McEVER PROBATION DETENTION CENTER

Last updated August 23, 2026.(DS)

McEver Probation Detention Center

McEver Probation Detention Center, located in Perry, Houston County, houses male probationers under the Georgia Department of Corrections. The facility is led by Superintendent Sherryl F. Blair, who assumed the role in June 2024, with Assistant Superintendent Shawn Hilton, Chief of Security Eric Walling, and Business Office manager Cassandra Askew completing the administrative team. McEver operates within a state prison system that the U.S. Department of Justice concluded in October 2024 has lost control of its facilities — a finding that frames every dimension of what follows.

A Facility Inside a Collapsing System

The conditions at McEver cannot be understood apart from the structural failures GPS has documented across the Georgia Department of Corrections. 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: acceptance rates run 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 October 2024 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. 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.

Infrastructure Failure as a Force Multiplier

Most GDC facilities are 30 to 40 or more 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, confirmed again by Guidehouse in 2024 — 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. GPS treats infrastructure collapse as a force multiplier for the violence, classification, gang-control, and mortality crises documented at the facility level.

Food, Sanitation, and the Limits of Inspection

GPS has 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. Inmate-maintenance worker accounts collected at Dooly State Prison describe thousands of roaches inside kitchen equipment. The Marshall Project's May 16, 2026 investigation of Georgia prison food independently corroborated the pattern, reporting rats in kitchens, insects in food, moldy trays, and visible malnutrition across Georgia facilities.

The state spends approximately $1.69 per person per day on food — 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. GPS's investigation "Dunked, Stacked, and Served" centers on the contradiction between high DPH scores and sustained witness reports of equipment failure and food contamination — a gap GPS attributes in part to scheduled walkthrough inspections that do not assess equipment under load, and to documented professional overlap between inspectors and facility staff in small-county settings.

Violence and Sexual Harm as Systemic Conditions

Sexual violence in Georgia Department of Corrections 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 include the 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. 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.

Death in Custody

GPS has tracked one death at McEver Probation Detention Center since 2020, with the cause recorded as unknown or pending. That single recorded death sits within a systemwide toll that GPS has independently tracked at 1,863 deaths in GDC custody since 2020 — a figure GPS treats as a floor, since GDC reports deaths approximately two months late.

Accounts from Inside

GPS has received accounts 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. These reports align with the systemic patterns GPS has documented across GDC facilities — the staffing collapse that leaves facilities unable to maintain order, the food-service failures that persist despite inspection scores, and the gang assumption of control that DOJ and Guidehouse both identified as a systemwide condition.

Sources

This analysis draws on GPS's own investigative reporting and systemic findings, including GPS's mortality database and the investigation "Dunked, Stacked, and Served"; 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; and accounts collected by GPS from incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people.