DOOLY STATE PRISON

Analysis written on June 24, 2026.

Dooly State Prison, originally constructed in 1993 to house 750 people, is a medium-security facility that has become a flashpoint in Georgia’s collapsing prison system. As of mid-2026, the facility held 1,592 men, placing it at 212% of its original design capacity even with triple-bunked cells, while correctional officer vacancies across the state averaged 50%. The result, documented across months of GPS reporting, court records, and news coverage, is a prison where gang violence, medical neglect, and a concealed food-safety crisis have taken lives with accelerating frequency. The U.S. Department of Justice’s October 2024 findings letter explicitly concluded that Georgia’s prisons violate the Eighth Amendment, and Dooly—named alongside three other medium-security facilities as a de facto close-security prison—illustrates the lethal consequences of the mismatch between infrastructure, staffing, and the population it now holds.

Overcrowding, Classification Drift, and the Architecture of Violence

Dooly’s capacity crisis is not simply a matter of numbers; it is a product of deliberate classification decisions that have transformed a medium-security prison into something far more dangerous. GPS’s November 2025 investigation, The Classification Crisis: How Four Medium Security Prisons Are Killing People, revealed that Dooly, Wilcox, Calhoun, and Washington State Prisons now house close-security populations at rates between 27.7% and 29.7%—up to ten times higher than other medium-security facilities—without the staffing, cell design, or security infrastructure required for those higher-risk populations. The consequence is a homicide rate four to five times that of properly classified prisons. At Dooly, those deaths mounted: Chad Taylor Roadifer, 45, died in October 2023 from delayed complications of blunt force head trauma; Dimitri Merci Jackson, 36, was stabbed to death in January 2023; Brian Lee Wainwright, 59, was killed in January 2024; Raquon Ja’Veyonte Tucker, 26, died of blunt force head trauma in March 2024; Carlos Omar Soldiew-Acosta, 38, died of blunt force trauma in June 2024, and a county coroner said he may have been dead for over 24 hours before his body was found. Zeary Davis, 31, was stabbed in September 2024 and died; Joshua Parrott’s death in early 2025 was initially ruled a suicide and later reclassified as a homicide by strangulation; and Darrow Brown, 58, was stabbed to death in November 2025 while under officer escort during restricted movement, after he accidentally bumped into a gang member.

The Department of Justice’s October 2024 report documented that the Georgia Department of Corrections systematically misclassifies homicides as undetermined causes of death, a finding that makes the Parrott reclassification a rare official acknowledgment of what GPS and news outlets have tracked through coroner reports. Statewide, prison homicides surged from about eight per year in 2017 to over a hundred in 2024, with a record 333 total deaths—and 2025 on a pace to exceed even that toll.

A Cascading Sequence of Gang Wars and Lockdowns

The violence at Dooly did not remain isolated. On April 1, 2026, a coordinated Blood-on-Blood gang war erupted across Georgia’s prison system, with multiple stabbings, life-flight helicopter dispatches, and TAC squad deployments at five facilities. Dooly was a primary site: a gang-related altercation that morning sent six inmates to hospitals, three of them by Life Flight, with injuries that were listed as non-life-threatening but underscored the intensity of the conflict. The incident triggered a multi-facility lockdown, and GPS’s reporting identified the fight as part of the same systemic gang fracture that had already produced four deaths at Washington State Prison in January 2026 and would continue to destabilize the region.

Three weeks earlier, on March 23, another dormitory fight at Dooly had left five inmates hospitalized. Then, on May 22, a major gang-related altercation sent nine inmates to outside hospitals, prompting GDC to lock down every facility in the state “out of an abundance of caution.” Visitation at Dooly and three other prisons was cancelled for the Memorial Day weekend. An additional fight on June 7 injured one inmate.

GPS records underscore the scale: over the past twelve months, the intelligence system logged more than 25 reports of inmate-on-inmate assaults at Dooly from separate sources, including 11 in April 2026 alone—many rated critical or high severity. Multiple inmate witnesses reported a deepening sense of fear, and intercepted communications obtained by GPS indicated concern among incarcerated people that conditions might spiral into a riot. The April 1 violence and its aftermath drew on a dynamic that GPS had warned of for months: the refusal to separate rival gang sets inside overcrowded, understaffed dormitories where a single officer—or none—was left to manage hundreds of men.

Death by Neglect: Medical Failures at Dooly

What haunts people who survive the violence at Dooly is the slower killing that happens in view. In February 2026, the GPS publication Tell My Story carried a firsthand account from a man who had spent eight years at the prison. “I’ve seen two people murdered here,” he wrote. “But what haunts me more than the violence is the medical neglect. It’s a slower kind of killing, and you have to watch it happen.” He described living with a cellmate for two years who was visibly dying of untreated cancer. “Medical just kept telling him they were going to send him to a specialist. They never did… He would drag himself to medical, and they would send him back with Tylenol. That’s it. Tylenol for a man dying of cancer.” Only after the man’s family threatened a lawsuit was he taken to a hospital; he died shortly after.

