Last updated October 4, 2026.(DS)

Coffee Correctional Facility: A Private Prison Under Pressure

Coffee Correctional Facility is a medium-security men's prison in Nicholls, Coffee County, opened in 1998 and operated by the private contractor CoreCivic. Its original design capacity was 1,000; its current rated capacity is 2,628, and GPS's facility records show a population of 2,810 — roughly 106.9 percent of rated capacity. Sidney Carter has served as warden since January 2024. The facility's public record since 2020 is dominated by three threads: a homicide and violence caseload that includes a 2025 mass stabbing and a 16-defendant gang indictment, the criminal prosecution of a former officer for drug trafficking, and a mortality registry in which the largest single cause category is "unknown."

Violence, Gang Indictments, and the December 2025 Stabbings

The most serious recent event in Coffee's record is a series of stabbings on December 13, 2025. According to GDC accounts, multiple incarcerated people were critically injured and required off-site life-saving medical care. Six months later, on June 18, 2026, a Georgia grand jury heard evidence in the case; GDC reported that 16 incarcerated people were indicted on charges including aggravated assault, aggravated battery, violations of the Street Gang Terrorism and Prevention Act, and riot in a penal institution.

FOX 5 Atlanta reported that the 16 alleged members of the Bloods gang engaged in a series of stabbings that critically injured multiple people, and Yahoo.com's coverage stated that all 16 indicted were Bloods members and committed the stabbings. Those gang characterizations are news-reported allegations attached to the indictments, not adjudicated findings.

Coffee's violence record predates the 2025 stabbings. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Kendall Ja'Mal Cromer, 31, died on November 30, 2020, from stab wounds to the neck and chest, and that an incident report indicated four other incarcerated people were involved. The AJC separately reported that Hendricks Riley Gunn, 42, died on January 1, 2022, from blunt force injuries to the head and neck. GPS's mortality registry classifies both deaths as homicides — the only two homicides recorded at the facility in the registry's coverage period.

A Former Officer and the Contraband Pipeline

In January 2025, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Dacia Gaskins, a former correctional officer at Coffee Correctional Facility, had been indicted for conspiring to distribute illegal drugs. The AJC's account specified that Gaskins was charged with conspiring to distribute cocaine, methamphetamine, oxycodone and marijuana as part of a drug-trafficking operation.

The Gaskins case sits inside a broader pattern GPS has documented across the Georgia Department of Corrections. GPS's systemic reporting describes officer vacancies running between 49.3 percent and 60 percent systemwide for multiple years against a national standard of no more than 10 percent, an acceptance rate under 15 percent in the hiring pipeline, and 82.7 percent of new hires leaving within their first year. Georgia ranks last of 50 states for correctional-officer pay. The October 2024 Department of Justice findings letter concluded that "the leadership of the Georgia Department of Corrections has lost control of its facilities," faulting GDC for placing "too much blame on gangs and insufficient emphasis on understaffing." GPS treats staffing collapse and gang assumption of facility control — DOJ and the Guidehouse 2024 assessment independently concluded that gangs effectively run multiple facilities, controlling access to phones, showers, food, and bed assignments — as the integrated structural finding that explains per-facility violence. Roughly 31 percent of the system's approximately 49,000 incarcerated population are validated members of 315 different security threat groups, more than double the national average.

The staffing picture is not abstract. Russell Zirkle, a former GDC assistant warden, said on the record in a timestamped interview that Smith State Prison was among facilities running a 70–80 percent officer vacancy rate — testimony GPS reported in its coverage of how the Department handles its staffing crisis. 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-Six Deaths Since 2020

GPS's mortality registry records 26 deaths at Coffee Correctional Facility since January 1, 2020 — a floor, since GDC reports deaths roughly two months late. The full list is maintained at GPS's facility death registry. The registry's cause breakdown is dominated by the unknown: 15 of the 26 deaths are categorized Unknown/Pending, four as Other, four as Natural/Medical, two as Homicide, and one as Suicide.

The most recent recorded deaths are Fletcher Mccloud, who died July 27, 2026, at age 44; Paul Travis Williams, who died March 23, 2026, at 57; Richard Romeo Shelby, who died December 28, 2025, at 60; and David Lynn Waldrop, who died November 25, 2025, at 70. GPS's registry lists the cause for each as Unknown/Pending — meaning GPS does not yet know the cause, not that none exists.

