DOOLY STATE PRISON

Analysis written on August 2, 2026.

Overcrowding and Classification Drift

Dooly State Prison was built in 1994 to hold 750 men. It now houses 1,639 — more than 218 percent of its original design — in triple-bunked cells with open living units originally meant for a far smaller population. When GPS obtained population data in October 2025 and published the analysis “The Classification Crisis,” Dooly emerged as one of four medium-security prisons that the Georgia Department of Corrections had packed with close-security inmates at rates far beyond what the facilities’ staffing and infrastructure could safely manage. The four facilities — Dooly, Wilcox, Calhoun, and Washington State Prisons — held close-security populations of roughly 28 to 30 percent, and homicide rates at those prisons were four to five times higher than at properly classified medium-security sites. The Department of Justice’s October 2024 findings on Georgia’s prisons, which declared conditions unconstitutional, catalogued unchecked gang control, routine sexual abuse, and deliberate staff indifference to violence — all of which GPS’s analysis placed squarely in the context of this classification drift. At Dooly, the mismatch between population and security level would prove lethal again and again.

Perfect Scores, Roach-Infested Kitchens

The Georgia Department of Public Health has inspected Dooly State Prison’s food service six times since mid-2023. Every inspection — on June 23, 2023, June 18, 2024, and March 14, 2025 — returned a score of 100, a Grade A. Yet GPS has independently documented that the reality inside the kitchen contradicts those scores. Multiple inmate-maintenance workers at Dooly have reported to GPS that opening kitchen equipment, including tray-prep tables, reveals thousands of roaches. Tray-sanitizing dishwashers have remained broken for sustained periods, and meals are served on visibly contaminated trays. This contradiction between spotless inspection reports and what incarcerated workers observe every day is a systemic pattern that GPS has investigated as a regulatory-capture dynamic: inspections are scheduled walkthroughs that do not assess equipment under load, and in small-county settings the professional and social overlap between inspectors and facility staff can blunt the rigor of the visit. The state spends approximately $1.69 per person per day on food — less than sixty cents a meal — against a federally estimated Thrifty Food Plan of about ten dollars a day for nutritionally adequate meals. The Marshall Project independently corroborated this picture in May 2026, documenting rats in kitchens, insects in food, moldy trays, and visible malnutrition across Georgia facilities.

The Toll: Homicides, Medical Neglect, and a Death Cascade

GPS’s mortality database records 49 deaths at Dooly State Prison since the start of 2020. Seven have been classified as homicides, two as overdoses, and the remaining forty as unknown or pending. The list of the dead includes men whose names and stories appeared in public reporting: Dimitri Merci Jackson, 36, died from a stab wound to the chest in January 2023. Chad Taylor Roadifer, 45, succumbed in October 2023 to delayed complications of blunt force head trauma sustained months earlier. Brian Lee Wainwright, 59, was killed in January 2024. Raquon Ja’Veyonte Tucker, 26, died in March 2024 from blunt force head trauma. Carlos Omar Soldiew-Acosta, 38, was found dead in June 2024 from blunt force trauma; the coroner told a television station he may have been dead for more than twenty-four hours before his body was discovered. Zeary “Blue” Davis, 31, was stabbed to death in Dorm E1 on September 26, 2024. And Darrow Brown, 58, was stabbed to death in November 2025 after, according to GPS reporting, accidentally bumping into a gang member.

The violence did not stop. In the first half of 2026, Dooly saw a cascade of gang-related dormitory fights. On March 23, a fight confined to one dormitory left five inmates injured, all transported to outside medical facilities. On April 1, six inmates were taken to hospitals, three airlifted by Life Flight, following a pre-dawn altercation. On May 22, a fight spanning two dorms injured nine inmates, causing GDC to lock down every state prison and cancel visitation at four facilities for Memorial Day weekend. And on June 7, three inmates were involved in another altercation that sent one to a local hospital. GPS’s intelligence records show at least 27 distinct reports of inmate-on-inmate assault at Dooly over the past twelve months, clustering with critical severity in April and May 2026.

Alongside the violence, medical neglect has claimed lives in slower but equally devastating ways. James Yarbrough suffered from uncontrolled diabetes for months at Dooly before dying of diabetic ketoacidosis in August 2020; the State of Georgia paid a $700,000 settlement to his family. James Michael Bailey, 44, died from sepsis in 2024 after his son alleged that medical staff put his father’s treatment “on the back burner.” A GPS-published account titled “Tylenol and Empty Promises” describes a man at Dooly watching his cellmate die from untreated cancer over two years, receiving nothing but over-the-counter pain relief until a lawyer’s threat finally prompted action — too late. And a separate GPS narrative, “I’ll Take Care of It,” recounts an officer at Dooly in 2022 threatening an incarcerated man in a low, certain voice, presaging a retaliatory beating after the man had reported abuse.