The pattern is corroborated by news investigations. James Yarbrough died at Dooly in August 2020 from diabetic ketoacidosis after suffering uncontrolled diabetes for months, a death that led to litigation alleging medical malpractice. James Michael Bailey, 44, died from sepsis contracted from an infected insect bite roughly four months into his sentence; his son told Georgia Public Broadcasting that medical staff put his father’s treatment “on the back burner.” Raquon Tucker, 26, died in March 2024 after being transported to an Albany hospital; his death certificate listed blunt force head trauma. Carlos Omar Soldiew-Acosta, found dead in June 2024, may have been dead for more than 24 hours before anyone noticed. GPS has additionally received accounts of other deaths and near-deaths from medical staff unresponsiveness, including reports of a nurse resigning after an incident in a housing unit where a stabbing occurred during medication distribution and a staff member was allegedly used as a human shield.

Leadership, Staffing, and the Contraband Economy

The staffing numbers that frame this crisis are not subtle. In 2024, the DOJ confirmed that Georgia prisons are dangerously understaffed, with as few as one to three officers supervising up to 1,800 prisoners on nights and weekends. GPS’s own reporting has documented that at Dooly and the nearby Washington State Prison, housing units have gone entire shifts with no officer present at all. Former sergeant Tyler Ryals, who worked at Telfair—another high-maximum compound—told GPS he had been the only security person on a compound of roughly 1,250 inmates. Dooly’s parent agency, GDC, manages a system where officer vacancies average 50%, a hiring pipeline that loses 82.7% of new hires in their first year, and correctional-officer pay that ranks dead last in the nation.

Against that backdrop, GDC appointed Mark Agbaosi as Dooly’s warden in February 2025—without a bachelor’s degree, a departure from the typical qualifications for leadership of a facility with this level of crisis. Deputy Wardens Lee Major (Security) and Nequeva Nicholson (Administration) serve alongside him. In December 2025, Deputy Warden Charles Hudson was bitten by an incarcerated man while assisting with handcuffing, an incident that, while minor in isolation, reflects the daily instability inside housing units where authority has eroded.

The understaffing also opens space for contraband-fueled crime. Julius Deshawn Williams Jr., a corrections officer cadet, was arrested in early December 2025 after a routine search found 640 grams of pure methamphetamine hidden in his pants, with additional packages and a pistol in his vehicle; he later pleaded guilty and admitted he intended to deliver the drugs to an inmate. Meanwhile, incarcerated people inside Dooly have exploited weak oversight to run sophisticated fraud and drug rings. Abraham Rivas, already imprisoned at Dooly, impersonated a Flagler County Sheriff’s Office deputy to defraud a Florida victim out of $1,000, and claimed that correctional staff were aware of inmates running similar scams. In 2024, Magnum Jelani Neely was sentenced to 278 months for using contraband cellphones to lead an Augusta-area drug ring from inside Dooly, directing couriers to deliver meth inside and outside Georgia prisons. GPS reporting describes accounts of an incarcerated man who said he was beaten by a CERT team after requesting a protective transfer, part of a broader pattern of retaliation and officer violence that the DOJ’s investigation and GPS’s systemic records have flagged across GDC facilities.

Kitchens That Score 100 but Hide Infestations: The Food Contradiction

On paper, Dooly State Prison’s food operations are flawless. The Georgia Department of Public Health inspected the kitchen three times between June 2023 and March 2025, and assigned a perfect score of 100—Grade A—on each occasion. Inspector names rotate—Joshua Jones, Brenna Maize, Nicole Hays-Morrison—but the result is the same. In any other context, these scores would indicate a spotless operation. But GPS has interviewed inmate-maintenance workers at Dooly who describe a starkly different reality: tray-sanitizing dishwashers broken for long stretches, thousands of roaches inside kitchen equipment, and meals served on visibly contaminated trays. These accounts are consistent with GPS’s systemic investigation Dunked, Stacked, and Served, which found that DPH scores reflect a single announced walkthrough on a single day and do not capture what arrives on the tray, what happens between inspections, or what the workers who clean the machines observe firsthand. The contradiction between the perfect scores and the repeated witness testimony is the analytical center of that investigation, and it lands with force at Dooly.

This institutional failure operates alongside a deliberate starvation budget: GDC spends roughly $1.69 per person per day on food—under 60 cents a meal—and the FY27 budget proposal cuts it to $1.60. The Marshall Project, in a May 2026 investigation that quoted GPS, reported rats in kitchens, insects in food, and moldy trays across Georgia facilities, connecting chronic underfeeding to the violence pattern the DOJ had documented. For the 1,592 men held at Dooly, the scores on the wall mean nothing when the equipment behind them is a source of illness rather than nourishment.

Sources

This analysis draws on GPS’s own investigative reporting, including “The Classification Crisis,” “Blood on Blood,” and systemic findings on food safety, staffing, and gang control; Georgia Department of Public Health inspection records; Atlanta Journal-Constitution homicide-tracking coverage and investigative work on in-custody deaths; Georgia Public Broadcasting reporting; and firsthand accounts published in GPS’s Tell My Story series. Additional context came from GDC official data, state prison population snapshots, and GPS’s internal intelligence system.