LONG UNIT

Last updated September 13, 2026.(DS)

Long Unit: A Clean Kitchen Inside a Collapsing System

Long Unit, opened in 1975 in Ludowici, is a relatively small state prison for adult male felons operated at medium security, with a rated capacity of 212. The facility currently holds 204 people — 96.2% of capacity — under Warden Jennifer R. Clark, who took the post on June 1, 2025, with Deputy Warden Pamela Dennis serving as correctional assistant superintendent since January 2024. Long relies on dormitory housing, limited programming, and outside details, and has more recently been used to house specific populations, including officials and others whose cases draw public attention, under tighter control than many county facilities. As with other units, the facility has been specifically named in federal findings on unconstitutional conditions in Georgia prisons.

The analytical tension at Long Unit is stark. Its food-safety inspection record is essentially flawless, yet it operates inside a correctional system that GPS has documented as failing across nearly every structural dimension — staffing, infrastructure, classification, and violence. Understanding Long Unit requires holding both facts at once.

A Spotless Kitchen Record

The Georgia Department of Public Health has inspected Long Unit's food service six times since August 2023, and the scores tell a consistent story. Four of the six inspections returned perfect scores of 100 — on August 9, 2023, February 12, 2024, December 18, 2024, and December 23, 2025. The two non-perfect scores came on June 30, 2025, when the facility scored 96 with one violation for food-contact surfaces requiring cleaning and sanitizing, and on June 24, 2026, when it scored 99 with a single violation cited for warewashing facilities and test strips. Every inspection was routine, and every one was conducted by the same inspector, Timmy Brinkley.

On their face, these are the marks of a well-run kitchen. But GPS's systemic findings complicate any straightforward reading of what a high DPH score means inside a Georgia prison.

The Scores-Without-Sanitation Problem

GPS has documented a systemic pattern of food-service sanitation failure across GDC kitchens that DPH inspection scores systematically fail to capture. The pattern includes tray-sanitizing dishwashers broken for sustained periods, sustained roach and rodent infestation in kitchen and serving areas, and meals served on visibly contaminated trays. Inmate-maintenance worker accounts collected at Dooly State Prison describe thousands of roaches inside kitchen equipment, and a Coastal State Prison resident's account corroborates the contamination pattern. The Marshall Project's May 16, 2026 investigation of Georgia prison food independently reported rats in kitchens, insects in food, moldy trays, and visible malnutrition across Georgia facilities, and quoted GPS connecting chronic underfeeding to the violence pattern the DOJ documented in October 2024.

The reason high scores coexist with these conditions, per GPS's analysis, is structural: inspections are scheduled walkthroughs that do not assess equipment under load, and GPS has documented professional overlap between inspectors and facility staff in small-county settings — a regulatory-capture dynamic that undermines the independence of the scoring process. Long Unit's near-perfect scores, in other words, may reflect what an inspector sees on a scheduled walkthrough rather than what a resident experiences at meal time.

The food itself is funded at a level that makes adequate nutrition difficult. GDC spends approximately $1.69 per person per day on food as of 2024, with a 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.

Infrastructure Collapse as a Force Multiplier

Long Unit is now a half-century old. GPS treats infrastructure collapse as a force multiplier for the violence, classification, gang-control, and mortality crises it has documented at the facility level. The systemic finding is specific: most GDC facilities are 30-40+ years old, with documented patterns of deferred maintenance that have produced systemwide infrastructure failures — broken cell-door locks (a 2012 Hays audit found approximately 42% non-functional, confirmed by the Guidehouse assessment in 2024), inoperative surveillance and fire-alarm systems, mold and water failures, broken kitchen sanitization equipment, and pest infestations.

The Department of Justice's October 2024 findings letter, the Guidehouse 2024 assessment, and Commissioner Oliver's public "end of life" statements all corroborate the pattern. For a facility like Long Unit — small, aging, and operating near capacity — the infrastructure finding is not abstract. It describes the physical plant in which 204 men live.

