Last updated October 4, 2026.(DS)

McEver Probation Detention Center

McEver Probation Detention Center is a Georgia Department of Corrections facility for men in Perry, Houston County. It operates as a probation detention center — a lower-security placement that holds people serving probation-detention time rather than a state prison population — and its leadership record lists Sherryl F. Blair as correctional superintendent since January 2023, with Shawn T. Hilton as correctional assistant superintendent since January 2021. GPS's death registry records two deaths at the facility since 2020, both with causes still listed as unknown or pending. Around those bare facts sits a body of family accounts describing weight loss, commissary money, and pressure between the people held there — accounts that, taken together, describe a facility where the ordinary mechanics of survival are being negotiated under conditions GPS has documented systemwide.

Two Deaths, Both Without a Recorded Cause

GPS's mortality registry records two deaths at McEver Probation Detention Center since January 2020. Anthony Golson died October 7, 2023, at the facility, at age 46. Tyrone Quimby died August 20, 2022, at the facility, at age 63. In both cases the registry lists the cause as Unknown/Pending — meaning GPS does not yet know why these men died, not that the deaths were unexplained by any other authority. GPS's registry is a floor rather than a complete count: GDC reports deaths roughly two months late, so the record lags the underlying events.

Both deaths fall into the registry's unknown-or-pending category, which is the largest single gap in Georgia's public accounting of who dies in custody and why. GPS has independently tracked 1,896 deaths in GDC custody system-wide since 2020, and the share of those with no resolved cause is a standing problem in the state's disclosure practice. At a facility the size and security level of McEver, two deaths over roughly four years is not, on its face, an outlier — but the absence of a recorded cause in either case means the public record cannot say what happened to either man.

Weight Loss, Commissary Money, and Pressure Between the People Held There

Family accounts collected by GPS describe a recurring pattern at McEver centered on rapid weight loss among people held there. Multiple family members report that an incarcerated person lost weight during his time at the facility, with one account placing a man's weight at 111 pounds at the time of the report. These are family attestations rather than medical records, and GPS has not independently verified the weights or the rate of loss — but the repetition of the theme across separate family accounts is itself the finding, and it lands against a documented systemwide problem.

GDC spends approximately $1.69 per person per day on food, 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 roughly 14 times more on medical care for incarcerated people ($432 million) than on their food. In May 2026, The Marshall Project 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. GPS has separately 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. That pattern is the analytical center of GPS's investigation "Dunked, Stacked, and Served."

A second cluster of family accounts describes conflict among the people held at McEver over commissary funds — money sent by families, fights over it, and what one account describes as attempts to scam commissary funds from a family. Other accounts describe threats and hostility directed at an incarcerated person by others at the facility, encouragement to use drugs, and phone-related repercussions after a person discussed his situation with family. A former incarcerated person's account to GPS describes gang bullying and control at the facility, staff and administration ignoring rule violations, gang-based extortion, inedible food, and conditions described as inhumane.

The commissary thread matters because commissary money is the only money most incarcerated people control. GDC's commissary master, covering 517 SKUs with FY2024 sales and 2025 pricing, shows the system is inmate-funded and bypasses state appropriations entirely. Markups on the most-purchased items run steep: acetaminophen at 224%, denture tablets at 123%, allergy tablets at 117%, ibuprofen at 108%. The Koss Clear Headphones CL-20 alone generated $125,317 in inmate spending in FY2024 at a 31% markup. When families send money into a system where the state's own food budget is under 60 cents a meal, that money becomes a target — and the accounts from McEver describe exactly that dynamic.

Staffing Collapse as the Structural Backdrop

Nothing about McEver can be read in isolation from the systemwide staffing crisis GPS has documented. Officer vacancies in Georgia's prisons have run between 49.3% and 60% systemwide for multiple years, against a national standard of no more than 10%. 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 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." DOJ and the 2024 Guidehouse consultant assessment independently concluded that gangs effectively run multiple facilities, controlling access to phones, showers, food, and bed assignments. Roughly 31% of the system's ~49,000 incarcerated population are validated members of 315 different security threat groups — more than double the national average.

That is the context in which a former incarcerated person's account of gang bullying and control at McEver, and family accounts of extortion over commissary funds, should be read. GPS records show three separate buckets of concern at this facility over the past twelve months, each drawing on at least three distinct sources: alleged assault by another incarcerated person, family safety concerns, and unnamed staff misconduct allegations. These are aggregate counts, not individual incidents, and they describe a facility where the same pressures visible in the family accounts are registering across multiple independent reports.

Infrastructure and the Limits of the Public Record

McEver sits inside a system whose physical plant is failing. 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, confirmed by Guidehouse in 2024), 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 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.

What the public record does not contain for McEver is equally notable. As of GPS's most recent records, the facility's two deaths since 2020 carry no resolved cause, and the family accounts of weight loss and commissary conflict have not been corroborated by facility records or inspection findings. That gap is not evidence of concealment — it is the ordinary condition of a state that discloses little about its probation detention centers. But it means the most specific things the public can say about McEver come from the families of the people held there, and from GPS's systemwide findings about the conditions those families are describing.

Sources

This analysis draws on GPS's mortality registry and commissary master data; GPS's systemwide investigative findings on staffing collapse, food-service sanitation, infrastructure failure, and sexual violence in GDC custody; the October 2024 U.S. Department of Justice findings letter and the 2024 Guidehouse consultant assessment; The Marshall Project's May 2026 investigation of Georgia prison food; GDC Standard Operating Procedures and the Georgia Code; and family and former-incarcerated-person accounts collected by GPS staff.