Last updated November 8, 2026.(DS)

Montgomery State Prison: A Half-Empty Prison With a Fractional Doctor

Montgomery State Prison sits in Mount Vernon, in Montgomery County, a medium-security facility for adult male felons that opened in 1972 and was renovated in the mid-1990s. Its design capacity is about 900 beds; it houses general-population prisoners who also staff Correctional Industries shops and outside work details, and its stated mission emphasizes structured programs and reentry preparation. GPS's facility record puts the current population at 386 — roughly 42.9 percent of capacity — a figure that makes what follows harder rather than easier to explain. A prison holding fewer than half the people it was built for, with a documented half-million-dollar liability payout and a contracted medical staffing plan that assigns it a fraction of a physician, is the subject of this page.

A Population Well Under Capacity, and a Capacity Dispute in the Record

The population figure is the cleanest fact in the file: 386 people against 900 design beds. But the documentary record on Montgomery's capacity is not internally consistent, and the inconsistency is itself worth flagging. GDC material cited in the record lists the institution capacity at 418, and a separate exhibit lists a physical capacity of 321 offenders with on-site X-ray marked "Yes." Those figures cannot all describe the same thing at the same time, and GPS does not have the underlying documents to reconcile them. What can be said is that Montgomery is not an overcrowding story in the way Georgia's close-security facilities are. Whatever is driving outcomes here, raw population pressure against the rated bed count is not the obvious candidate — which shifts attention to staffing, medical capacity, and the classification of who is actually housed inside.

Centurion's Staffing Matrix: A Fractional Physician and a Part-Time Psychiatrist

The most concrete window into health care at Montgomery comes from the contracted provider's own proposed staffing matrices. Centurion's matrix assigns the prison a total of 4.40 FTE and 176 weekly hours — a figure that includes 1.00 FTE for an LPN, 1.00 FTE for an RN Administrator, 0.40 FTE for an RN, and 1.00 FTE for an office associate. A separate Centurion amendment lists 12 estimated weekly primary care physician hours at a weekly rate of $144 per hour.

The mental-health matrix is thinner still. MHM Amendment 13 lists 0.15 FTE for a psychologist at 6.00 hours per week, 0.15 FTE for a psychiatrist at 6.00 hours per week, 1.00 FTE for a mental health counselor, and 0.50 FTE for a clerk — a total mental-health allocation of 1.80 FTE and 72.00 hours per week at an annual cost of $170,987. Dental staffing in the same amendment totals 1.25 FTE and 50 hours per week: a 0.50 FTE dentist at 20 hours, a 0.25 FTE hygienist at 10 hours, and a 0.50 FTE dental assistant at 20 hours, at a combined FY23 annual cost of $151,888.92. Six hours a week of psychiatric time is the entire specialty allocation for a prison of several hundred men. GPS does not have outcome data tying those hours to specific cases, but the arithmetic is the arithmetic.

Hepatitis C, Antiviral Rationing, and a Family's Account

GPS has received recurring accounts from families at Montgomery describing an incarcerated person diagnosed with advanced liver disease and Hepatitis C whose family says a curative antiviral protocol has not been provided. Family members describe repeated attempts to reach facility leadership — the warden, a deputy warden, the assistant warden, the medical department — by phone, email, and letter, and describe promises to look into the matter that were not followed up. One family member has characterized the withholding of direct-acting antiviral treatment as deliberate indifference to a serious medical need; that is the family's legal characterization, not a finding by GPS or any court. GPS has also received accounts of a Deputy Warden for Care and Treatment being named as a recipient of such a complaint.

These are family attestations. GPS's reporting describes accounts that have not been independently confirmed against medical records, and they are presented here as accounts. What gives them weight is not any single claim but their convergence with the staffing matrix above: a prison whose contracted psychiatric allocation is six hours a week and whose primary care physician hours are estimated at twelve is a prison where rationing of expensive specialty treatment is structurally plausible. GPS has received additional reports of medical-care denial at this facility that it treats as consistent with that pattern.

Two Deaths in the Registry, and What GDC's Own Coding Says

GPS's mortality registry records two deaths at Montgomery State Prison since January 1, 2020. Dante Todd died July 12, 2026, at Montgomery State Prison at age 50; GPS's registry lists the cause as Unknown/Pending, meaning GPS does not yet know why he died and will not guess. Jimmy M Smith died July 31, 2020, at Montgomery State Prison at age 61; the registry lists the cause as Natural/Medical.

On Smith, the underlying record deserves care. GDC's own coding classified the death as "Natural" — but that classification is GDC's administrative coding, obtained by the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project through an open records request covering 2015–2021, not an autopsy finding. GPS treats an independent medical examiner, coroner, or autopsy determination as superseding GDC's coding whenever one is obtained. Across 200 records where GPS already held a cause of death, GPS and the UCLA dataset agreed 84.5 percent of the time; where they disagreed at Montgomery, the disagreements mostly involved GPS being more specific than GDC's "Undetermined" classification. System-wide, GPS has independently tracked 1,928 deaths in GDC custody since 2020 — a floor, since GDC reports deaths roughly two months late.

