COFFEE CORRECTIONAL FACILITY

Last updated September 13, 2026.(DS)

Coffee Correctional Facility: A Private Prison at 106.9% of Capacity

Coffee Correctional Facility opened in 1998 as a medium-security prison for adult men in Nicholls, Coffee County. It is a private prison operated by CoreCivic under contract with the Georgia Department of Corrections. Its original design capacity was 1,000 people; its current rated capacity is 2,628. GPS's facility records show a population of 2,810 — 106.9% of rated capacity. Sidney Carter has served as warden since January 2024, a post held under the contractor's authority rather than GDC's.

The facility's trajectory tracks the systemic patterns GPS has documented across Georgia's medium-security prisons: facilities operating beyond their design capacity, absorbing higher-security populations without the staffing or infrastructure to manage them, and producing predictable outcomes in violence and mortality. The record at Coffee — a mass stabbing, two documented homicides, a former officer indicted on drug-trafficking charges, and a mortality count that has climbed past two dozen since 2020 — is what that pattern looks like on the ground.

A Mass Stabbing and the Gang-Control Dynamic

On December 13, 2025, a series of stabbings at Coffee Correctional Facility left multiple incarcerated people critically injured and requiring off-site life-saving medical care, according to the Georgia Department of Corrections. The scale of the violence became clearer the following June, when a Georgia grand jury indicted 16 incarcerated people on charges including aggravated assault, aggravated battery, violations of the Street Gang Terrorism and Prevention Act, and riot in a penal institution. Evidence was presented to the grand jury on June 18.

FOX 5 Atlanta reported that the 16 indicted were alleged members of the Bloods gang who engaged in a series of stabbings that critically injured multiple people. Yahoo.com reported that all 16 indicted are members of the Bloods street gang and committed the stabbings. The gang framing is the state's characterization of the defendants; the underlying charges remain unadjudicated.

The December 2025 mass stabbing is not an isolated event. GPS's systemic findings document that approximately 31% of Georgia's roughly 49,000 incarcerated population are validated members of 315 different security threat groups — more than double the national average. The October 2024 DOJ findings letter and the Guidehouse 2024 consultant assessment independently concluded that gangs effectively run multiple Georgia facilities, controlling access to phones, showers, food, and bed assignments. Officer vacancies systemwide have run between 49.3% and 60% for multiple years, against a national standard of no more than 10%. The DOJ explicitly faulted GDC for placing "too much blame on gangs and insufficient emphasis on understaffing." Former GDC assistant warden Russell Zirkle, in an on-record, timestamped interview with GPS, described prisons running at a 70–80% officer vacancy rate — the condition under which gang control of daily life becomes structural rather than incidental.

Twenty-Six Deaths and the Homicide Record

GPS has tracked 26 deaths at Coffee Correctional Facility since its mortality records begin on January 1, 2020 — a figure that is a floor, since GDC reports deaths roughly two months late. Fifteen of those deaths are classified Unknown/Pending, four Natural/Medical, four Other, two Homicide, and one Suicide. The most recent recorded deaths include Fletcher McCloud, 44, who died on July 27, 2026; Paul Travis Williams, 57, on March 23, 2026; Richard Romeo Shelby, 60, on December 28, 2025; and David Lynn Waldrop, 70, on November 25, 2025 — all with cause of death still listed as Unknown/Pending.

The two homicides in GPS's records are both documented by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Kendall Ja'Mal Cromer, 31, died on November 30, 2020 from stab wounds to the neck and chest; an incident report indicates four other incarcerated people were involved. Hendricks Riley Gunn, 42, died on January 1, 2022 from blunt force injuries to the head and neck. Both deaths predate the December 2025 stabbing by years, which is the point: the violence at Coffee is not a single rupture but a recurring feature of the facility's record.

Those deaths sit within a broader pattern GPS has documented across Georgia's medium-security facilities — medium-security prisons housing close-security populations without the staffing and infrastructure that classification level assumes. The October 2024 DOJ findings letter concluded that "the leadership of the Georgia Department of Corrections has lost control of its facilities." Systemwide, GPS has independently tracked 1,890 deaths in GDC custody since 2020.

