Last updated October 25, 2026.(DS)

Colquitt County Prison: A 1954 County Institution Inside a System in Crisis

Colquitt County Prison sits in Moultrie, in Colquitt County, a medium-security institution for men that opened in 1954 and today carries a rated capacity of 190. It is a county correctional institution — operated by the county rather than directly by the Georgia Department of Corrections — and its public record is thin in the way that small county facilities' records usually are: a physical plant, a labor mission, a program list, and very little else. What the record does show is a facility holding 155 people against that 190-bed rating, roughly 81.6 percent of capacity, and a mortality registry that has logged two deaths since January 2020. Those two deaths, and the statewide conditions that surround them, are the analytical threads this page follows.

The Physical Plant and the Labor Mission

Colquitt County Prison's design is laid out in four dormitories of 55 beds each, alongside 12 isolation cells. The facility houses both state and county offenders and functions as a general labor force supporting Colquitt County Government — road maintenance, skilled machine operation, county building maintenance, and building construction. That labor mission is not incidental to the institution's identity; it is the reason a county facility of this vintage exists and persists.

The programs GDC lists for the facility are, by the standards of the system's larger institutions, modest but not empty. Academically, the prison offers General Education Diploma coursework. Counseling includes Personal & Self-Growth and Motivation For Change. Vocational and on-the-job training spans Food Service, Heavy Equipment Operation, Building, Auto Maintenance, Laundry, and Electric and Air Conditioning. Religious programming includes various worship services and a choir. GDC also lists the facility's housing as "Open, Dormitory" — a designation that matters, because open dormitory housing is precisely the configuration in which the system's documented failures of supervision and sanitation do the most damage.

Two Deaths in the Registry

GPS's mortality registry records two deaths at Colquitt County Prison since January 1, 2020. Joseph William Presnal died July 31, 2020, at the facility; he was 47. Randall Duane Jr Brock died December 26, 2020, also at the facility; he was 41. GPS's registry lists the cause for both as "Other."

Those two deaths are a floor, not a ceiling. GDC reports deaths roughly two months late, and GPS's since-2020 registry is explicitly a minimum count. The registry does not include the 791 deaths GPS separately holds from 2015 to 2019 — the Department's own cause coding obtained by open records request through the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project series — so the two deaths here should be read as what GPS has recorded in the 2020-onward window, not as an all-time count for a facility that has been operating since 1954.

Nationwide, GPS has independently tracked 1,927 deaths in GDC custody since 2020. Against that systemwide figure, two deaths at a 155-person county facility is not an outlier — which is itself the point. The mortality pattern GPS has documented across Georgia's prisons is not concentrated in the system's largest and most notorious institutions; it runs through the small county facilities as well.

Staffing Collapse and the Supervision Gap

The conditions that shape daily life at Colquitt County Prison are systemwide, and GPS has documented them at length. Officer vacancies in Georgia's prisons have run between 49.3 percent and 60 percent systemwide for multiple years, against a national standard of no more than 10 percent. At Valdosta State Prison the rate reached 80 percent by April 2024. The hiring pipeline cannot close the gap: the acceptance rate is under 15 percent, 82.7 percent of new hires leave in their first year, and Georgia ranks last of 50 states for correctional-officer pay.

The October 2024 DOJ findings letter concluded explicitly 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 percent of the system's roughly 49,000 incarcerated population 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.

GPS treats staffing collapse and gang assumption of facility control as the integrated structural finding that explains the per-facility violence, classification, mortality, and infrastructure-failure narratives across the system. For a facility built around open dormitories and a working labor force, the supervision ratio is not an abstraction — it is the difference between a dormitory and an unmonitored room.

Food, Sanitation, and the Inspection Score That Misses It

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. The Marshall Project corroborated the pattern on May 16, 2026, in Schwartzapfel's "Rats, Insects and Mold," independently reporting rats in kitchens, insects in food, moldy trays, and visible malnutrition across Georgia facilities, and quoting GPS connecting chronic underfeeding to the violence pattern DOJ documented in October 2024.

GPS has documented a systemic 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 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 — the regulatory-capture dynamic developed in GPS's scores-without-sanitation reporting. High DPH scores at GDC facilities coexist with sustained witness reports of equipment failure and food contamination; the contradiction is the analytical center of the GPS investigation "Dunked, Stacked, and Served."

That small-county dynamic is directly relevant to a facility like Colquitt County Prison, where the institution, the county government it supplies labor to, and the local inspection apparatus occupy the same small professional world.

Infrastructure as a Force Multiplier

Most GDC facilities are 30 to 40-plus 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 percent non-functional, and Guidehouse 2024 confirmed the pattern), 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, gang-control, and mortality crises GPS has documented at the facility level.

Colquitt County Prison opened in 1954 — older than most of the facilities in that assessment. Its four 55-bed dormitories and 12 isolation cells are the physical inheritance of a seven-decade-old design, and the systemwide maintenance record is the context in which that inheritance should be read.

Sexual Violence and the PREA Record

Sexual violence in GDC facilities is systemic. 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 percent. 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 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, Georgia's largest women's facility, including the November 2024 Cameron Cheeks plea — a hire-fire-rehire case that 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, and Angela Anderson — a figure exceeding the entire BJS-recorded national women-in-state-prison homicide total across 2001–2019. The Ashley Diamond litigation established the constitutional baseline and launched the DOJ investigation.

GPS treats this pattern as the analytical center of any GDC violence or staff-misconduct narrative, not as facility-isolated incidents. The 7.7 percent substantiation rate is the number that matters most for a facility like Colquitt County: it describes a system in which the great majority of allegations are never confirmed on paper, regardless of what happened.

Leadership and Accountability

Colquitt County Prison's warden is William Howell, who has held the post since January 1, 2024, per GPS's personnel records. The deputy warden is Matthew Conner, and the deputy warden of care and treatment is James Stancil, both in their posts since July 16, 2026. The warden's position is recorded as a contractor role, consistent with the facility's county operation.

What the Record Shows

Colquitt County Prison is a small, old, county-run institution holding 155 men in open dormitories, offering a GED program, two counseling tracks, six vocational and on-the-job training areas, and religious services, and supplying labor to Colquitt County Government. It has recorded two deaths since 2020 — Joseph William Presnal at 47 and Randall Duane Jr Brock at 41 — both listed in GPS's registry under "Other." It sits inside a system that federal investigators concluded has lost control of its facilities, where officer vacancies run near 50 percent or higher, where food-service sanitation failures escape inspection scores, and where sexual-violence allegations are substantiated at a rate of 7.7 percent. None of those systemwide findings is a finding about Colquitt County Prison specifically. But a 1954 dormitory facility with a working labor mission and a thin public record is exactly the kind of institution where the system's documented failures would be least visible — and where the two names in the registry are the only public trace of what the record does not show.

Sources

This analysis draws on GPS's facility profile and personnel records for Colquitt County Prison; GPS's mortality registry, which records the deaths of Joseph William Presnal and Randall Duane Jr Brock; GPS's systemic findings on staffing collapse, food-service sanitation, infrastructure failure, and sexual violence in GDC custody, including the investigation "Dunked, Stacked, and Served"; the October 2024 U.S. Department of Justice findings letter; the Guidehouse 2024 consultant assessment; the 2012 Hays State Prison audit; PREA Auditors of America's May 2022 review; and The Marshall Project's May 16, 2026 investigation by Schwartzapfel, "Rats, Insects and Mold," which independently reported conditions across Georgia facilities.