COLQUITT COUNTY PRISON

Last updated August 29, 2026.(DS)

Colquitt County Prison is a county correctional institution in Moultrie, Colquitt County, constructed in 1954. It holds 182 men — 95.8% of its rated capacity of 190 — in four dormitories of 55 beds each, with 12 isolation cells. The facility provides housing for state and county offenders and a general labor force supporting Colquitt County Government, including road maintenance, skilled machine operation, county building maintenance, and building construction. GDC lists programming that includes a General Education Diploma; counseling in Personal & Self-Growth and Motivation For Change; vocational and on-the-job training in Food Service, Heavy Equipment Operation, Building, Auto Maintenance, Laundry, Electric and Air Conditioning; and religious programming including Various Worship Services and Choir. Warden William Howell has led the facility since January 2024 under a contractor arrangement.

A Small Facility Inside a Collapsing System

Colquitt County Prison operates at nearly full capacity inside a state prison system that GPS has documented as structurally failing. Officer vacancies across Georgia's prisons have run between 49.3% and 60% systemwide for multiple years, against a national standard of no more than 10%; at Valdosta State Prison the rate reached 80% by April 2024. The hiring pipeline cannot close the gap — acceptance rates run under 15%, and 82.7% of new hires leave in their first year — while Georgia ranks last of 50 states for correctional-officer pay. 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. 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.

Infrastructure and Food-Service Failures

Most GDC facilities are 30-40+ years old, with documented patterns of deferred maintenance that have produced systemwide infrastructure failures: broken cell-door locks (a 2012 Hays audit found roughly 42% non-functional, confirmed by Guidehouse in 2024), inoperative surveillance and fire-alarm systems, mold and water failures, broken kitchen sanitization equipment, and pest infestations. GPS treats infrastructure collapse as a force multiplier for the violence, classification, gang-control, and mortality crises documented at the facility level. The food-service dimension is acute: GDC spends approximately $1.69 per person per day on food (2024), with a 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. The Marshall Project independently reported on May 16, 2026 (Schwartzapfel, "Rats, Insects and Mold") rats in kitchens, insects in food, moldy trays, and visible malnutrition across Georgia facilities, quoting GPS connecting chronic underfeeding to the violence pattern the DOJ documented in October 2024. GPS has separately documented a systemic pattern of food-service sanitation failure across GDC kitchens that Department of Public Health 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 hidden from DPH scores 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.

Deaths in Custody

GPS has tracked two deaths at Colquitt County Prison since its mortality records begin on January 1, 2020 — both classified in the "Other" cause category. Joseph William Presnal died in custody at the facility on July 31, 2020. Randall Duane Brock Jr. died in custody at the facility on December 26, 2020. These counts are a floor: GDC reports deaths roughly two months late, and GPS's records contain nothing before 2020. System-wide, GPS has independently tracked 1,887 deaths in GDC custody since 2020.

Sexual Violence as a Systemic Pattern

Sexual violence in Georgia Department of Corrections facilities is systemic, and GPS treats it as the analytical center of any GDC violence or staff-misconduct narrative rather than as facility-isolated incidents. The October 2024 DOJ findings letter concluded that sexual assault is "rampant" and that GDC does not reasonably protect incarcerated people, including LGBTI individuals, from sexual harm. Of 456 sexual-abuse allegations recorded in 2022, only 35 were substantiated (7.7%). GDC's own consultants, PREA Auditors of America, reviewed 388 PREA investigation files in May 2022 and found that not one met the law's standards. Georgia has never submitted a PREA certification of full compliance to the U.S. Department of Justice in the law's two-decade history. Specific clusters documented elsewhere in the system include the DOJ-documented at-knifepoint sexual assaults at Pulaski State Prison, the 2020 Smith State Prison case in which an incarcerated person was waterboarded and sexually assaulted by his cellmate, and at least four staff arrests for sexual assault since 2020 at Lee Arrendale State Prison, including the November 2024 Cameron Cheeks plea — a hire-fire-rehire case GPS treats as an artifact of the staffing and hiring-standards collapse. GPS has also documented three women strangled in Lee Arrendale's A Unit between 2022 and 2024 (Sherry Joyce, Hallie Reed, Angela Anderson) — a figure exceeding the entire BJS-recorded national women-in-state-prison homicide total across 2001-2019.

Sources

This analysis draws on GPS's own systemic findings across GDC facilities, including documentation of staffing collapse, infrastructure failure, food-service sanitation breakdowns, and sexual violence patterns; the October 2024 DOJ findings letter; the Guidehouse 2024 consultant assessment; The Marshall Project's May 2026 investigation of Georgia prison food; GPS-tracked mortality records; and GDC facility and personnel records.