Staff Misconduct and the Contraband Pipeline

In January 2025, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Dacia Gaskins, a former correctional officer at Coffee Correctional Facility, was indicted for conspiring to distribute illegal drugs. The AJC's reporting specified that Gaskins was indicted for conspiring to distribute cocaine, methamphetamine, oxycodone, and marijuana as part of a drug-trafficking operation. The indictment is an accusation; no disposition is reflected in the record.

The Gaskins case fits a pattern GPS has documented across the GDC system. The hiring pipeline cannot close the staffing gap — acceptance rates under 15%, with 82.7% of new hires leaving in their first year — and Georgia ranks last of 50 states for correctional-officer pay. GPS's systemic findings treat staffing collapse and gang assumption of facility control as an integrated structural finding, and the contraband record at Coffee shows the perimeter side of the same problem. GDC's own contraband arrest reports document repeated attempts to move phones, tobacco, and drugs onto the grounds: in March 2013, two civilians were arrested by the Coffee County Sheriff's Office after throwing footballs packed with 10 cell phones, 10 chargers, and tobacco over the facility fence; in January 2013, a man was found hiding in bushes on adjacent private property with three footballs containing 16 cell phones and 10 chargers; and in October 2012, two civilians stopped near the facility were found with seven cell phones, tobacco, crystal meth, and Xanax. In January 2018, a visitor was arrested by the Nicholls Police Department after security staff found a methamphetamine pipe during a routine search. GDC publishes arrests, not dispositions — an arrest is not a conviction.

Food-Safety Scores and the Limits of Inspection

Coffee Correctional Facility's kitchen has received consistently high scores from Georgia Department of Public Health food-safety inspections. Between May 2023 and March 2026, the facility received seven routine inspections, all Grade A: 100 in May 2023, 100 in December 2023, 100 in May 2024, 90 in November 2024, 99 in May 2025, 96 in September 2025, and 100 in March 2026. The November 2024 inspection cited two violations — proper cold holding temperatures and physical facilities installed, maintained, and clean — while the May 2025 and September 2025 inspections each cited one, for nonfood-contact surfaces and food-contact surfaces respectively.

Those scores sit in tension with GPS's systemic findings on food-service sanitation across GDC kitchens. GPS has documented that DPH inspection scores systematically fail to capture sustained equipment failure and contamination: tray-sanitizing dishwashers broken for extended periods, roach and rodent infestation in kitchen and serving areas, and meals served on visibly contaminated trays. GPS's analysis holds that high DPH scores at GDC facilities coexist with sustained witness reports of equipment failure and food contamination because inspections are scheduled walkthroughs that do not assess equipment under load, and because of documented professional overlap between inspectors and facility staff in small-county settings. The contradiction is the analytical center of GPS's investigation "Dunked, Stacked, and Served."

The broader food context is stark. GDC spends approximately $1.69 per person per day on food — 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, and the state has proposed $1.60 per day in FY27. Georgia spends roughly 14 times more on medical care for incarcerated people ($432 million) than on their food. 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.

Communication Failures and Family Notification

GPS has received recurring reports concerning failures to notify family members following incidents at Coffee Correctional Facility. A family member alleges the facility failed to notify next of kin after an incident involving an incarcerated person, and a separate account describes information about an incident reaching a family through another incarcerated person rather than through facility staff. These are accounts GPS has received, not findings of an investigation.

They are consistent with the broader communication breakdown GPS has documented across GDC facilities, where understaffing and administrative dysfunction leave families without reliable channels for information about their incarcerated relatives. The pattern matters analytically because family notification is one of the few external checks on what happens inside a facility — when it fails, incidents can go unrecorded in any public account for months.

Sources

This analysis draws on reporting from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, FOX 5 Atlanta, and Yahoo.com; official Georgia Department of Corrections statements, grand jury records, and contraband arrest reports; Georgia Department of Public Health food-safety inspection reports; the U.S. Department of Justice's October 2024 findings letter on Georgia prisons and the Guidehouse 2024 consultant assessment; The Marshall Project's May 2026 investigation of Georgia prison food; GPS's mortality database, facility records, and contraband data; an on-record interview with former GDC assistant warden Russell Zirkle; and GPS's own investigative reporting on classification drift, staffing collapse, and food-service sanitation across the GDC system. Family and inmate accounts collected by GPS staff informed the editorial framing of communication failures at the facility.