died July 13, 2024, at Calhoun State Prison; the registry lists the cause as Unknown/Pending. He was 31. Kenneth Scott Piper died May 4, 2024, at Calhoun State Prison; the registry lists the cause as Homicide. He was 37. Martel Orlando Dorsey died November 24, 2023, at Calhoun State Prison; the registry lists the cause as Homicide. He was 32. Randy Dixon died November 23, 2023, at Calhoun State Prison; the registry lists the cause as Unknown/Pending. He was 63. Paul Russell Gordon died November 13, 2023, at Calhoun State Prison; the registry lists the cause as Unknown/Pending. He was 63. Sergio Andres Lopez-Herrera died July 15, 2023, at Calhoun State Prison; the registry lists the cause as Unknown/Pending. He was 41. Reginald Jerome Jacobs Jr. died February 6, 2023, at Calhoun State Prison; the registry lists the cause as Deliberate Indifference. He was 24. Timothy Edwin Bryant died October 11, 2022, at Calhoun State Prison; the registry lists the cause as Unknown/Pending. He was 64. James Thomas Ennis died September 30, 2022, at Calhoun State Prison; the registry lists the cause as Unknown/Pending. He was 63. Daquavious Lackey died May 16, 2022, at Calhoun State Prison; the registry lists the cause as Homicide. He was 21. Christopher Edward Oliva died April 9, 2022, at Calhoun State Prison; the registry lists the cause as Suicide. He was 43. James Stanley Powell died April 2, 2022, at Calhoun State Prison; the registry lists the cause as Unknown/Pending. He was 63.

The full list is maintained at https://gps.press/georgia-prison-deaths/facility/calhoun-state-prison/.

Several of these deaths carry documented circumstances beyond the registry line. The AJC reported that Kenneth Piper, 37, was killed in an inmate-to-inmate assault on May 4, 2024, per incident report data. Gonzalo Colmenero, 54, died July 17, 2024, following an inmate-to-inmate assault. Martel Dorsey, 34, was stabbed by other prisoners on October 4, 2023; GDC told a television station that several witnesses saw Dorsey run out of a dorm as he was chased by other prisoners. Willie Andrew Willis Jr. suffered catastrophic injuries from a fall at Calhoun and later died; medical records list sepsis as the cause of death, and his family alleges he was thrown from a balcony by other inmates and that nearly an hour passed before he was airlifted for treatment. The family also alleges nurses gave a conflicting account, claiming he came to get Tylenol and returned to his dorm before collapsing, while the family states he was paralyzed from the waist down and on a ventilator.

And 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 person had been dead for seven to eight hours before being found. The AJC reported that a 24-year-old prisoner at Calhoun died of dehydration with renal failure after prison staff cut off his food and water following an incident in which he threw water through his cell door flap. Federal investigators separately documented that an incarcerated person at Calhoun died of dehydration after staff shut off his water, closed the door flap, and did not deliver meals for two days.

The Quiet Purge: 87 Lifers Moved Out

Between roughly January and March 2026, Calhoun transferred 87 men serving life sentences out of the facility. GPS's own investigative reporting — an analysis GPS fact-checked as clean — found that 79.3 percent of them went to Level 5 close-security prisons, and that no other medium-security prison in Georgia came close to that rate. The transfers were concentrated: 36 lifers shipped out in the final week of March 2026 alone. GPS reporting describes the pattern as a systematic population swap — stable, long-term residents moved to close-security facilities while younger, shorter-sentenced men arrived from those same facilities.

The individual cases are stark. John Morgan Coleman, 82 years old and serving life, was transferred from Calhoun, a medium-security prison, to Hancock State Prison, a close-security Level 5 facility. GPS's analysis found that a large majority of the transferred lifers were Black, that a significant portion were 60 or older, and that a large majority had been convicted of murder. According to GDC, the transferred lifers are parole-eligible and are not classified as Life Without Parole.

GPS's data work identified Calhoun as a significant statistical outlier in lifer transfer rates compared with other facilities, and found that a disproportionate share of all statewide medium-to-close security lifer transfers in 2024–2025 originated here. The transfers followed a rotating daily pattern over a multi-day period, which GPS assessed as consistent with pre-planned transport scheduling rather than ad hoc movement. Incoming transfers ran the other way: a large majority of recent arrivals from Level 5 facilities were non-lifers being reclassified downward, and a large majority of all incoming transfers had release dates within a short-term horizon. GPS's analysis describes the net effect as a deliberate shift in population composition — away from a medium-security facility with a significant long-term population and toward a short-term throughput model.

