FLOYD COUNTY PRISON

Analysis written on June 28, 2026.

Floyd County Prison, located in Rome and operated by a private contractor under the Georgia Department of Corrections, holds 336 incarcerated men at a medium-security level. Warden Michael Long has led the facility since January 2024, according to GPS’s personnel records. Detailed incident-level reporting about the facility is sparse in the public record, but it exists within a state prison system that GPS’s investigative work has characterized as structurally collapsed — a context that necessarily shapes conditions inside it.

A Private Facility Inside a Collapsing System

Georgia’s prison system routinely operates with correctional-officer vacancy rates averaging 50 percent, more than five times the national standard. A 2024 assessment by consultants Guidehouse and a parallel set of federal findings released by the Department of Justice in October 2024 both concluded that understaffing has reached a point where gangs have effectively assumed control of day-to-day life inside multiple GDC facilities, regulating access to phones, showers, food, and bed assignments. Approximately 31 percent of the system’s roughly 49,000 incarcerated people are validated members of 315 different security threat groups, more than double the national average. The DOJ explicitly faulted GDC leadership for losing control of its facilities and placing “too much emphasis on insufficient emphasis on gangs and insufficient emphasis on understaffing.”

GPS has documented how infrastructure collapse compounds the violence. Most GDC prisons are 30 to 40 years old, with deferred maintenance producing broken cell-door locks, inoperative surveillance and fire-alarm systems, mold, water failures, and persistent pest infestations — conditions the DOJ and the Guidehouse assessment both corroborated. Food service adds another layer of deprivation: Georgia spends roughly $1.69 per person per day on meals — under 60 cents per meal — against the federally estimated Thrifty Food Plan of roughly $10 for a nutritionally adequate adult diet. GPS’s investigation into prison kitchens found that broken dishwashers, roach and rodent infestation, and meals served on visibly contaminated trays are systemic and frequently go uncaptured by scheduled Department of Public Health inspections, a pattern that The Marshall Project independently verified in a May 2026 report that quoted GPS connecting chronic underfeeding to the violence identified by the DOJ.

Sexual violence is also pervasive. The DOJ’s October 2024 findings described sexual assault as “rampant” and concluded that GDC does not reasonably protect incarcerated people — including LGBTI individuals — from sexual harm. Fewer than 8 percent of the 456 sexual-abuse allegations recorded in 2022 were substantiated, and GDC’s own PREA auditors reviewed 388 investigation files in May 2022 and found that none met federal standards. Georgia has never submitted a PREA certification of full compliance. All of these dynamics — staffing collapse, gang control, infrastructure decay, underfeeding, and sexual violence — operate as a single integrated structural failure. Floyd County Prison, as a privately contracted facility inside this system, is not insulated from them.

Mortality and Transparency

GPS’s mortality database records two deaths at Floyd County Prison. No public narrative explains the circumstances of those deaths, but they occur against a backdrop of 1,841 deaths systemwide since 2020 — a toll that prompted the DOJ’s intervention and continues to draw scrutiny. The facility’s private operator status adds an additional layer of opacity, as private prison contracts frequently include fewer public-disclosure requirements than state-run facilities. Without access to internal incident reports, disciplinary records, or oversight audits, it becomes difficult to determine whether Floyd County Prison reflects the worst of the systemic crisis or whether its smaller population and medium-security classification have provided some measure of insulation. What is clear is that it belongs to a system in which the federal government has found the state’s leadership no longer capable of exercising control.

Sources

This analysis draws on GPS’s own investigative reporting, which synthesizes the October 2024 Department of Justice findings, the 2024 Guidehouse consultant assessment, GDC budget and policy records, and firsthand facility-level accounts; GPS’s independent mortality database; and the GPS GDC facilities directory. Public news reporting by The Marshall Project provided independent corroboration of food-system failures.