MONTGOMERY STATE PRISON

Last updated October 4, 2026.(DS)

A Medium-Security Prison Operating Below Its Rated Capacity

Montgomery State Prison sits in Mount Vernon, in Montgomery County, and opened in 1972 as a medium-security institution for adult male felons. It was renovated in the mid-1990s. Its original design capacity was 206; its current rated capacity is 900. As of GPS's most recent facility record, the prison holds 396 people — roughly 44 percent of its rated capacity, an unusual figure in a system where crowding is the norm. The population is general-population, and incarcerated men at the facility also staff Correctional Industries operations and outside work details. The facility's stated mission emphasizes structured programs and reentry preparation, though GPS's standing profile notes it faces the same chronic resource and staffing problems present throughout the Georgia Department of Corrections.

Tracy Glynn Page has served as warden since June 2024. Tony D. Crapps is Deputy Warden of Care and Treatment, a post he has held since June 2026, and Stefanie Cooper Calhoun has been a deputy warden since November 2023.

Food-Safety Scores and the Gap Between Inspection and Kitchen Reality

The Georgia Department of Public Health has inspected Montgomery's food service five times since mid-2023, and the scores are uniformly high: 100 (Grade A) on June 9, 2023; 98 on December 28, 2023, with three violations cited, including in-use utensil storage, physical facilities maintenance and cleanliness, and ventilation and lighting; 98 on June 20, 2024, with one violation for physical facilities maintenance and cleanliness; 100 on February 18, 2025; and 100 on March 10, 2026. Every one of those was a routine inspection.

Those scores deserve to be read against what GPS has documented systemwide about the limits of DPH scoring as a measure of kitchen conditions. GPS's investigative work has found a pattern of food-service sanitation failure across GDC kitchens that 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. The pattern is obscured, in GPS's analysis, because DPH inspections are scheduled walkthroughs that do not assess equipment under load, and because GPS has documented professional overlap between inspectors and facility staff in small-county settings. High DPH scores at GDC facilities coexist with sustained witness reports of equipment failure and food contamination; that contradiction is the analytical center of GPS's investigation "Dunked, Stacked, and Served." Montgomery's five Grade A scores are a record of scheduled inspections passed, not a refutation of the systemic finding.

The broader food context is a system spending roughly $1.69 per person per day on food in 2024 and proposing $1.60 per day in FY27 — under 60 cents per meal — against an FDA Thrifty Food Plan estimate of about $10 per day for an adult man's nutritionally adequate diet. The Marshall Project independently corroborated that pattern on May 16, 2026, 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 the DOJ documented in October 2024.

A Half-Million-Dollar Settlement and the Deaths GPS Has Recorded

Court and state records tie one significant liability payout to this facility. A GDC settlement in the case of Richard Alan Lankford, arising from a 2020 incident at Montgomery State Prison, produced a state liability payout of $500,000, according to the Georgia Department of Administrative Services Risk Management settlement ledger obtained through open records. The incident date recorded is February 17, 2020.

GPS's mortality registry records two deaths at Montgomery State Prison since January 1, 2020. Jimmy M. Smith died July 31, 2020, at Montgomery State Prison; GPS's registry lists the cause as Natural/Medical. He was 61. Dante Todd died July 12, 2026, at Montgomery State Prison at age 50; GPS's registry lists the cause as Unknown/Pending, meaning the cause has not yet been determined in GPS's records. That count is a floor, not a ceiling — GDC reports deaths roughly two months late, and GPS separately holds 791 deaths from 2015 to 2019 drawn from the Department's own cause coding obtained by open records request, a series not included in the since-2020 figure. Across the system, GPS has independently tracked 1,896 deaths in GDC custody since 2020.

Hepatitis C Treatment, Family Complaints, and an Unanswered Chain of Command

GPS has received a sustained set of accounts from family members of an incarcerated person at Montgomery State Prison concerning Hepatitis C treatment. The recurring theme across those accounts is a diagnosis confirmed at the facility in 2026, symptoms described as severe fatigue, bodily pain, and cognitive difficulty, and a family allegation that facility medical staff are aware of the condition but are withholding a curative treatment protocol. The family's position, as conveyed to GPS, is that direct-acting antiviral medication can cure the infection only before Stage 3 fibrosis progresses to cirrhosis or liver cancer — a characterization of the clinical window that is the family's, not a verified medical finding. The family has alleged that withholding DAA treatment amounts to deliberate indifference to a serious medical need in violation of the Eighth Amendment, and has sought review by the GDC Ombudsman and Central Health, a legislative inquiry, a safety welfare check, and legal advocacy from an outside organization monitoring systemic medical neglect involving GDC and its healthcare contractor, which the family identifies as Centurion.

Running alongside the treatment allegation is a documented pattern of failed contact. Family members report reaching the warden, a deputy warden, and the assistant warden directly, and receiving a promise to look into the matter that was never followed up. Calls to the warden's office, a deputy warden, and the medical department are described as unreturned, and communications beyond initial contacts as unanswered. A complaint was directed to the warden and copied to a Deputy Warden for Care and Treatment. GPS registers these as family accounts; they have not been independently corroborated against facility medical records.

The Structural Context: Staffing, Classification, and Infrastructure

Nothing about Montgomery's situation is facility-isolated. Officer vacancies in Georgia's prisons have run between 49.3 percent and 60 percent systemwide for multiple years against a national standard of no more than 10 percent, and the hiring pipeline cannot close the gap — an acceptance rate under 15 percent, with 82.7 percent of new hires leaving in their first year, in a state that ranks last of 50 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." Former GDC assistant warden Russell Zirkle, in an on-record timestamped interview with GPS, described Telfair and Smith State Prisons as running 70 to 80 percent officer vacancy rates — testimony that corroborates the documented staffing collapse rather than the Department's public accounting of it. Former GDC sergeant Tyler Ryals, 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 has documented classification drift as a parallel structural failure: medium-security facilities housing close-security inmates without the staffing and infrastructure that designation implies, operating effectively as higher-security prisons. GPS published a report titled "The Classification Crisis: How Four Medium Security Prisons Are Killing People" documenting classification drift; the report's title identifies four facilities, and GPS's evidence base does not establish which four. Separately, GPS has documented that most GDC facilities are 30 to 40-plus years old with patterns of deferred maintenance producing systemwide infrastructure failures — broken cell-door locks, inoperative surveillance and fire-alarm systems, mold and water failures, broken kitchen sanitization equipment, and pest infestations — a pattern corroborated by the DOJ's October 2024 findings, the Guidehouse 2024 assessment, and Commissioner Oliver's public "end of life" statements. GPS treats infrastructure collapse as a force multiplier for the violence, classification, gang-control, and mortality crises documented at the facility level.

Sexual violence is part of that same systemic picture. The DOJ's October 2024 findings letter concluded that sexual assault in GDC facilities is "rampant" and that the Department 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 percent — and 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 in the law's two-decade history.

Sources

This analysis draws on Georgia Department of Public Health food-safety inspection records for Montgomery State Prison; the Georgia Department of Administrative Services Risk Management settlement ledger obtained through open records; GPS's mortality registry and facility records; GPS's own investigative reporting and systemic findings on staffing collapse, classification drift, infrastructure failure, food-service sanitation, and sexual violence in GDC custody; an on-record timestamped interview with former GDC assistant warden Russell Zirkle; accounts from former GDC sergeant Tyler Ryals; and family accounts collected by GPS staff concerning medical treatment at Montgomery State Prison.