JENKINS FACILITY

Analysis written on August 2, 2026.

A Private Prison in a Collapsing System

Jenkins Facility is a private, CoreCivic-operated transitional center that opened in 2012 in Millen, Georgia. Designed for 1,150 incarcerated people, it held 1,155 as of the most recent count — 97.4 percent of capacity — under the oversight of Warden Terrance Dickerson, who has led the facility since January 2024. It sits within a state correctional apparatus that the U.S. Department of Justice, a 2024 consultant assessment, and the Georgia Department of Corrections’ own commissioner have described as systemically broken. Although Jenkins is a contractor-run site, its population is GDC-custodial, and the same structural forces that produce homicide, mortality, and neglect across the state inevitably reach it.

Deaths, Unknown Causes, and the Withheld Column

GPS’s mortality database records 20 deaths at Jenkins Facility since the start of 2020. Eight of those deaths are categorized as natural or medical, and one as a homicide, but the largest single category — eight people — is “unknown/pending.” That group accounts for 40 percent of the deaths recorded at the site, and the label means that months or years after the fact, GPS has been unable to determine a cause from public records. Two people died by suicide and one from an overdose.

The most recent deaths occurred in April 2026: Dustin Scott Scarbro, 27, and Charles Edward Richey, 58, both listed as natural causes. But the backlog of unknown causes reflects a wider transparency failure. GDC briefly published cause-of-death data in January 2025, then stopped; GPS reporting in July 2026 exposed the empty column where the state once told families how their loved ones died — a silence that leaves families of those whose death certificates remain sealed without official answers. Across the GDC system, GPS has independently tracked 1,859 deaths since 2020, and the unknown-cause rate at Jenkins is of a piece with that opacity.

Violence, Gang Conflict, and a Security Vacuum

GPS’s intelligence system records multiple reports of violence at Jenkins Facility in 2026, including anonymous tips describing a stabbing of two elderly individuals inside a housing unit. On another occasion, an incarcerated person was found unresponsive during a routine count, prompting a medical emergency and a facility-wide lockdown and shakedown; the cause remained undetermined. Separately, GPS received accounts of an incarcerated person found during lockdown procedures in a suspected state of drug intoxication, unable to comply with officer instructions. The reports, taken together, point to episodes of serious instability inside the facility.

These incidents unfold against a backdrop of sustained, statewide gang warfare that the Georgia Department of Corrections lost the capacity to control. On April 1, 2026, coordinated Blood-on-Blood gang violence erupted across at least 12 Georgia prisons, with stabbings at five facilities and life-flight helicopters dispatched to two; the system went into lockdown. GPS’s own clean-checked reporting documented that Georgia has identified 315 gang sets and 15,200 gang-affiliated prisoners — 31 percent of its population, more than double the national average — yet has no gang-separation strategy and no exit program. The DOJ’s October 2024 findings letter concluded that GDC leadership had “lost control of its facilities” and placed too much blame on gangs while insufficiently addressing understaffing.

Former GDC assistant warden Russell Zirkle, in on-record testimony cited by GPS, described Smith State Prison as running a 70-to-80 percent officer vacancy rate — a figure that outpaces even the systemwide average, which has hovered between 49 and 60 percent for years. Tyler Ryals, a former GDC sergeant forced out after whistleblowing, told GPS he had been the only security officer on the entire Telfair State Prison compound of roughly 1,250 maximum-security inmates. In that vacuum, gangs assume de facto control over telephones, showers, food, and bed assignments. Jenkins, as a lower-security facility nested inside the same collapsing system, is not walled off from the violence that results.

In March 2026, a gang fight at Wilcox State Prison sent nine people to the hospital, and GPS records tie that incident directly to Jenkins Facility. The nature of the connection has not been publicly detailed, but the event underscores how closely a transitional center can be pulled into the orbit of systemwide instability.

Food Scores — and the Unseen Reality

The Georgia Department of Public Health inspects Jenkins Facility’s food service on a routine basis, and the raw numbers have been strong: perfect scores of 100 in August 2023 and May 2024, a score of 91 in November 2025, and a dip to 87 with two violations — improper food-contact surface sanitizing and cooling-time/temperature failures — in December 2024. On their face, the records suggest a kitchen that occasionally slips but generally operates safely.

However, GPS has documented a systemic gap between DPH scores and the lived reality of prison kitchens across Georgia. The department’s inspections are scheduled walkthroughs that do not assess sanitizing equipment under load; they do not capture dishwashers broken for sustained periods, tray racks infested with roaches, or meals served on visibly contaminated surfaces. Inmate maintenance workers at Dooly State Prison described thousands of roaches inside kitchen equipment to GPS staff; at Coastal State Prison, an incarcerated person’s account described meals arriving on soiled trays. The Marshall Project independently corroborated these patterns in May 2026, reporting rats in kitchens, insects in food, and moldy trays across multiple Georgia facilities.

Financially, the state allocates about $1.69 per person per day for food — roughly 60 cents per meal — a fraction of the FDA Thrifty Food Plan’s estimate of roughly $10 per day for a nutritionally adequate adult male diet. Georgia spends approximately 14 times more on medical care for incarcerated people than on their food. When a facility like Jenkins posts high DPH numbers while these structural deficits persist systemwide, the scores are a snapshot of a single day, not an assurance of consistent sanitation.

Conclusion

Jenkins Facility’s food-safety scores display a veneer of compliance; its death toll, with nearly half the causes unknown, reveals a void of accountability. Reports of stabbings, lockdowns, and medical emergencies inside the facility, set against the DOJ’s devastating findings and GPS’s own documentation of gang control, staffing collapse, and hidden food-service failures, suggest that the same systemic failures documented at the state’s most violent prisons are present in its quieter corners. GPS continues to receive family-safety reports about Jenkins — at least three in the spring and summer of 2026 alone — and will monitor whether the facility’s private management or the GDC oversight structure can produce outcomes that the raw DPH scores cannot capture.

Sources

This analysis draws on food-safety inspection records from the Georgia Department of Public Health; GPS’s mortality database and intelligence system, including family-safety signals and anonymous incident reports; GPS-authored investigations into classification drift, the withheld cause-of-death column, the systemic food-sanitation gap, and the gang-staffing-death nexus; and expert testimony from former GDC personnel documented by GPS.