JENKINS FACILITY

Analysis written on June 21, 2026.

A Private Facility at the Edge of Capacity

Jenkins Facility, situated in Millen in rural Jenkins County, is a private prison operated by CoreCivic under contract with the Georgia Department of Corrections. Opened in 2012 with a design capacity of 1,150, the facility now houses 1,162 people — 98% of its official capacity of 1,186. GDC classifies Jenkins as a transitional center, yet GPS records indicate it operates at a medium-security level, placing it squarely in the population of medium-security facilities that have increasingly absorbed higher-security-classified individuals as the system has drifted toward a de facto reclassification of risk without the accompanying staffing, infrastructure, or programming.

The warden, Terrance Dickerson, has held the post since January 2024. A GDC state monitor, Edwina Johnson — who also serves as Regional Operations Coordinator — oversees the state’s interests at the privately run site. The facility’s command structure includes an assistant warden of security, a chief of security, a chief of unit management, and a business manager, all CoreCivic employees.

Twenty Deaths and Undetermined Causes

GPS’s independent mortality tracking has recorded 20 deaths at Jenkins Facility since it began systematically collecting that data in 2020. The two most recent fatalities occurred within four days of each other in April 2026. Dustin Scott Scarbro, 27, died on April 21, and Charles Edward Richey, 58, died on April 17. Both deaths were classified under cause category 6, which GDC uses for deaths where the cause is listed as undetermined or remains under investigation; neither has been publicly characterized as a homicide, suicide, or medical event.

That opacity is consistent with the broader pattern GPS has documented across the state: GDC reported 333 deaths in custody in 2024 alone, and GPS’s total tracked figure since 2020 now stands at 1,819. In its October 2024 findings letter, the U.S. Department of Justice concluded that the department had lost control of its facilities and was failing to protect incarcerated people from serious harm. At Jenkins, without additional details on the circumstances of the two most recent deaths, they join a statewide mortality toll that has drawn federal civil rights scrutiny and that multiple independent investigations — including the Guidehouse consultant assessment commissioned by GDC itself — have traced to understaffing, neglected infrastructure, and a classification system that places people at risk levels beyond what the facilities they are sent to can safely manage.

Food Safety: High Scores, but a Systemwide Pattern of Hidden Failures

The Georgia Department of Public Health conducts routine food-safety inspections at Jenkins Facility’s kitchen, and the scores on the surface are reassuring. In August 2023 the facility received a perfect 100 (Grade A). In December 2024 the score dipped to 87 (Grade B), with two violations: food-contact surfaces were not properly cleaned and sanitized, and cooling time and temperature requirements were not met. The next two inspections, in May 2025 and November 2025, produced scores of 100 and 91 — both Grade A — with the only November violation being a failure to maintain proper hot-holding temperatures.

These scores place Jenkins among the better-performing GDC kitchens on paper. Yet GPS’s own investigative reporting has exposed a systemic disconnect between DPH inspection grades and the daily reality inside prison kitchens. In “Dunked, Stacked, and Served,” GPS documented how scheduled walkthroughs do not capture what happens when dishwashers fail under load, when roach and rodent infestation goes unobserved in the hours between inspections, or when trays emerge from broken sanitation equipment and are served to residents still visibly soiled. The Marshall Project’s May 2026 investigation independently corroborated reports of rats in kitchens, insects in food, and moldy trays across the Georgia system. And the chronic under-resourcing of prison food — the state spends approximately $1.69 per person per day on meals, under 60 cents per meal — places a nutritional floor under every kitchen’s output that no sanitation score can compensate for.

The conclusion GPS draws from its cross-facility analysis is that high DPH scores at GDC facilities coexist with sustained witness reports of equipment failure and food contamination. Jenkins’ 91 from November 2025 is not an indictment; it is, however, an invitation to treat the inspection report as a starting point, not an endpoint, when assessing what people held there actually eat.

