Last updated October 18, 2026.(DS)

Long Unit: A Small Prison Inside a System-Wide Crisis

Long Unit sits in Ludowici, in Long County, a state prison for adult male felons that opened in 1975 and today carries a rated capacity of 212. GPS's facility records show 205 people held there — 96.7 percent of rated capacity — under Warden Jennifer R. Clark, who has led the facility since June 2025, with Pamela Dennis serving as correctional assistant superintendent since January 2024. The facility's own profile describes it as a relatively small prison operated at medium security, used in recent years to house specific populations, including officials and others whose cases draw public attention, under tighter control than many county facilities. It relies on dormitory housing, limited programming, and outside details — and it has been specifically named in federal findings on unconstitutional conditions in Georgia prisons.

What follows examines Long Unit through the two records that actually exist for it: the thin, specific paper trail of state inspections and mortality data, and the much larger body of GPS reporting on the system-wide conditions — staffing collapse, classification drift, infrastructure failure, and food-service sanitation — that shape daily life inside a facility this size. The analytical problem is the gap between those two records. On paper, Long Unit looks clean. In the accounts GPS has collected from across the GDC system, the conditions that produce harm are precisely the ones that paper does not capture.

Two Deaths, Both Coded Natural, in a Registry That Runs Behind

GPS's mortality registry records two deaths at Long Unit since January 1, 2020, both coded Natural/Medical. Charles E. Daniels died August 24, 2020, at Long Unit; the registry lists his cause as Natural/Medical and his age at death as 51. Cameron Ryan Paquette died February 13, 2024, at Long Unit; the registry lists his cause as Natural/Medical and his age at death as 43.

Those are the only two entries the registry holds for this facility in the 2020-onward window, with single deaths in 2020 and 2024 and none recorded in 2021, 2022, 2023, 2025, or 2026 to date. That count is a floor, not a ceiling: GDC reports deaths roughly two months late, so recent deaths may not yet appear. It should also be read against the scale of the system — GPS has independently tracked 1,918 deaths in GDC custody since 2020 — and against the fact that a facility holding roughly 205 people will, statistically, record few deaths in any given year. A low count at Long Unit is not evidence that the facility is safe; it is evidence that it is small.

Food-Safety Scores That Don't Measure the Kitchen

The most consistent public record for Long Unit is its food-safety inspection history, conducted by the Georgia Department of Public Health. The scores are, on their face, excellent. A routine inspection on August 9, 2023, scored 100 (Grade A). Another on February 12, 2024, scored 100 (Grade A). On December 18, 2024, 100 (Grade A). On June 30, 2025, the facility scored 96 (Grade A), with one violation cited — food-contact surfaces not cleaned and sanitized. On December 23, 2025, back to 100 (Grade A). And on June 24, 2026, a routine inspection scored 99 (Grade A), with one violation cited for warewashing facilities: installation, maintenance, and use, including test strips.

Six consecutive Grade A scores across three years is the kind of record that gets cited as proof a kitchen is functioning. GPS's own investigative work argues the opposite reading. GPS has documented a systemic pattern of food-service sanitation failure across GDC kitchens that DPH inspection scores systematically fail to capture: tray-sanitizing dishwashers broken for sustained periods, sustained roach and rodent infestation in kitchen and serving areas, and meals served on visibly contaminated trays. The pattern is hidden from the scores, in GPS's analysis, because inspections are scheduled walkthroughs that do not assess equipment under load — a dishwasher that fails on a Tuesday afternoon with 200 trays in the queue can still pass a Wednesday morning walkthrough — and because GPS has documented professional overlap between inspectors and facility staff in small-county settings, the regulatory-capture dynamic GPS develops in its reporting on scores without sanitation.

The June 2026 warewashing violation is worth pausing on. It is the one inspection line in Long Unit's record that touches the exact equipment GPS's reporting identifies as the systemic failure point — the dishwashing and tray-sanitizing machinery. A single cited violation for warewashing maintenance is not proof of the broader pattern. But it is the one place where the inspection paper and the witness-derived pattern touch the same equipment, and it is the reason a 99 should not be read as an all-clear.

The stakes of that gap are not abstract. GDC spends approximately $1.69 per person per day on food as of 2024 and has proposed $1.60 per day in FY27 — under 60 cents per meal — against the FDA Thrifty Food Plan estimate of roughly $10 per day for an adult man's nutritionally adequate diet. The state spends approximately 14 times more on medical care for incarcerated people ($432 million) than on their food. The Marshall Project corroborated the pattern in a May 16, 2026 investigation by Schwartzapfel, "Rats, Insects and Mold," independently reporting rats in kitchens, insects in food, moldy trays, and visible malnutrition across Georgia facilities, and quoting GPS connecting chronic underfeeding to the violence pattern the DOJ documented in October 2024. A kitchen can score 100 on a scheduled walkthrough and still be the place where the food budget is being absorbed.

Staffing Collapse and the Facilities Gangs Actually Run

The structural fact that most shapes a facility like Long Unit is not in its own inspection file at all. Officer vacancies in Georgia's prisons have run between 49.3 percent and 60 percent systemwide for multiple years, against a national standard of no more than 10 percent; at Valdosta State Prison the rate reached 80 percent by April 2024. The hiring pipeline cannot close the gap — acceptance rate under 15 percent, with 82.7 percent of new hires leaving in their first year — and Georgia ranks last of 50 states for correctional-officer pay.

