McEVER PROBATION DETENTION CENTER

Analysis written on May 31, 2026.

McEver Probation Detention Center sits in Perry, Georgia, in Houston County, designated administratively as the Dooly State Prison host facility. GDC records identify Superintendent Sherryl Blair as the facility's lead administrator, with Assistant Superintendent Shawn Hilton, Chief of Security Eric Walling, and Business Office manager Cassandra Askew comprising the on-site leadership. The facility houses individuals in a probation-detention status, a population whose shorter stays and transitional legal posture often place them outside the scrutiny that long-term prison facilities attract.

GPS has received accounts from a former incarcerated person describing gang control, gang-based extortion, and inadequate food at McEver. The account, which also describes staff and administration ignoring rule violations and inhumane conditions more broadly, is consistent with systemic failures GPS has documented across the Georgia Department of Corrections. GDC spends approximately $1.69 per person per day on food — under sixty cents per meal — a figure the state has proposed reducing to $1.60 in the upcoming fiscal year. 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. GPS's own investigation of food-service sanitation, "Dunked, Stacked, and Served," has documented a systemic pattern in which tray-sanitizing dishwashers remain broken for sustained periods, roach and rodent infestation persists in kitchen and serving areas, and meals are served on visibly contaminated trays — failures that Department of Public Health inspection scores systematically fail to capture because inspections are scheduled walkthroughs that do not assess equipment under operational load. McEver's administrative link to Dooly State Prison — where GPS has collected inmate-maintenance worker accounts describing thousands of roaches inside kitchen equipment — places the facility in proximity to one of the system's documented sanitation failure points.

The staffing crisis that defines Georgia corrections shapes the environment at every GDC facility, including detention centers. Statewide correctional officer vacancies have run between 49.3% and 60% for multiple years, against a national standard of no more than 10%. The October 2024 Department of Justice findings letter explicitly concluded that GDC leadership "has lost control of its facilities" and faulted the department 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. 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. At a probation detention center, where the population cycles through rapidly and classification resources are thinner than at permanent prisons, the vacuum created by understaffing leaves residents particularly exposed to the gang-control dynamics that the DOJ has identified as a systemwide structural failure.

Georgia Prisoners' Speak has independently tracked one death in custody at McEver. The circumstances, date, and cause of that death are not reflected in publicly available records beyond GPS's own tracking database. GDC policy requires that all deaths, along with use-of-force incidents, sexual assault allegations, disturbances, and serious injuries, be reported immediately to the Facilities Division as Major Incidents under Standard Operating Procedure 203.03. Whether that reporting occurred in this case, and what investigative follow-up it generated, is not publicly known.

GPS's documentation of systemic violence across GDC facilities — including the DOJ's October 2024 finding that sexual assault is "rampant" and that GDC does not reasonably protect incarcerated people from sexual harm — establishes the correctional environment in which McEver operates. Of 456 sexual-abuse allegations recorded systemwide in 2022, only 35 were substantiated. GDC's own consultants reviewed 388 PREA investigation files 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. These failures are not isolated to maximum-security prisons; they are artifacts of a system that, as GPS has documented, combines collapsed staffing, deferred infrastructure maintenance across facilities now 30 to 40-plus years old, and a hiring pipeline that loses 82.7% of new officers within their first year.

Sources: This analysis draws on GPS's systemic findings across the Georgia Department of Corrections, including the October 2024 DOJ investigation, the Guidehouse 2024 consultant assessment, The Marshall Project's May 2026 investigation of prison food, and GPS's own investigative reporting on food-service sanitation, staffing collapse, and sexual violence. Facility-specific information comes from GDC personnel records, GPS's mortality tracking database, and accounts received from a former incarcerated person at McEver.