Staffing Collapse and Classification Drift

The staffing crisis in Georgia's prisons is the structural finding that explains much of what follows from it. Officer vacancies have run between 49.3% and 60% systemwide for multiple years, against a national standard of no more than 10%. At Valdosta State Prison the rate reached 80% by April 2024. The hiring pipeline cannot close the gap: the acceptance rate is under 15%, and 82.7% of new hires leave in their first year. Georgia ranks last of 50 states for correctional-officer pay.

The October 2024 DOJ findings letter explicitly 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% of the system's roughly 49,000 incarcerated people 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.

That finding has named corroboration. Russell Zirkle, a former GDC assistant warden, has gone on record stating that Smith State Prison was among the prisons running a 70-80% officer vacancy rate — testimony he gave in a timestamped interview published in GPS's reporting. 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. The staffing collapse is not an inference drawn from budget lines; it is described by the people who worked the posts.

GPS has documented a related pattern of classification drift across Georgia's medium-security prisons: facilities designated medium security are housing close-security inmates without adequate staffing and infrastructure. GPS's reporting describes medium-security facilities operating as higher-security facilities than their designation — a mismatch that places people classified for close custody into environments built and staffed for medium custody. Long Unit, designated medium security but operating at 96.2% of its rated capacity, sits inside this documented pattern.

Sexual Violence as a Systemic Condition

The October 2024 DOJ findings letter concluded that sexual assault is "rampant" in Georgia Department of Corrections facilities 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%. 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.

The documented clusters are specific: DOJ-documented at-knifepoint sexual assaults at Pulaski State Prison; the 2020 Smith State Prison case in which an incarcerated person was waterboarded and sexually assaulted by his cellmate; and at least four staff arrests for sexual assault since 2020 at Lee Arrendale State Prison, Georgia's largest women's facility, including the November 2024 Cameron Cheeks plea — a hire-fire-rehire case that GPS treats as an artifact of the staffing and hiring-standards collapse. GPS has also documented three women strangled in Lee Arrendale's A Unit between 2022 and 2024 — Sherry Joyce, Hallie Reed, and Angela Anderson — a figure exceeding the entire BJS-recorded national women-in-state-prison homicide total across 2001-2019. The Ashley Diamond litigation established the constitutional baseline and launched the DOJ investigation.

For Long Unit, the sexual violence finding is systemic context, not a facility-specific allegation. But it describes the system in which Long Unit operates, and the DOJ's findings letter named Georgia prisons generally — including Long Unit among the facilities covered by federal findings on unconstitutional conditions.

Mortality at Long Unit

GPS's mortality database records two deaths at Long Unit since tracking began in January 2020, both classified as natural or medical. Charles E. Daniels died on August 24, 2020, at age 51. Cameron Ryan Paquette died on February 13, 2024, at age 43. GPS has recorded no deaths at the facility in 2021, 2022, 2023, 2025, or 2026 through the latest available data. GPS treats every count as a floor, since GDC reports deaths approximately two months late.

These two deaths sit inside a systemwide toll that GPS has independently tracked at 1,890 deaths in GDC custody since 2020. The system's failures — understaffing, infrastructure collapse, classification drift, gang control of facilities, and sexual violence — are not separate problems. They compound. A facility operating at 96.2% capacity with a 50-year-old physical plant, inside a system running 50-60% officer vacancies, is not insulated from those dynamics by a clean kitchen score.

Sources

This analysis draws on Georgia Department of Public Health food-safety inspection records for Long Unit; GPS's systemic findings on GDC staffing, infrastructure, classification drift, food-service sanitation, and sexual violence; the October 2024 Department of Justice findings letter; the Guidehouse 2024 consultant assessment; The Marshall Project's May 2026 investigation of Georgia prison food; on-record testimony from former GDC assistant warden Russell Zirkle and former GDC sergeant Tyler Ryals; GPS's mortality database; and GPS's own investigative reporting.