A $500,000 Payout and the Contraband Record

The Georgia Department of AS Risk Management settlement ledger, obtained through open records, records a $500,000 state liability payout tied to Montgomery State Prison in connection with Richard Alan Lankford, incident dated February 17, 2020. The ledger establishes the payment and its facility; it does not, on its own, establish the conduct behind it, and GPS does not have the underlying claim file.

GDC's own published contraband reports sketch a different kind of pressure. The reports record 23 incidents at Montgomery, including a November 2021 case in which Sergeant Kimberly Laframboise-Whalen was arrested after loose and smokeless tobacco was found in her vehicle, and a February 2020 case in which Warden Brown learned of a planned drop at the Parton Park detail site in Lyons by listening to a phone call, leading to the arrests of Debra and Kailee Peacock with 2 grams of methamphetamine, six packs of tobacco, ten cans of dip, and packaging materials. In May 2026, GDC reported that a visitor, Hope Crews, was arrested after a bundle fell from her waistline during visitation processing, and that a civilian, Xavier Herring, was arrested near the facility with a package containing meth, MDMA, marijuana, and strips with an unknown substance. These are arrests as GDC reported them; GDC publishes no dispositions, and an arrest is not a conviction.

Staffing Collapse as the Systemwide Frame

Montgomery's own numbers land inside a pattern GPS has documented across the system. Officer vacancies in Georgia's prisons have run between 49.3 and 60 percent systemwide for multiple years against a national standard of no more than 10 percent; the hiring pipeline cannot close the gap, with an acceptance rate under 15 percent and 82.7 percent of new hires leaving in their first year, and Georgia ranks last of 50 states for correctional-officer pay. The October 2024 DOJ findings letter concluded that GDC leadership had "lost control of its facilities" and faulted the Department for placing "too much blame on gangs and insufficient emphasis on understaffing." GPS treats that staffing collapse, combined with gang assumption of facility control, as the integrated structural finding behind the per-facility violence, classification, and mortality narratives — and it is the frame in which Montgomery's fractional medical staffing should be read.

GPS records show four separate staff-misconduct signals at this facility over the past twelve months, concentrated in October and November 2026, at high and moderate severity. GPS has additionally received accounts describing contraband movement and staff conduct at Montgomery that it treats as consistent with the broader pattern.

Audits, Accreditation, and the Paper Trail

GDC's own schedules place Montgomery on a recurring audit cycle: an internal audit in March 2022, three consecutive days of internal audits on January 29, 30, and 31, 2024, and three more scheduled for May 4, 5, and 6, 2026. The Department's FY2022 ACA accreditation schedule lists Montgomery as a ReAccreditation facility marked with a double asterisk, and its FY2022 PREA audit schedule set a PREA audit for October 24–26, 2022. That Montgomery appears repeatedly on audit calendars is a fact about scheduling, not about findings; GPS does not have the audit results themselves, and the presence of an audit on a calendar says nothing about what it concluded.

The food-safety record, by contrast, is fully public. The Georgia Department of Public Health inspected Montgomery's kitchen six times between June 2023 and October 2026, all routine inspections by inspector Dale Krosting, with scores of 100 (June 2023), 98 (December 2023, three violations including in-use utensil storage and ventilation and lighting), 98 (June 2024, one violation for physical facilities), 100 (February 2025), 100 (March 2026), and 96 (October 2026, one violation for food-contact surfaces cleaned and sanitized). GPS has documented a systemic pattern in which DPH scores fail to capture kitchen conditions — broken tray-sanitizing dishwashers, sustained infestation, contaminated trays — because inspections are scheduled walkthroughs that do not assess equipment under load. High scores at Montgomery should be read with that limitation in mind, not as a clean bill.

Leadership

Tracy Glynn Page is warden of Montgomery State Prison, in post since June 16, 2024. Tony D. Crapps is Deputy Warden of Care and Treatment, and Stefanie Cooper Calhoun is Deputy Warden of Administration. The Care and Treatment post is the one families describe writing to about medical complaints; GPS presents that as what families report, not as a finding about any individual.

Sources

This analysis draws on Georgia Department of Corrections records — contraband arrest reports, internal audit and accreditation schedules, PREA audit scheduling, and cause-of-death coding obtained by the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project through open records request — together with Georgia Department of Public Health food-safety inspection reports, the Georgia Department of Administrative Services Risk Management settlement ledger, Centurion and MHM staffing matrices filed in the state's correctional health care contracting record, GPS's own mortality registry and facility records, and family and witness accounts collected by GPS staff.