A Prison Run by Gangs Without Guards

The Department of Justice concluded in 2024 that Georgia prisons are dangerously understaffed and that gang control of housing units is systemic. Dooly embodies that collapse. On September 23, 2024, a private citizen sent a letter to Commissioner Tyrone Oliver’s government email address naming two Bloods leaders by GDC ID number and warning that they were running an extortion ring in Dorm E1, that a close-security Blood was living alone in a room after forcibly removing his roommate, and that another was sleeping in an unassigned room. Three days later, Zeary Davis was stabbed to death in that same dormitory.

GPS’s investigation into the Davis killing, built on on-record testimony from former CERT commander Tyler Ryals and inmate witness accounts, reveals that at the moment of the stabbing, no correctional officer was posted in E1. Dooly had no panic buttons; the only way to summon help was a contraband cellphone. Two incarcerated men kept pressure on Davis’s wounds while the inmate fire crew reached him before the shift supervisor did. No officer had the keys to the three locked gates between the dorm and outside medical aid. Emergency responders were delayed more than thirty minutes because no one at the facility could provide entry. Afterward, officers allegedly assaulted a prisoner who had asked about the response.

Tyler Ryals had seen this coming. In August 2024, the veteran CERT commander, who had served nearly a decade across five state prisons, swore out a witness statement warning GDC leadership that prison security was collapsing under staffing shortages, climbing violence, and contraband. He documented posts being worked by single officers or left empty for five hours at a stretch, gangs dictating cell moves, and inmates having to save officers because there were so few. Twelve days after submitting his warning, Ryals was out of the department; his personnel records state he resigned, though he wrote no resignation letter. He recorded his exit meeting with Assistant Commissioner Ahmed Holt. On that recording, Holt disputed essentially none of Ryals’s statement, reframed the staffing crisis as a nationwide issue, asked Ryals if he was “venting,” and when told there are not enough officers replied, “If you can figure out how to get 3,000 men into the Georgia Department of Corrections, I’m gonna go get them.” He offered no plan.

The systemic numbers bear out Ryals’s lived experience. Officer vacancies across Georgia’s prisons have hovered between 49.3 and 60 percent for years, against a national standard of no more than 10 percent. More than 82 percent of new hires leave in their first year, and Georgia ranks dead last in correctional-officer pay. GDC Commissioner Oliver told legislative committees that news reporting on record deaths was “propaganda” and said of the dead, “One is bad. But it’s not as bad when you look at the population we’re dealing with.”

Fraud, Drugs, and the Contraband Economy

The absence of guard coverage and the easy availability of contraband phones have turned Dooly into a hub for fraud and drug trafficking orchestrated from inside the walls. In 2024, Magnum Jelani Neely was sentenced to more than 23 years for using contraband cellphones to lead an Augusta-area drug ring from Dooly, directing couriers to deliver methamphetamine inside and outside prisons. In 2025, Abraham Rivas was charged with impersonating a Flagler County sheriff’s deputy to defraud a Florida victim into sending $1,000 in bond payments to his prison commissary account; Rivas claimed other inmates were running similar schemes and that staff were aware. And in December 2025, corrections officer cadet Julius Deshawn Williams Jr. was caught during a routine search with 640 grams of pure methamphetamine hidden in his pants and a pistol in his vehicle; he pleaded guilty to possession with intent to distribute, admitting he intended to give the drugs to an inmate.

In response, GDC has deployed managed access cell-phone blocking systems at Dooly and other facilities. GPS has documented that in facilities where the technology was activated, violence subsequently spiked, as the power structures that had kept a fragile equilibrium were blown apart without staff capable of filling the vacuum.

Leadership, Settlements, and the Cost of Denial

The warden responsible for Dooly during much of this period, Mark Agbaosi, was appointed in February 2025 without a bachelor’s degree — a departure from the qualifications that once governed the post. His deputy wardens include Charles Hudson, who was bitten by an inmate while trying to assist in handcuffing. The broader leadership response, from the Commissioner’s dismissive public statements to the Assistant Commissioner’s recorded non-response to a whistleblower, reflects an institutional posture that has left the state exposed to repeated liability. DOAS settlement records show payouts tied to Dooly ranging from $1,000 to $700,000 for incidents spanning 2016 to 2023, including the large settlement for James Yarbrough’s death. Those sums represent only the claims that were resolved; GPS’s case database and at least seven distinct family safety-concern signals in the past year suggest that the full toll of harm at Dooly is far from accounted for.

Sources

This analysis draws on GPS’s own investigative reporting, including the “Classification Crisis” and “I’ll Take Care of It” articles, on-record testimony collected by GPS, data from the Georgia Department of Public Health, the Georgia Department of Administrative Services settlement ledger, and mortality records tracked by GPS since 2020. The account of Tyler Ryals’s whistleblowing and the Holt recording is based on GPS’s possession of the recording and witness statement. News reporting from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Georgia Public Broadcasting, 13WMAZ, WGXA, WALB, Wesh.com, and The Marshall Project contributed additional public-record details. Inmate and family narratives collected by GPS, aggregated to preserve confidentiality, further inform the facility-wide patterns described.