Earlier deaths include William Eric Green, who died May 24, 2024, at age 61; Robert Adams, who died February 8, 2024, at 52; and Jeffery B Russell, who died January 8, 2024, at 60 — all at Coffee Correctional Facility, with the registry listing each cause as Unknown/Pending. Traquan Latrez Clay died November 21, 2023, at 25, and Raymond Turahn Peoples died November 18, 2023, at 53, both Unknown/Pending. In 2022 the registry records Karl Eugene Pundt, who died November 25, 2022, at 78; Charles J Edwards, who died September 26, 2022, at 75; Aydin M Rashidov, who died August 18, 2022, at 27; Enrique Alejandro Lopez, who died March 30, 2022, at 37; Robbie Lee Collins, who died January 18, 2022, at 45; and Maurice Bernard White, who died January 17, 2022, at 48 — all at Coffee Correctional Facility, all with the cause listed as Unknown/Pending — alongside Hendricks Riley Gunn, who died January 2, 2022, at 42, with the cause listed as Homicide.

Edward Tyrone Poole died December 29, 2021, at 34; the registry lists his cause as Suicide. Robert Ennis Roebuck died November 2, 2021, at 56, of Natural/Medical causes. Derrick Moody died June 10, 2021, at 58, and Lewis Nathaniel Wright died January 29, 2021, at 70, both listed as Other. Leroy Henderson died January 20, 2021, at 67, of Natural/Medical causes. Kendall Jamal Cromer died November 30, 2020, at 31, a Homicide. Abdullah Khalid Bin Mikal died July 26, 2020, at 38, listed as Other. Ernest Byrd Shuman died July 24, 2020, at 73, and James Lee Grace died June 22, 2020, at 67, both of Natural/Medical causes.

Across the system, GPS has independently tracked 1,896 deaths in GDC custody since 2020.

Food Service, Inspections, and the Gap Between Scores and Sanitation

Coffee's Georgia Department of Public Health food-safety record is, on its face, strong. The facility scored 100 (Grade A) on routine inspections on March 27, 2026; May 6, 2024; December 13, 2023; and May 19, 2023. It scored 99 (Grade A) on May 2, 2025, with one violation for nonfood-contact surfaces clean; 96 (Grade A) on September 29, 2025, with one violation for food-contact surfaces cleaned and sanitized; and 90 (Grade A) on November 8, 2024, with two violations, for proper cold holding temperatures and for physical facilities installed, maintained, and clean.

GPS's systemic reporting argues those scores should be read with caution. GPS has documented a pattern of food-service sanitation failure across GDC kitchens that DPH inspection scores systematically fail to capture: 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 obscured, in GPS's analysis, 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. High DPH scores at GDC facilities coexist with sustained witness reports of equipment failure and food contamination; that contradiction is the analytical center of GPS's investigation "Dunked, Stacked, and Served."

The Marshall Project corroborated the broader pattern on May 16, 2026, in reporting by Schwartzapfel ("Rats, Insects and Mold") that independently documented rats in kitchens, insects in food, moldy trays, and visible malnutrition across Georgia facilities, and quoted GPS connecting chronic underfeeding to the violence pattern DOJ documented in October 2024. GPS's own reporting notes that GDC spends approximately $1.69 per person per day on food (2024) 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 ($432 million) than on their food.

Infrastructure and the Medium-Security Squeeze

Coffee's rated capacity of 2,628 against a population of 2,810 places it modestly over its rated ceiling, and its original design capacity of 1,000 has been more than doubled over the facility's life. That compression sits inside a systemwide infrastructure problem GPS has documented: most GDC facilities are 30–40+ years old, with patterns of deferred maintenance producing broken cell-door locks (a 2012 Hays audit found roughly 42 percent non-functional at one facility, confirmed by the 2024 Guidehouse assessment), inoperative surveillance and fire-alarm systems, mold and water failures, broken kitchen sanitization equipment, and pest infestations. The DOJ October 2024 findings, the Guidehouse 2024 assessment, and Commissioner Oliver's public "end of life" statements all corroborate the pattern. GPS treats infrastructure collapse as a force multiplier for the violence, classification, and mortality crises it has documented at the facility level.

GPS has also documented classification drift across Georgia's medium-security prisons — facilities operating at higher security levels than their designation implies, without the staffing and infrastructure to match. GPS published a report titled "The Classification Crisis: How Four Medium Security Prisons Are Killing People" documenting the pattern; the report's title identifies four facilities, and this page does not assert which four beyond what GPS's published work states.

Sources

This analysis draws on Georgia Department of Public Health food-safety inspection records; GDC statements and grand jury reporting on the December 2025 stabbings and the June 2026 indictments; reporting by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, FOX 5 Atlanta, and Yahoo.com; The Marshall Project's May 2026 investigation of Georgia prison food; the U.S. Department of Justice October 2024 findings letter and the 2024 Guidehouse assessment; on-record testimony from former GDC assistant warden Russell Zirkle and former GDC sergeant Tyler Ryals; GPS's mortality registry and facility records; and GPS's own systemic reporting on staffing, food service, infrastructure, and classification.