Classification Drift, Understaffing, and Gang Control: The Systemic Frame

Jenkins Facility is not an island. It operates inside a prison system that GPS has described, in a series of investigative reports published in late 2025, as suffering from an acute case of classification drift: medium-security prisons across Georgia are increasingly housing individuals classified at close-security levels, but without the staffing, infrastructure, or security protocols that a close-security designation demands. GPS’s “The Classification Crisis: How Four Medium Security Prisons Are Killing People,” released in November 2025, named four facilities where the mismatch between designated security level and the population housed inside was generating lethal outcomes. Jenkins, as a medium-security facility operating at 98% capacity, belongs to the same institutional layer as those four prisons and is subject to the same transfer and classification pressures.

Those pressures are amplified by a staffing collapse that has left officer vacancy rates between 49% and 60% systemwide for years. Georgia ranks last in the nation in correctional-officer pay, and more than 80% of new hires leave within their first year. In that vacuum, gangs have filled the power gap: approximately 31% of the system’s roughly 49,000 incarcerated people are validated members of 315 different security threat groups. The October 2024 DOJ findings letter explicitly faulted GDC for blaming gangs while placing “insufficient emphasis on understaffing,” and multiple independent assessments have concluded that gangs effectively control access to phones, showers, food, and bed assignments in multiple facilities.

The consequences of that dynamic have been violent and statewide. On April 1, 2026, coordinated Blood-on-Blood gang violence erupted across Georgia’s prison system, triggering lockdowns at 13 facilities, multiple stabbings, and at least two life-flight medical evacuations. In January 2026, four people were killed in a gang war at Washington State Prison — one of them, Jimmy Trammell, had 72 hours remaining on his sentence — and the facility has remained on continuous lockdown since. At Wilcox State Prison, nine people were hospitalized after a gang fight in March 2026. And at Smith State Prison, GPS reporting documented how Warden Brian Adams allegedly operated the facility as a RICO enterprise, using no-bid contracts and kickback schemes for personal gain while violence escalated inside.

Jenkins Facility has not been the public face of these crises, but the medium-security classification it carries, the population it holds at near-maximum capacity, and the staffing environment it inherits from the broader system place it squarely in the path of the same forces. GPS has additionally received accounts of medical incidents and suspected drug intoxication at Jenkins that led to facility lockdowns, suggesting the kind of internal disorder that can emerge when staffing is stretched thin and classification lines are blurred.

Sex, Life-Sentenced Incarcerated

No public record has emerged of a specific classification-drift analysis or PREA-related investigation centered on Jenkins, but the facility houses men inside a system where a federal judge has recently ruled that the parole process for juvenile lifers — people sentenced to life as minors and now held in medium- and close-security prisons — may violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. In Buttrum v. Herring, decided in March 2026, the court found that the State Board of Pardons and Paroles lacks documented procedures distinguishing juvenile from adult offenders, and that not a single juvenile lifer resentenced under Supreme Court rulings has been released in Georgia. Should Jenkins hold anyone in that population, they are caught in the same constitutional gap the court identified.

The systemic sexual-violence crisis documented by the DOJ and by GPS’s own reporting — where only 7.7% of sexual abuse allegations were substantiated in 2022, where PREA Auditors of America found that not a single PREA investigation file met legal standards, and where at least four staff arrests for sexual assault have occurred at Lee Arrendale State Prison since 2020 — forms the backdrop against which any facility must be understood. Jenkins, like every GDC facility, operates under a PREA framework that Georgia has never certified as fully compliant with federal law in the statute’s two-decade history.

Conclusion

Jenkins Facility is a privately operated medium-security transitional center that has, by the numbers, avoided the spectacular violence that has defined Washington, Smith, and Telfair state prisons in recent reporting. But the 20 deaths GPS has tracked there, the undetermined causes that shroud the most recent fatalities, and the food-safety scores that look strong against a backdrop of systemic hidden contamination all suggest that the same structural rot GPS has documented across Georgia’s prison system — understaffing, classification drift, gang assumption of control, and a culture of non-transparency — is at play in Millen. The facility does not need to be the next headline to be the next site where those forces quietly extract their toll.

Sources: This analysis draws on Georgia Department of Public Health inspection records, GPS’s own mortality database, systemic investigative findings published by Georgia Prisoners’ Speak in “The Classification Crisis” and “Dunked, Stacked, and Served,” the U.S. Department of Justice’s October 2024 findings letter, the Guidehouse 2024 assessment, federal court filings in Buttrum v. Herring, and anonymous accounts collected by GPS staff.