COLQUITT COUNTY PRISON

Analysis written on August 9, 2026.

Colquitt County Prison is a privately operated men’s facility in Moultrie, Georgia, holding approximately 182 people. Run by a private contractor and overseen by Warden William Howell since 2024, it is part of the Georgia Department of Corrections’ network of contracted prisons. GPS’s mortality database records two deaths at the facility since tracking began in 2020: Joseph William Presnal died in custody on July 31, 2020, and Randall Duane Jr. Brock on December 26, 2020; both are classified as deaths from “Other” causes. Against the context of 1,860 total deaths tracked by GPS across Georgia’s prison system since 2020, these two represent the only documented fatalities at Colquitt, yet almost nothing is publicly known about the circumstances. The prison operates within a system that GPS and federal investigators have found to be in a state of profound dysfunction, and this analysis draws on systemic findings, federal reports, and independent journalism to examine what is known — and what remains conspicuously hidden — about the conditions inside.

Two Recorded Deaths, Minimal Information

The deaths of Presnal and Brock occurred early in the pandemic era, but no public record details the events that preceded them. GPS’s database categorizes both as “Other” causes, meaning no specific cause — medical, violence, or otherwise — is available. This opacity mirrors a statewide problem: the U.S. Department of Justice concluded in its October 2024 findings letter that GDC’s leadership had lost control of its facilities, a finding GPS’s own documentation of staffing collapse and violence corroborates. While private facilities may operate with even less transparency, the absence of public information about these two deaths is of a piece with a broader accountability vacuum that leaves families and the public without answers.

A System on the Brink: Infrastructure, Food Deprivation, and Sanitation

GPS’s reporting has established that most GDC facilities are 30 to 40 years old, with pervasive deferred maintenance leading to broken cell‑door locks, inoperative surveillance and fire‑alarm systems, mold, water failures, and pest infestations — conditions the DOJ and the state‑commissioned Guidehouse 2024 assessment explicitly corroborated. Colquitt County Prison, as a privately operated site, remains outside the available inspection record, but the systemic nature of the decay means that anyone held in Georgia’s carceral system faces a heightened risk from failing physical plants.

Food deprivation is another documented constant. Georgia spends approximately $1.69 per person per day on food — equivalent to under 60 cents per meal — and has proposed lowering that to $1.60 in the next fiscal year, a fraction of the FDA Thrifty Food Plan’s roughly $10‑per‑day estimate. In a May 2026 investigation titled “Rats, Insects and Mold,” The Marshall Project independently 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 DOJ documented. GPS’s own investigation, “Dunked, Stacked, and Served,” reveals a hidden layer: broken tray‑sanitizing dishwashers, thousands of roaches inside kitchen equipment, and meals served on visibly contaminated trays — conditions that routine Department of Public Health inspections systematically fail to capture because inspections are scheduled walkthroughs conducted without equipment under load and are susceptible to local regulatory capture. While no DPH reports specific to Colquitt are available, the systemwide finding is that even high inspection scores can mask deep contamination. For the people held at any Georgia facility, including Colquitt, the combination of extreme caloric insufficiency and potential food‑borne illness is a constant stressor, one that GPS links directly to the violence and health crises seen across the state.

Staffing Collapse and Gang Control

Systemwide, officer vacancies in Georgia’s prisons have run between 49 percent and 60 percent for years, and at some facilities the rate has reached 80 percent. The DOJ’s October 2024 findings letter explicitly faulted GDC for placing “too much blame on gangs and insufficient emphasis on understaffing,” and concluded that gangs effectively run multiple facilities, controlling access to phones, showers, food, and bed assignments. Former GDC Sergeant Tyler Ryals, forced out in 2024 after whistleblowing, told GPS he had personally been the only security officer on an entire compound housing some 1,250 maximum‑security inmates at Telfair State Prison. These dynamics are not confined to state‑run sites; privately operated facilities draw from the same corroded hiring pool and operate under the same pay scale — Georgia ranks last in the nation for correctional‑officer compensation — and thus face identical structural pressures. What is known about Colquitt County Prison’s staffing levels does not exist in any public record GPS has been able to locate, but the systemwide conditions point to a predictable vulnerability: when there are too few officers to secure a facility, control devolves into the hands of those most willing to wield violence, a reality that puts every incarcerated person and every staff member at risk.

Sexual Violence as a Systemic Condition

The DOJ’s October 2024 findings letter concluded that sexual assault in Georgia’s prisons 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 — a 7.7 percent rate. GDC’s own consultants, PREA Auditors of America, reviewed 388 Prison Rape Elimination Act investigation files in May 2022 and found that not a single one met the law’s standards. Georgia has never submitted a PREA certification of full compliance in the law’s two‑decade history. Documented clusters — the DOJ‑detailed at‑knifepoint sexual assaults at Pulaski State Prison, the 2020 Smith State Prison case in which an incarcerated man was waterboarded and sexually assaulted by his cellmate, and at least four staff arrests for sexual assault at Lee Arrendale State Prison since 2020, including a hire‑fire‑rehire case — demonstrate that the crisis spans both men’s and women’s facilities. While no public reports from Colquitt County Prison have emerged, the systemic nature of the violence, together with the absence of any meaningful oversight in a privately operated setting, means every person in Georgia’s prison system faces this threat. As the Ashley Diamond litigation crystallized, the constitutional baseline for protection has been established, but the state has failed to meet it, leaving facilities like Colquitt unexamined and their residents unprotected.

Sources

This analysis draws on systemic findings published by Georgia Prisoners’ Speak, including its investigations “Dunked, Stacked, and Served” and its documentation of staffing, food, and sexual‑violence crises; the U.S. Department of Justice’s October 2024 findings letter; the state‑commissioned Guidehouse 2024 assessment; corroborating reporting by The Marshall Project; and GPS‑tracked mortality records that list the deaths of Joseph William Presnal and Randall Duane Jr. Brock. The facility’s leadership information is drawn from GDC personnel records.