LONG UNIT

Analysis written on August 9, 2026.

A Small Facility Inside a Systemwide Collapse

Long Unit is a small, medium-security state prison in Long County that opened in 1975 with a rated capacity of 212. As of August 2026, its population stood at 208 — 98 percent of design — with Warden Jennifer Clark at the helm. The facility is unusual: its short name in GDC records identifies it as the “Smith SP Host Facility,” and it has long been used to house specific populations, including public officials and others whose cases attract outside attention, under tighter control than many county facilities can provide. But the larger crisis consuming Georgia’s prison system is not absent here. The Department of Justice’s October 2024 findings letter concluded that “the leadership of the Georgia Department of Corrections has lost control of its facilities,” and the structural forces behind that verdict — a half-century of deferred maintenance, a starvation food budget, a staffing vacancy rate the DOJ explicitly linked to gang takeovers, and rampant sexual violence — shape every GDC site, including one that posts near-perfect health inspection scores.

Staffing Collapse and a Host Facility’s Burden

Systemwide, officer vacancies have run between 49 and 60 percent for years, against a national standard of no more than 10 percent. The numbers are worse at the close-security facilities Long Unit is meant to support. Russell Zirkle, a former GDC assistant warden, told GPS in an on-record interview that Smith State Prison — the facility Long Unit hosts administratively — routinely operated with a 70 to 80 percent officer vacancy rate, a figure he delivered with firsthand certainty. That stark testimony corroborates the DOJ’s October 2024 finding that GDC had placed “too much emphasis on gangs and insufficient emphasis on understaffing.” It also adds human scale to a statistic: approximately 31 percent of the system’s roughly 49,000 incarcerated people are validated members of 315 different security threat groups, and the DOJ’s own investigation concluded that gangs effectively run multiple facilities, controlling access to phones, showers, food, and bed assignments.

The violence that understaffing enables is not abstract. In June 2024, a smuggled firearm was used to kill a food-service worker inside Smith State Prison, the same close-security compound Long Unit serves as host. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported the shooting, and GPS’s reporting on the staffing crisis has tied such incidents to a vacuum of authority that leaves both incarcerated people and staff exposed. For a small annex like Long Unit, which depends on the same hiring pipeline and command structure, the vulnerability is shared even if the incident log looks quieter.

Two Deaths in Custody and the Healthcare Crisis

Since the start of 2020, GPS has tracked 1,860 deaths in GDC custody — a floor, because GDC reports deaths roughly two months late. Of those, two occurred at Long Unit: one in 2020 and one in 2024, both classified as natural or medical in GPS’s database. The facility’s death count is low relative to its population, but the systemic healthcare failures the DOJ documented — inadequate chronic care, neglect of serious medical needs, and a pattern of deaths that might have been prevented — cast a shadow over any mortality adjudicated as “natural” under the same GDC umbrella. The October 2024 DOJ letter explicitly cited GDC for failing to protect incarcerated people from physical harm including medical neglect, a finding that applies systemwide even if Long Unit’s own fatalities have not yet generated separate public scrutiny.

Perfect Inspection Scores and a Hidden Sanitation Crisis

Long Unit’s kitchen has been inspected by the Georgia Department of Public Health five times since August 2023, earning scores of 100 (four times) and 96 (once, with a single violation for food-contact surface sanitization). On their face, the numbers suggest a spotless kitchen. Yet GPS’s investigative reporting, published in the investigation “Dunked, Stacked, and Served,” has documented a systemic pattern across GDC kitchens that these scores systematically fail to capture: tray-sanitizing dishwashers broken for sustained periods, roach and rodent infestations inside kitchen equipment, and meals served on visibly contaminated trays — a pattern corroborated by The Marshall Project’s May 2026 investigation of Georgia prison food, which reported rats in kitchens, insects in food, and moldy trays. GPS’s analysis further identifies a regulatory-capture dynamic: inspections are scheduled walkthroughs that do not assess equipment under load, and in small counties the professional overlap between inspectors and facility staff can compromise independence. Long Unit’s perfect record, in other words, is not proof of a safe kitchen; it is a data point inside a well-documented gap between what a scheduled inspection sees and what an incarcerated person eats three times a day.

Sexual Violence: A Pattern That Spares No Facility

The DOJ’s October 2024 findings were categorical: sexual assault in Georgia’s prisons is “rampant,” and GDC does not reasonably protect incarcerated people, including LGBTI individuals, from sexual harm. Of 456 sexual-abuse allegations recorded systemwide in 2022, only 35 were substantiated — 7.7 percent — and GDC’s own consultants reviewed 388 PREA investigation files in May 2022 and found that not one met the law’s standards. Georgia has never submitted a PREA certification of full compliance to the U.S. Department of Justice in the law’s two-decade history. The DOJ documented at-knifepoint sexual assaults at Pulaski State Prison; a waterboarding and sexual assault by a cellmate at Smith State Prison in 2020; and at least four staff arrests for sexual assault since 2020 at Lee Arrendale State Prison, the state’s largest women’s facility. These are not the incidents of a single broken facility; they are the output of a system in which staffing collapse, inadequate training, and a near-total absence of accountability have normalized sexual predation. Long Unit’s small size and protective-custody mission do not insulate it from that reality; they place it inside the same institution the DOJ has declared unsafe.

Sources

This analysis draws on food-safety inspection records from the Georgia Department of Public Health; GPS’s own investigative reporting and systemic findings, including its investigations “Dunked, Stacked, and Served” and “Two Commanders Say Georgia Hides Its Prison Staffing Crisis”; mortality data compiled by GPS; the October 2024 findings letter of the U.S. Department of Justice; on-record testimony from former GDC assistant warden Russell Zirkle; and reporting from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The Marshall Project.