GPS has received recurring reports from incarcerated people and family members describing these transfers, including accounts that men with clean disciplinary records and active program participation were moved out, and that some transferred individuals were not gang-affiliated. GPS records show a cluster of due-process and classification-related signals at Calhoun over the past twelve months, including six due-process-violation signals across five months.

Staffing, Force, and the Machinery of Control

The DOJ's October 2024 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." 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. The hiring pipeline cannot close the gap: acceptance rates under 15 percent, and 82.7 percent of new hires leaving in their first year. Georgia ranks last of 50 states for correctional-officer pay.

At Calhoun, the consequences are documented in the federal findings and in the accounts GPS has collected. The DOJ found that less than 10 percent of prison fights, less than 23 percent of inmate-on-inmate assaults, and less than 6 percent of incidents involving weapons were forwarded for investigation. Federal investigators found incarcerated people cleaning and dressing their own wounds using toothpaste, coffee grounds, dirt, and makeshift bandages because medical help was delayed or unavailable, and that EMS teams are delayed an average of 30 minutes during emergency responses to GDC prisons due to understaffing. A grievance filed by an incarcerated person at Calhoun alleging extortion and gang violence was rejected as untimely with no follow-up.

GPS's intelligence system records a dense cluster of force- and supervision-related signals at Calhoun over the past twelve months: 21 sources reporting alleged inmate-on-inmate assaults across six months; five sources reporting alleged assault by staff; five reporting alleged excessive force; eight reporting named staff misconduct and eight reporting unnamed staff misconduct; five reporting grievance obstruction; and three reporting staffing shortages. External complaints in that period were filed to the DOJ Civil Rights Division and to at least one named detective.

GPS has received accounts of staff use of force at Calhoun, including accounts of pepper spray and Tasers deployed for infractions that would not legally justify such force — including a staff member who took pepper spray and threatened a crowd in the chow hall because some were talking. GPS has received accounts that staff at Calhoun deny meals as a form of punishment, including accounts involving a warden, and accounts of group punishment imposed on entire housing units in violation of standard operating procedures. GPS has received accounts of an elderly incarcerated person being tased on a deputy warden's orders and then tased again while on the floor on the warden's orders. GPS has received accounts that staff placed incarcerated people in gang-controlled housing units as retaliation after a shakedown, and accounts of racial animosity expressed openly by staff and incarcerated people against a minority population. GPS has received accounts that food distribution at Calhoun is unsupervised and controlled by Security Threat Group affiliation or by stronger individuals who sell or trade it. These are allegations GPS has received and not independently confirmed; they are recorded here as the pattern they describe.

The Drug Pipeline That Ended in Dismissals

Calhoun has been a hub for contraband drug prosecutions that, in the aggregate, produced almost no convictions. 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. The GDC failed to submit drug evidence in at least 11 dismissed cases involving 15 defendants, undermining its stated "zero tolerance" policy on drug smuggling. The Calhoun County Sheriff's Department failed to submit drug evidence for testing in 12 dismissed cases despite the sheriff's claim that deputies had sent evidence to the state lab. The GDC's public statement about the number of dismissed cases conflicted with what the AJC found in court files, suggesting the agency understated the scope of the evidentiary failures.

The emblematic case is the "Hot Pockets" prosecution. Correctional officers Corlethia Lattimore and Imani Ferguson were arrested in February 2020 after arriving for their shifts with Hot Pockets packages. Lattimore was alleged to have brought 112 grams of methamphetamine — four times the amount for a trafficking charge; Ferguson was alleged to have brought tobacco, a prohibited item. Both were immediately fired. GDC investigator Ruby Long took out the arrest warrants but allegedly failed to submit the drug evidence to the crime lab for testing. Charges against both officers were dismissed in July 2023 because there was no crime lab report or law enforcement report to support the charges, and the four-year statute of limitations had run out.

