DECATUR COUNTY PRISON

Analysis written on July 19, 2026.

Decatur County Prison: A Private Facility Inside Georgia’s Unconstitutional System

Decatur County Prison, a privately operated institution in Bainbridge, houses 121 men under contract with the Georgia Department of Corrections. Warden Gordon Screen has led the facility since January 2024. According to Georgia Prisoners’ Speak’s mortality database, there have been no in-custody deaths recorded at the facility. But that stark number—zero—cannot be read as evidence that Decatur County Prison is insulated from the crisis that has drawn a federal civil rights investigation of the entire state prison system and led the U.S. Department of Justice to conclude that GDC leadership has lost control of its facilities.

A Private Prison in a System Under Federal Scrutiny

The staffing emergency that the DOJ cited as central to the collapse of safety and order in Georgia's prisons is not limited to state-run compounds. In January 2025, the Georgia Department of Corrections itself acknowledged that statewide correctional officer vacancies average 50 percent. Georgia Prisoners’ Speak’s own reporting, synthesizing years of agency data and on-the-ground accounts, has documented that systemwide vacancy rates have ranged between 49.3 and 60 percent for multiple years, with individual prisons reaching 80 percent—far beyond the national standard of no more than 10 percent. Georgia ranks last in the nation for correctional officer pay, and the hiring pipeline cannot keep pace: fewer than 15 percent of applicants are accepted, and nearly 83 percent of new hires leave within their first year.

Private prisons like Decatur County Prison are staffed by contractor employees, but they face the same labor market constraints, the same wage ceiling, and the same security demands as state-run facilities. The DOJ’s October 2024 findings letter explicitly held that “the leadership of the Georgia Department of Corrections has lost control of its facilities” and placed blame on understaffing rather than the gang violence the agency had offered as its own public explanation. GPS has treated the combination of staffing collapse and gang assumption of facility control as a single integrated structural finding that underlies per-facility violence, classification breakdowns, and mortality patterns. At Decatur County Prison, the population is small—121 people—but it is not immune to the conditions that allow security gaps to widen. GPS’s investigation has found that in many facilities, low staffing means few officers are present to supervise entire housing units, and in the vacuum, gangs control access to phones, showers, food, and beds.

Former GDC CERT Commander Tyler Ryals, forced out in 2024 after blowing the whistle, told GPS that he had been the only security staff member on the entire Telfair State Prison compound of roughly 1,250 maximum-security inmates. While that example is extreme, it embodies the structural collapse that affects every facility where the state contracts out custody—a collapse the state’s own $2.7 million Guidehouse consultant assessment confirmed.

Starvation Budgets and Rotten Kitchens

The systemic failures extend to what people eat—and whether what they eat is safe. GPS has documented that the Georgia Department of Corrections spends approximately $1.69 per person per day on food, a figure the agency has proposed cutting to $1.60 in the coming fiscal year—under sixty cents per meal. By comparison, the FDA’s Thrifty Food Plan estimates roughly $10 per day as the cost of a nutritionally adequate diet for an adult man. The state spends roughly fourteen times more on medical care for incarcerated people than on feeding them.

In May 2026, The Marshall Project corroborated the pattern with an independent investigation that found rats in kitchens, insects in food, moldy trays, and visible malnutrition across Georgia facilities, and quoted GPS directly connecting chronic underfeeding to the violence crisis the DOJ had documented. GPS’s own investigation, titled “Dunked, Stacked, and Served,” has traced how food-service sanitation failures are hidden from DPH inspection scores because inspections are scheduled walkthroughs that do not assess equipment under full load, and because in small-county settings professional overlap between inspectors and facility staff can mask the truth. Inmate-maintenance workers at Dooly State Prison have described thousands of roaches inside kitchen equipment; a resident at Coastal State Prison described meals arriving on visibly contaminated trays; The Marshall Project’s reporting documented mold. GPS has concluded that sanitizing dishwashers break for sustained periods across GDC kitchens, and that infestations of roaches and rodents persist while DPH scores remain high—a contradiction that is the analytical center of the investigation. No inspection report for Decatur County Prison was available to GPS for this analysis, but the systemic pattern documented at other facilities points to a hidden infrastructure of neglect that private prisons, contracted by GDC, cannot escape.

Sexual Violence and a System That Refuses to Protect

The DOJ’s October 2024 findings 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 rate of 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.

GPS has documented specific clusters: 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, Georgia’s largest women’s facility, since 2020. The Ashley Diamond litigation established the constitutional baseline and launched the DOJ investigation. Decatur County Prison has not produced a public record of such incidents in GPS’s database—but the DOJ’s conclusion that the state fails systemically to protect people from sexual harm applies to every facility where GDC places people, including private contract prisons. The absence of documented cases at a small facility of 121 people is not a mark of safety; it reflects, in part, the documented reality that reporting avenues are functionally closed and that retaliation against those who speak up is a recurrent pattern GPS has tracked across the system.

Leadership and Accountability in the Dark

Warden Gordon Screen has led Decatur County Prison since the start of 2024, according to personnel records. The facility is privately operated, placing it one step removed from direct GDC line authority but still subject to departmental oversight and the same constitutional obligations. GPS has tracked no deaths, no major incidents, and no lawsuits filed against the facility in its databases. The small population may account for some of that quiet. But the systemic failures documented by the DOJ, the Guidehouse assessment, and GPS’s own investigative reporting—from staffing shortages to food deprivation to unaddressed sexual violence—form the backdrop against which any custodial facility in Georgia must be assessed. In a system where the DOJ has formally found that leadership has lost control, the fact that a private prison has not yet produced the kind of headline crises seen elsewhere may say more about the limits of oversight and documentation than about conditions inside.

Sources

This analysis draws on investigative reporting and systemic findings published by Georgia Prisoners’ Speak (GPS), including data on GDC staffing, food budgets, sanitation failures, and sexual violence; the October 2024 findings letter from the U.S. Department of Justice; the 2024 Guidehouse consultant assessment; independent reporting by The Marshall Project; and GPS’s own mortality and personnel databases. No facility-specific incident records, inspection reports, or lawsuits were available for Decatur County Prison at the time of writing.