Last updated October 25, 2026.(DS)

McEver Probation Detention Center: A Small Facility Inside a Systemwide Collapse

McEver Probation Detention Center sits in Perry, in Houston County, and holds male probationers under GDC operation. Its public footprint is small — a superintendent, a deputy, a handful of deaths GPS has recorded, and a thin documentary trail. That thinness is itself the analytical problem. What can be established about McEver comes almost entirely from two directions: the sparse first-party record GPS maintains on the facility itself, and the much larger body of systemwide findings — from the U.S. Department of Justice, from GDC's own consultants, and from GPS's investigative work — that describe the conditions every GDC facility, including the smallest, operates inside. This page reads McEver through both.

The Facility and Its Leadership

McEver is a probation detention center, a facility type distinct from the state's medium- and close-security prisons: it holds male probationers rather than the general prison population, and its scale is correspondingly modest. GDC's personnel records list Sherryl F. Blair as correctional superintendent, a post she has held since 2023, with Shawn T. Hilton serving as correctional assistant superintendent since 2021. GPS's facility directory records the institution under the GDC operator with Blair as its lead.

The public record does not describe McEver's housing configuration, its programming, or its physical plant in any detail GPS can independently confirm. That absence is worth stating plainly rather than papering over: for a facility of this size, the documentary record that exists is largely administrative, and the conditions inside are known mainly through the accounts of the people held there and their families.

Two Deaths, Both Unresolved

GPS's mortality registry records two deaths at McEver since 2020, and in both cases the cause remains unknown or pending.

Anthony Golson died October 7, 2023, at McEver Probation Detention Center at age 46; GPS's registry lists the cause as Unknown/Pending. Tyrone Quimby died August 20, 2022, at the facility at age 63, also with a cause listed as Unknown/Pending.

A pending cause is not a finding of foul play, and it is not a finding of natural death. It means the record GPS holds does not yet establish why the person died. Across the system, GPS has independently tracked 1,918 deaths in GDC custody since 2020 — a figure that is always a floor, because GDC reports deaths roughly two months late. Two deaths at a facility this small is a small number in absolute terms; the more significant fact is that neither has a documented cause in the public record GPS maintains.

Staffing Collapse as the Governing Condition

The most important context for any GDC facility is the staffing crisis, and it is not facility-specific in origin. 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%; 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 within their first year. Georgia ranks last of 50 states for correctional-officer pay.

The October 2024 DOJ findings letter drew the conclusion directly: "the leadership of the Georgia Department of Corrections has lost control of its facilities," faulting GDC for placing "too much blame on gangs and insufficient emphasis on understaffing." DOJ and the Guidehouse 2024 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. 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.

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. A probation detention center with a superintendent and a deputy on the books is not exempt from that arithmetic.

Food, Sanitation, and the Weight-Loss Reports

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 — 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 DOJ documented in October 2024.

GPS has separately 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. Inmate-maintenance worker accounts collected at Dooly State Prison describe thousands of roaches inside kitchen equipment; a Coastal State Prison resident's account and The Marshall Project's investigation corroborate the contamination pattern. The contradiction between high DPH scores and sustained witness reports of equipment failure is the analytical center of GPS's investigation "Dunked, Stacked, and Served."

Against that backdrop, GPS has received recurring reports from families of rapid, significant weight loss among people held at McEver, including accounts describing a person weighing as little as 111 pounds at the time of the report and weighing less than upon arrival. These are family accounts, not verified medical records, and GPS presents them as such. But they describe a pattern — weight loss in custody — that the systemwide food data makes legible rather than anomalous.

Commissary, Extortion, and the Economics of the Dorm

Commissary is inmate-funded and bypasses state appropriations entirely, which makes it a distinct economy inside every GDC facility. The GDC commissary master lists 517 SKUs; in FY2024 the three highest-markup electronics items alone generated $25,270.86 in markup profit on $117,913.57 in wholesale cost, a 21.4% margin. The Koss Clear Headphones CL-5 carried a 70% markup in 2025 and a 40% price increase over the prior year; the CL-2 a 64% markup and 36% increase.

That economy is where several of the family reports about McEver converge. GPS has received recurring family accounts describing other incarcerated people attempting to obtain commissary funds from a family, and of fights breaking out over commissary money sent by relatives. A former incarcerated person described to GPS a environment of gang bullying and control at the facility, with staff and administration said to ignore rule violations, alongside gang-based extortion and inedible food. GPS has received accounts of threats and hostility among incarcerated people at McEver, and of a person being encouraged by others to use drugs.

These are accounts, aggregated here rather than attributed individually, and GPS does not present them as established fact. What they describe — an informal economy policed by the people held, with commissary money as its currency — is consistent with the systemwide pattern DOJ and Guidehouse documented, in which gangs control access to phones, showers, food, and bed assignments.

Retaliation, Phones, and the Cost of Speaking Up

GPS has received accounts that a person at McEver faced phone-related repercussions after discussing his situation with family — a specific and recognizable form of retaliation, since phone access is one of the levers DOJ found gangs and staff alike control inside GDC facilities.

The broader retaliation pattern is documented elsewhere in GPS's Tell My Story archive. In "An Email Trail as the Day Is Long," a fiancée describes writing to the commissioner, the Ombudsman, the regional director, the DOJ Office of Civil Rights, a U.S. Senator, and the Southern Center for Human Rights on behalf of a man with stage IV cancer, and describes what followed: "Staff got upset, and they created false disciplinary reports on him." She describes a doctor threatening to take him off medication, then doing it, then seeking a signature on a document stating he was refusing it — "First the threat, then the punishment, then the paper that makes it look like his own choice." That account is not about McEver, and GPS does not suggest it is; it is cited here because it describes the mechanism — grievance, then retaliation, then paperwork — that the McEver phone reports echo.

Infrastructure and the "End of Life" System

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, which Guidehouse confirmed 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.

For McEver specifically, GPS's public record does not document a discrete infrastructure failure. The systemwide finding is offered here as context, not as a claim about this facility's physical plant.

What GPS Records Show

GPS's intelligence system records, over the past 12 months at McEver, three distinct source clusters each for alleged assault by another incarcerated person, family safety concerns, and unnamed staff misconduct — spanning April through August 2026 at high and moderate severity. These are aggregated counts, not individual incidents, and each represents at least three separate sources.

Taken together with the family reports on weight loss, commissary extortion, and phone retaliation, and with the two unresolved deaths in the registry, the picture is of a small facility whose internal conditions are known to GPS mainly through the people closest to them — the families on the outside keeping the record.

Sources

This analysis draws on GPS's mortality registry and facility personnel records; GPS's investigative findings on systemwide staffing collapse, food-service sanitation, and infrastructure failure; the October 2024 U.S. Department of Justice findings letter and the 2024 Guidehouse consultant assessment as described in GPS's reporting; The Marshall Project's May 16, 2026 investigation by Schwartzapfel, "Rats, Insects and Mold"; the GDC commissary master and GPS's commissary investigation; GDC Standard Operating Procedures on offender store accounts, faith- and character-based initiatives, religious accommodations, and career technical education; and firsthand accounts published in Georgia Prisoners' Speak — Tell My Story, including "An Email Trail as the Day Is Long." Family and witness accounts collected by GPS inform the aggregate observations and are presented as accounts, not verified findings.