McEVER PROBATION DETENTION CENTER

Last updated September 13, 2026.(DS)

McEver Probation Detention Center sits in Perry, Georgia, in Houston County, operating as a male probation detention center under the Georgia Department of Corrections. Sherryl F. Blair has served as the facility's correctional superintendent since 2023, with Shawn T. Hilton as assistant superintendent since 2021. GPS's mortality database records one death at McEver since tracking began in January 2020 — Anthony Golson, 46, who died on October 7, 2023, with the cause still listed as unknown or pending. That single recorded death reflects both the facility's relatively small footprint within the GDC system and the chronic lag in how the state reports deaths in custody; GPS's count is always a floor, since GDC reports deaths roughly two months late.

A Small Facility Inside a System the DOJ Says Has Lost Control

McEver does not exist in isolation. It operates inside a corrections system that the U.S. Department of Justice concluded in October 2024 had lost control of its own facilities. Officer vacancies across Georgia's prisons have run between 49.3% and 60% systemwide for multiple years — against a national standard of no more than 10% — and at Valdosta State Prison the rate reached 80% by April 2024. The hiring pipeline cannot close the gap: acceptance rates sit under 15%, and 82.7% of new hires leave within their first year. Georgia ranks last of 50 states for correctional-officer pay.

The DOJ's findings letter faulted GDC for placing "too much blame on gangs and insufficient emphasis on understaffing," and both the DOJ and the Guidehouse 2024 consultant assessment independently concluded that gangs effectively run multiple facilities, controlling access to phones, showers, food, and bed assignments. 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. 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 approximately 1,250 maximum-security inmates.

GPS has received an account from a former incarcerated person describing gang bullying and control at McEver, staff and administration ignoring rule violations, gang-based extortion, inedible food, and inhumane conditions. GPS records show three distinct sources reporting alleged inmate-on-inmate assault at the facility between April and August 2026, three reporting family safety concerns over the same span, and three alleging unnamed staff misconduct — each bucket drawn from multiple independent sources rather than a single incident.

Food, Weight Loss, and the Hidden Failure of Oversight

GDC spends approximately $1.69 per person per day on food (2024) and has proposed $1.60 per day in FY27 — under 60 cents per meal — versus 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 independently corroborated the pattern in May 2026, 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.

GPS has additionally documented a systemic pattern of food-service sanitation failure across GDC kitchens that Department of Public Health 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 DPH scores because inspections are scheduled walkthroughs that do not assess equipment under load, and because GPS has documented professional overlap between inspectors and facility staff in small-county settings. High DPH scores at GDC facilities coexist with sustained witness reports of equipment failure and food contamination — a contradiction that forms the analytical center of GPS's investigation "Dunked, Stacked, and Served."

Family accounts collected by GPS describe a recurring pattern at McEver of rapid weight loss among incarcerated people, with multiple reports of individuals weighing less at the time of the report than upon arrival — in one case, a family member reported a weight of 111 pounds. These accounts sit against the backdrop of a state food system that GPS's systemic findings suggest routinely falls short across the system.

Infrastructure Decay as a Force Multiplier

Most GDC facilities are 30 to 40-plus years old, with documented patterns of deferred maintenance that have produced systemwide infrastructure failures: broken cell-door locks (a 2012 Hays audit found roughly 42% non-functional, a figure the 2024 Guidehouse assessment confirmed), inoperative surveillance and fire-alarm systems, mold and water failures, broken kitchen sanitization equipment, and pest infestations. The DOJ's October 2024 findings, the Guidehouse 2024 assessment, and Commissioner Oliver's public "end of life" statements all corroborate the pattern. GPS treats infrastructure collapse as a force multiplier for the violence, classification, gang-control, and mortality crises documented at the facility level.

Sexual Violence and the Failure to Protect

Sexual violence in GDC facilities is systemic. The October 2024 DOJ findings letter concluded that sexual assault 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%. 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.

Specific clusters documented by the DOJ include at-knifepoint sexual assaults at Pulaski State Prison and the 2020 Smith State Prison case in which an incarcerated person was waterboarded and sexually assaulted by his cellmate. At Lee Arrendale State Prison — Georgia's largest women's facility — at least four staff have been arrested for sexual assault since 2020, 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.

Sources

This analysis draws on GPS's own investigative reporting and systemic findings, including GPS's mortality database and intelligence records; the U.S. Department of Justice's October 2024 findings letter; the Guidehouse 2024 consultant assessment; The Marshall Project's May 2026 investigation of Georgia prison food; GDC Standard Operating Procedures; and accounts collected by GPS from formerly incarcerated people and family members.