Last updated October 4, 2026.(DS)

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

Colquitt County Prison is a county correctional institution in Moultrie, in Colquitt County, built in 1954 and rated for 190 people. It is a medium-security facility for men, operated by the county, and its current population stands at 166 — roughly 87 percent of rated capacity. William Howell has served as warden since January 1, 2024.

The physical plant is four dormitories of 55 beds each, plus 12 isolation cells. The facility houses state and county offenders and supplies a general labor force supporting Colquitt County government — road maintenance, skilled machine operation, county building maintenance, and building construction. GDC lists its programs as academic (General Education Diploma), counseling (Personal & Self-Growth, Motivation For Change), vocational and on-the-job training (Food Service, Heavy Equipment Operation, Building, Auto Maintenance, Laundry, Electric and Air Conditioning), and religious programming (Various Worship Services, Choir). GDC also classifies the housing as "Open, Dormitory."

That is the standing record. What follows is what GPS has documented about the conditions inside it — and about the systemwide failures that reach into a 70-year-old county facility whether or not anyone at the facility caused them.

Two Deaths in the GPS 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, at age 47; GPS's registry lists the cause as Other. Randall Duane Jr Brock died December 26, 2020, at the facility, at age 41; his cause is likewise recorded as Other.

Both counts are floors, not ceilings. GDC reports deaths roughly two months late, so the registry lags actual events, and GPS's since-2020 series is separate from the 791 deaths the Department itself recorded statewide between January 2015 and December 2019 — the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project series obtained by open records request, which GPS holds but does not fold into this count.

Staffing Collapse as the Structural Backdrop

The single most consequential fact about any GDC facility right now is that the people who are supposed to run it are largely not there. Officer vacancies in 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: the acceptance rate is under 15%, and 82.7% of new hires leave within their first year. 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 specifically faulted GDC for placing "too much blame on gangs and insufficient emphasis on understaffing." That framing matters because the gang picture is real and large: 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.

The on-record testimony behind that conclusion is stark. 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 one integrated structural finding — the mechanism that explains the per-facility violence, classification, mortality, and infrastructure narratives rather than sitting alongside them.

Food, Sanitation, and the Scores That Miss It

GDC spends approximately $1.69 per person per day on food, 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 resulting pattern on May 16, 2026, in Beth Schwartzapfel's investigation "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 separately documented a systemic pattern of food-service sanitation failure that DPH inspection scores systematically fail to capture. Tray-sanitizing dishwashers have sat broken for sustained periods — inmate-maintenance worker accounts collected at Dooly State Prison describe thousands of roaches inside kitchen equipment — and GPS has documented sustained roach and rodent infestation in kitchen and serving areas, along with meals served on visibly contaminated trays, corroborated by a Coastal State Prison resident's account. The pattern stays 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. High DPH scores at GDC facilities coexist with sustained witness reports of equipment failure and food contamination; that contradiction is the analytical center of the GPS investigation "Dunked, Stacked, and Served."

Infrastructure Decay in a 1954 Building

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% non-functional, 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.

Colquitt County Prison has been standing since 1954. GPS treats infrastructure collapse as a force multiplier for the violence, classification, gang-control, and mortality crises GPS has documented at the facility level: a broken lock or a dead camera does not cause a stabbing, but it removes the conditions under which one might be prevented.

Sexual Violence as a Systemwide Finding

Sexual violence in GDC facilities is systemic, and the DOJ said so in October 2024: the 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 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 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.

None of these incidents occurred at Colquitt County Prison. They are cited here because the pattern is systemic, and GPS treats it as the analytical center of any GDC violence or staff-misconduct narrative — not as facility-isolated incidents that a given institution can be assumed to have escaped.

What the Record Does and Does Not Show

Colquitt County Prison's public record is thin in a way that is itself informative. GPS holds two deaths at the facility since 2020, a warden appointed in 2024, and a program list that runs from GED to heavy-equipment operation. It holds no facility-specific inspection findings, no litigation, and no personnel record beyond the warden's post.

That absence should not be read as evidence of anything. GPS has recorded no deaths at Colquitt County Prison beyond the two named here — which is a statement about GPS's registry, not about the facility. The systemwide findings above are documented at the system level; where they reach Colquitt County, they do so through the same mechanisms — understaffing, deferred maintenance on a 1954 plant, and a food budget under 60 cents a meal — that GPS has documented operating everywhere else in the system.

Sources

This analysis draws on GPS's own systemic findings and mortality registry; the October 2024 U.S. Department of Justice findings letter on Georgia's prisons; the 2024 Guidehouse consultant assessment; the 2012 Hays audit; the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project mortality series obtained by open records request; PREA Auditors of America's 2022 review of GDC investigation files; GDC's facilities directory, Standard Operating Procedures, and personnel records; and reporting by The Marshall Project, including Beth Schwartzapfel's May 16, 2026 investigation "Rats, Insects and Mold." On-record testimony from former GDC sergeant Tyler Ryals was provided to GPS.