COFFEE CORRECTIONAL FACILITY

Analysis written on May 31, 2026.

Coffee Correctional Facility is a privately operated prison in Nicholls, Georgia, run by CoreCivic under contract with the Georgia Department of Corrections. Designated a medium-security facility, it held 2,744 incarcerated men at last count—4.4 percent above its operational capacity of 2,628, and more than 80 percent beyond its original 1,524-person design capacity. In November 2025, Georgia Prisoners' Speak (GPS) published "The Classification Crisis: How Four Medium Security Prisons Are Killing People," naming Coffee Correctional Facility among the four facilities where medium-security labels mask the placement of close-security inmates without the staffing, infrastructure, or programming required to safely manage them. This analysis examines how overcrowding, classification drift, violence, staff misconduct, and systemic understaffing converge at Coffee, while also interrogating the facility’s outwardly pristine food-safety record.

Overcapacity and Classification Drift

Coffee Correctional Facility was built for 1,524 people; its operational capacity of 2,628 already represents a significant expansion, yet the population stood at 2,744, pushing the facility past even that stretched limit. The pressure runs deeper than headcounts, however. GPS documented classification drift across Georgia’s medium-security prisons beginning in October 2025, finding that they routinely housed close-security inmates without the additional staffing, secure housing units, and behavior-management infrastructure that close-security classification demands. The Classification Crisis report, published on November 12, 2025, explicitly identified Coffee as one of four medium-security facilities operating effectively as higher-security prisons, a condition GPS’s reporting has linked to heightened violence and mortality. With systemwide officer vacancy rates running between 49.3 and 60 percent for years, and a hiring pipeline that loses 82.7 percent of new hires in their first year according to GPS’s staffing analysis, medium-security prisons like Coffee function on skeleton crews that cannot adequately supervise a population that includes significant numbers of close-security individuals.

Homicides and Family Notification Failures

Two homicides in recent years underscore the consequences. On November 30, 2020, Kendall Ja'Mal Cromer, 31, died from stab wounds to the neck and chest; an incident report obtained by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution indicated that four other incarcerated people were involved. Hendricks Riley Gunn, 42, died on January 1, 2022 from blunt-force injuries to the head and neck, also at Coffee Correctional Facility. Across the GDC system, GPS has independently tracked 1,818 deaths since 2020, a crisis that includes these two homicides at Coffee.

After such incidents, communication with families has repeatedly broken down. GPS has received multiple reports—from families and anonymous sources—alleging that Coffee Correctional Facility failed to notify next of kin following incidents involving incarcerated individuals. Some relatives learned of the events through other incarcerated people rather than from prison officials, a lapse that compounds the trauma of in-custody death and injury.

Staff Integrity and Contraband

On January 31, 2025, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that former Coffee Correctional officer Dacia Gaskins had been indicted for conspiring to distribute cocaine, methamphetamine, oxycodone, and marijuana as part of a drug-trafficking operation within the facility. The indictment, which points to a former staff member using her position to introduce narcotics into the prison, is the kind of abuse that thrives in the staffing vacuum GPS has documented across GDC: when facilities run on bare-minimum crews, contraband interdiction and internal oversight erode, and the boundary between staff and incarcerated populations can blur dangerously.

Food Safety Scores Versus Systemic Sanitation Deficiencies

On the surface, Coffee Correctional Facility’s kitchen hygiene appears exemplary. Georgia Department of Public Health inspection records show perfect or near-perfect scores in every routine inspection from May 2023 through March 2026: five 100s, a 99, a 96, and a 90—all Grade A. Yet these scores stand in tension with GPS’s investigation “Dunked, Stacked, and Served,” which documented that DPH inspections are scheduled walkthroughs that do not test equipment under load or capture the cockroach infestations, broken tray-sanitizing dishwashers, and contaminated meal trays that incarcerated people and maintenance workers have reported at multiple facilities. GPS’s systemic finding on food-service sanitation concluded that high DPH scores at GDC kitchens routinely coexist with sustained witness accounts of equipment failure and contamination, a pattern that applies broadly to facilities receiving these grades, including Coffee.

The nutritional reality further undermines the appearance of order. GPS has documented that GDC spends approximately $1.69 per incarcerated person per day on food in FY2024, or under 60 cents per meal—roughly one-sixth of what the FDA’s Thrifty Food Plan estimates as the cost of a nutritionally adequate diet for an adult man. The Marshall Project, in its May 16, 2026 investigation “Rats, Insects and Mold,” reported rats in kitchens, insects in food, moldy trays, and visible malnutrition across Georgia facilities, and quoted GPS connecting chronic underfeeding to the violence pattern the Department of Justice documented in October 2024. At Coffee, the juxtaposition of near-perfect inspection scores with a state food budget that makes adequate nutrition impossible illustrates the gap between regulatory optics and lived conditions.

Systemic Staffing, Violence, and Gang Control

Coffee Correctional Facility exists within a correctional system that the Department of Justice, in its October 2024 findings letter, concluded had been “lost” by GDC leadership. Systemwide officer vacancies have persisted between 49 and 60 percent for years; at Valdosta State Prison the rate reached 80 percent. Approximately 31 percent of the GDC’s roughly 49,000 incarcerated population are validated members of 315 different security threat groups—more than double the national average—and both the DOJ and the Guidehouse 2024 consultant assessment found that gangs effectively run multiple prisons, controlling phones, showers, food, and bed assignments. A former GDC sergeant, Tyler Ryals, told GPS he had been the sole security staffer on a compound of roughly 1,250 maximum-security people at Telfair State Prison.

Sexual violence across the system is rampant: the DOJ called it “rampant,” and of 456 sexual-abuse allegations in 2022, only 35—7.7 percent—were substantiated. Georgia has never submitted a PREA certification of full compliance. While no specific sexual-assault case has been publicly reported at Coffee, GPS’s systemic investigation and the DOJ findings underscore that the combination of extreme understaffing, gang control, and classification drift—all present at Coffee—creates an environment in which violence of every kind proliferates. The two homicides at Coffee, the staff drug conspiracy, and the classification report’s alarm over the facility’s operations are not isolated incidents but expressions of a structural failure that stretches from Nicholls to the state capital.

Sources

This analysis draws on Georgia Department of Public Health food-safety inspection records; facility population data obtained from GDC; reporting by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, including homicide tracking and the Dacia Gaskins indictment coverage; and Georgia Prisoners' Speak’s own investigative work, including "The Classification Crisis: How Four Medium Security Prisons Are Killing People," systemic findings on staffing, food sanitation, and violence, and the "Dunked, Stacked, and Served" investigation. The Marshall Project’s May 2026 food investigation provided independent corroboration of systemic feeding failures. Family and anonymous accounts collected by GPS detail repeated notification lapses at Coffee Correctional Facility.