DECATUR COUNTY PRISON
Facility Information
- Current Population
- 119
- Address
- 1153 Airport Road, Bainbridge, GA 39817
- Phone
- (229) 248-3035
- Fax
- (229) 248-3041
- County
- Decatur County
- Operator
- GEO Group
Leadership & Accountability (as of 2024 records)
Officials currently holding positional authority at this facility, with deaths attributed to GPS-tracked records during their leadership tenure. Inclusion reflects role-based accountability, not legal findings of personal culpability. Death counts shown as facility / career.
| Role | Name | Since | Deaths this facility / career |
|---|---|---|---|
| Warden (Decatur County Prison) (facility lead) | Screen, Gordon | 2024-01-01 | — / — |
About
Decatur County Prison is a privately operated facility in Bainbridge housing 119 people, with no deaths recorded by GPS since 2020. Broader systemic failures documented by GPS across Georgia’s prison system—including staff shortages, infrastructure decay, and sexual violence—paint a context of deep dysfunction, though…
Food Safety Inspections
No inspection records are on file with the Georgia Department of Public Health for this facility. GPS has filed an open records request asking where these records are maintained.
What the score doesn't measure. DPH grades kitchen compliance on inspection day — food storage, temperatures, pest control. It does not grade whether today's trays are clean. GPS reporting has found broken dishwashers at most Georgia state prisons we've documented; trays go out wet, stacked, and visibly moldy — including at facilities with recent scores near 100.
Who inspects. Most Georgia state prisons sit in rural counties — often with fewer than 20,000 people, several with fewer than 10,000. The environmental health inspector lives in that community and often knows the kitchen staff personally. Rural inspection regimes don't have the structural independence you'd expect in a city-sized health department. Read the scores accordingly.
Read the investigation: “Dunked, Stacked and Served: Why Georgia Prison Trays Are Making People Sick”
Analysis written on August 9, 2026.
A Small Private Prison with Little Public Footprint
Decatur County Prison sits in Bainbridge, Georgia, and houses 119 incarcerated people under a private operator. Warden Gordon Screen has held the position since January 2024, with Deputy Warden Anita Johnson listed among the staff. The facility appears in GPS’s facility directory with only basic metadata—there are no news articles, lawsuits, or inspection records tied specifically to this prison in GPS’s databases. Since GPS began tracking in‑custody deaths in 2020, no fatalities have been recorded here, a notable absence in a system where GPS has documented 1,860 deaths statewide.
The lack of facility‑specific incidents does not mean an absence of harm; it may reflect the prison’s small size, its private management, or simply a reporting gap. As a privately operated unit within the Georgia Department of Corrections’ network, it sits at one remove from the direct GDC‑run infrastructure and staffing crises that GPS has exhaustively documented elsewhere. But the broader context is impossible to ignore.
A System in Crisis: What GPS Has Documented Statewide
Georgia Prisoners’ Speak (GPS) has built a body of systemic findings that describe a prison system in collapse. Staffing shortages are catastrophic: officer vacancies have run between 49% and 60% systemwide for years, and Georgia ranks last in the nation for correctional‑officer pay. GPS reporting, backed by the Department of Justice’s October 2024 findings letter, found that understaffing has allowed gangs to effectively control access to phones, showers, food, and bed assignments in multiple facilities. A former GDC sergeant told GPS he was once the only security officer on a compound of roughly 1,250 maximum‑security prisoners.
The physical infrastructure of the state’s older prisons is similarly broken. GPS has documented widespread deferred maintenance—broken cell‑door locks, inoperative fire alarms, mold, pest infestations, and failed kitchen equipment—across facilities that are 30 to 40 years old or more. The DOJ and the Guidehouse 2024 assessment corroborated these findings, and GDC Commissioner Oliver has publicly acknowledged that many facilities have reached “end of life.”
Food service offers a stark example of the layered failures. GPS analysis shows that GDC spends roughly $1.69 per person per day on food—under 60 cents a meal—against an estimated $10 per day for a nutritionally adequate diet. The Marshall Project independently reported rats, insects, moldy trays, and visible malnutrition in Georgia prisons, and GPS has collected inmate accounts of dishwasher breakdowns, roach infestations in kitchen equipment, and meals served on visibly contaminated trays. These sanitation problems persist even when Department of Public Health inspection scores appear acceptable, a pattern GPS has investigated in depth.
Sexual violence is another system‑wide crisis. The DOJ’s October 2024 findings concluded that sexual assault is “rampant” and that GDC does not reasonably protect incarcerated people from harm. In 2022, only 7.7% of 456 sexual‑abuse allegations were substantiated, and a review of 388 PREA investigation files found that not one met legal standards. GPS has documented clusters of staff‑on‑inmate sexual assault, homicides of incarcerated women, and a constitutional baseline established by the Ashley Diamond litigation—all of which frame the level of danger present in Georgia’s carceral facilities.
These systemic patterns are drawn from state‑run prisons, and the private‑operated Decatur County Prison may not share every deficiency. Yet the facility exists within a correctional ecosystem defined by chronic under‑resourcing, broken oversight, and extraordinary violence. The absence of recorded deaths or specific news events here should be read against that backdrop: the baseline for a Georgia prison is one of documented crisis, and a small private site may simply not have yet produced the kind of public record that GPS’s intelligence system can surface.
Sources
This analysis draws on GPS’s own systemic findings—derived from DOJ investigations, the Guidehouse assessment, The Marshall Project, and GPS’s facility‑level reporting—as well as personnel data and mortality records from GPS’s internal databases. No specific news reporting or litigation on Decatur County Prison was available at the time of writing.