The pattern extends beyond the facility's walls. 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. In the first three months of 2025, the GDC paid Sheriff Josh Hilton and eight of his deputies nearly $127,000 for off-duty perimeter patrol at $45 per hour. And on June 2, 2025, a grand jury heard 35 cases related to Calhoun State Prison; more than 300 cases remained pending afterward, according to the Superior Court clerk.

Contraband, Scams, and the Limits of Technology

The drug trade was not the only enterprise running out of Calhoun. The AJC reported that a Florida sheriff described a "huge scam" operation being run out of Calhoun State Prison and Wheeler Correctional Institution. Annie Ashley of Atlanta was charged with grand theft in connection with a scam network run out of Georgia prisons that took $15,000 from a woman near Daytona Beach, Florida; she is one of roughly two dozen people arrested in the past year by Volusia County.

The larger documented case is a wire-fraud operation. GPS reporting describes two Calhoun inmates — Joey Amour Jackson and Lance Riddle — convicted in a five-day federal trial in January 2026 of running a nationwide wire fraud and extortion operation from inside the prison using contraband cell phones. They stole $464,920 from 119 identified victims across six states, spoofed police department phone numbers, threatened women with arrest warrants, and instructed female victims to undress in Target store bathrooms. The Georgia Department of Corrections has deployed a Managed Access System across 34 state prisons at a capital cost of $50 million plus more than $15 million in annual operating expenses to monitor and block unauthorized cellular signals; the system was installed at Calhoun in mid-2025, after the fraud operation had already occurred.

Other drug operations tied to Calhoun were run at industrial scale. Prosecutors said prisoners led a drug ring operating in at least seven Georgia counties as far back as 2018, with Jonathan Alvin Pope as the leader and 13 others indicted, seven of them also incarcerated; Pope was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison. Pedro Barragan Valencia brokered the distribution of at least 250 kilograms of meth while serving a state prison sentence and was sentenced to 400 months in federal prison in December 2023. Edwin Murillo brokered major meth sales in several northeast Georgia counties and was sentenced to 300 months in federal prison in April 2019; he was later sentenced to life in prison for directing a 2021 torture and murder. Irvin Falcon, 23 and serving a burglary sentence, used a contraband cellphone to direct methamphetamine deliveries in the Fitzgerald area; six others were also convicted.

Liability, Sanitation, and What the Record Shows

The state has paid out on Calhoun cases. According to the Georgia Department of DOAS Risk Management settlement ledger, obtained through open records, the state paid $3,250,000 to Reginald Jacobs Sr., for the Estate of Reginald Jacobs Jr., tied to Calhoun State Prison and a 2023 incident linked to a documented death record — the same Reginald Jerome Jacobs Jr. whose registry cause is listed as Deliberate Indifference. The state paid $998,715 to Angel M. Ortiz (2019 incident), $10,000 to Asmar Rasheed (2018), and $1,400 to Lasharon Brantley (2020).

On food safety, the Georgia Department of Public Health's routine inspections of Calhoun's kitchen have been consistently strong on paper: scores of 100, 99, 98, and 96 across inspections in July 2023, January and July 2024, January and July 2025, January 2026, and July 2026, all Grade A. Violations cited were minor — thermometers, handwashing facilities, physical facilities maintained and clean, and on one 2023 inspection, insects, rodents, and animals not present. GPS has documented a systemic pattern in which DPH scores systematically fail to capture food-service sanitation failure across GDC kitchens, because inspections are scheduled walkthroughs that do not assess equipment under load. High DPH scores at GDC facilities coexist with sustained witness reports of equipment failure and food contamination. GPS's intelligence system records three sources reporting food-quality complaints at Calhoun in July and September 2026.

Sources

This analysis draws on the Georgia Department of Corrections' own population and classification data; the U.S. Department of Justice's October 2024 findings letter on Georgia prisons; the Georgia Department of Public Health's routine food-safety inspection records; the Georgia Department of Administrative Services Risk Management settlement ledger, obtained through open records; reporting by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and WALB; GPS's mortality registry and internal intelligence records; and GPS's own investigative reporting on classification drift and the transfer of life-sentenced men out of Calhoun State Prison. Inmate, family, and staff accounts collected by GPS staff inform the framing throughout; those accounts are allegations GPS has received and has not independently confirmed.