The October 2024 DOJ findings letter concluded that "the leadership of the Georgia Department of Corrections has lost control of its facilities" and faulted GDC for placing "too much blame on gangs and insufficient emphasis on understaffing." Approximately 31 percent of the system's roughly 49,000 incarcerated population are validated members of 315 different security threat groups — more than double the national average. DOJ and the Guidehouse 2024 consultant assessment independently concluded that gangs effectively run multiple facilities, controlling access to phones, showers, food, and bed assignments. Tyler Ryals, a former GDC sergeant forced out in 2024 after whistleblowing, told GPS he had personally been the only security person on the entire Telfair compound of roughly 1,250 maximum-security inmates.

That account is corroborated on the record by a former GDC assistant warden. Russell Zirkle, a former GDC assistant warden, has said on the record — in a timestamped interview — that Smith State Prison was among facilities running a 70-80 percent officer vacancy rate. GPS's reporting on that interview, "Two Commanders Say Georgia Hides Its Prison Staffing Crisis," documents the commanders' account that GDC obscures the scale of its vacancy problem. The same reporting documents a related fact from Smith State Prison: in June 2024, a smuggled firearm was used to kill a food-service worker inside that facility — a death that belongs to Smith State Prison, not to Long Unit, but one that illustrates what a 70-80 percent vacancy rate looks like when it fails.

GPS treats staffing collapse and gang assumption of facility control as the integrated structural finding that explains the per-facility violence, classification, mortality, and infrastructure-failure narratives across the system. For a facility of Long Unit's size — roughly 205 people, dormitory housing, outside details — the arithmetic is unforgiving: fewer officers per shift, more reliance on incarcerated workers to run the institution, and less supervision in exactly the spaces where supervision matters.

Classification Drift and the Population a Small Prison Actually Holds

Long Unit's profile notes that it has been used to house specific populations, including officials and others whose cases draw public attention, under tighter control than many county facilities. That is a population-management function, and it sits inside a larger pattern GPS has documented: classification drift, in which medium-security facilities house disproportionate numbers of close-security inmates without the staffing and infrastructure that close security requires. GPS's reporting describes medium-security prisons operating as close security — the designation on the sign not matching the population inside the wire.

The facility's own record reflects a version of this. GPS's static profile lists Long Unit as a close-security facility for adult males; its descriptive profile describes it as operated at medium security. That is not a contradiction to be resolved by picking one — it is the drift itself, visible in the record. A prison rated for 212 and holding 205, designated one way and described another, housing a population that includes people whose cases draw public attention, is a facility whose security posture depends heavily on staffing being adequate to the population actually present. The systemwide vacancy figures above are the measure of whether it is.

Infrastructure, Sexual Violence, and the Conditions Behind the Paper

Two more systemwide findings bear directly on what a DPH score and a mortality count cannot show. First, infrastructure: most GDC facilities are 30-40-plus years old, with documented patterns of deferred maintenance that have produced systemwide failures — broken cell-door locks (a 2012 Hays audit found roughly 42 percent non-functional, confirmed by the Guidehouse 2024 assessment), inoperative surveillance and fire-alarm systems, mold and water failures, broken kitchen sanitization equipment, and pest infestations. The DOJ October 2024 findings, the Guidehouse 2024 assessment, and Commissioner Oliver's public "end of life" statements all corroborate the pattern. Long Unit opened in 1975; it is squarely inside that cohort. GPS treats infrastructure collapse as a force multiplier for the violence, classification, gang-control, and mortality crises GPS has documented at the facility level.

Second, sexual violence. The October 2024 DOJ findings letter concluded that sexual assault in GDC facilities is "rampant" and that GDC does not reasonably protect incarcerated people, including LGBTI individuals, from sexual harm. Of 456 sexual-abuse allegations recorded in 2022, only 35 were substantiated — 7.7 percent. GDC's own consultants, PREA Auditors of America, 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. GPS treats this as the analytical center of any GDC violence or staff-misconduct narrative, not as facility-isolated incidents.

What the Record for This Facility Can and Cannot Establish

The honest summary of Long Unit's public record is that it is thin and mostly clean: two deaths since 2020, both coded Natural/Medical; six consecutive Grade A food-safety inspections with two minor violations cited across three years; a rated capacity of 212 against a population of 205; a warden in place since mid-2025 and a deputy since early 2024. None of that is a finding of harm at this facility, and this page does not make one.

What the record cannot do is rule harm out. The inspection regime measures a scheduled walkthrough, not equipment under load. The mortality registry runs roughly two months behind and counts only what GDC reports. And the conditions GPS has documented systemwide — 49.3 to 60 percent officer vacancies, gangs controlling access to basic necessities at multiple facilities, deferred maintenance across a 30-40-year-old physical plant, a food budget under 60 cents a meal, and a sexual-assault substantiation rate of 7.7 percent — are the conditions under which a small dormitory-housed prison with limited programming operates every day. Long Unit's file is quiet. The system it sits inside is not.

Sources

This analysis draws on Georgia Department of Public Health food-safety inspection records for Long Unit (2023-2026); GPS's mortality registry for the facility, covering deaths from January 1, 2020 forward; GPS's facility records and personnel data for Long Unit, including rated capacity, population, and leadership; GPS's systemic findings on infrastructure decay, food-service sanitation and per-person food spending, officer vacancies and gang control, classification drift, and sexual violence in GDC custody; the October 2024 U.S. Department of Justice findings letter and the 2024 Guidehouse consultant assessment as cited in that reporting; The Marshall Project's May 16, 2026 investigation by Schwartzapfel, "Rats, Insects and Mold"; and on-record statements by former GDC sergeant Tyler Ryals and former GDC assistant warden Russell Zirkle, as documented in GPS's reporting "Two Commanders Say Georgia Hides Its Prison Staffing Crisis."