Last updated October 25, 2026.(DS)

Richmond County Prison: A 1962 County Institution Inside a Statewide Crisis

Richmond County Prison is a county correctional institution in Augusta, opened in 1962 and rated for 220 people. GPS's facility records show 190 men held there as of the current snapshot — about 86.4 percent of rated capacity — under Warden Evan Joseph, who has held the post since January 1, 2024. The physical plant is eight general dormitories and two six-bed administrative segregation dormitories. The facility houses both state and county offenders and supplies a general labor force to Augusta/Richmond County government, with maintenance details assigned to Roads and Bridges, the Department of Transportation, Parks and Recreation, Animal Control, the Landfill, and Trees & Landscaping, as well as the Board of Education, the Fire Department, and the Department of Motor Vehicles (State Patrol). GDC lists its programs as academic (General Education Diploma, Basic Computer Skills), counseling (Re-Entry, Motivation For Change), vocational and on-the-job training (Food Services, Laundry, Barbering, Construction, Grounds-keeping and Horticulture), and religious services (Various Worship Services, Bible Study, and Gospel Groups).

What follows examines the facility against the systemic record GPS has built across the Georgia Department of Corrections — staffing collapse, food-service sanitation, sexual violence, and infrastructure decay — and against the one death GPS's registry records here since 2020.

One Death in the Registry: Stuart Ransom Martin

GPS's mortality registry records a single death at Richmond County Prison since January 1, 2020. Stuart Ransom Martin died August 9, 2022, at Richmond County Prison; the registry lists his cause as Natural/Medical and his age at death as 49. That is the whole of the public record GPS holds on the death — no circumstance, no underlying condition, no institutional finding. GPS's registry is a floor, not a ceiling: GDC reports deaths roughly two months late, so the count reflects what has been documented, not necessarily everything that has occurred.

The registry figure should be read in that light. A single recorded death at a 220-bed county institution is not, by itself, a finding about conditions there. It is a data point that sits inside a much larger pattern — GPS has independently tracked 1,927 deaths in GDC custody system-wide since 2020 — and the analytical question for a facility like this one is not whether its own count is high or low, but what systemwide failures it is exposed to as a medium-security county institution holding state and county offenders.

Staffing Collapse and the Loss of Facility Control

The most consequential systemwide finding GPS has documented is the collapse of GDC staffing and the vacuum it created. 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; at Valdosta State Prison the rate reached 80 percent by April 2024. 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 — and Georgia ranks last of 50 states for correctional-officer pay.

The October 2024 DOJ findings letter concluded explicitly 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." Roughly 31 percent of the system's approximately 49,000 incarcerated population are validated members of 315 different security threat groups — more than double the national average. DOJ and the Guidehouse 2024 consultant assessment independently concluded that gangs effectively run multiple facilities, controlling access to phones, showers, food, and bed assignments. 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 an integrated structural finding, not two separate problems. For a county institution with eight open dormitories and two six-bed segregation dorms, the relevant exposure is structural: dormitory housing depends on officer presence in a way that celled housing does not, and a system that cannot staff its prisons cannot guarantee it at any single one.

Food, Sanitation, and the Gap Between Inspection Scores and What Gets Served

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 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, with inmate-maintenance worker accounts collected at Dooly State Prison describing thousands of roaches inside kitchen equipment; sustained roach and rodent infestation in kitchen and serving areas; and meals served on visibly contaminated trays, corroborated by a Coastal State Prison resident's account and by The Marshall Project's investigation. The pattern is hidden from DPH scores because 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 — the contradiction at the center of GPS's investigation "Dunked, Stacked, and Served."

Richmond County Prison runs a Food Services vocational program, meaning incarcerated people there are trained in the same kitchens the system funds at under 60 cents a meal. That is not a claim about this facility's kitchen; it is the structural context in which any GDC food-service operation now sits.

Sexual Violence as a Systemic Condition

The October 2024 DOJ findings letter concluded that sexual assault in GDC facilities is "rampant" and that GDC 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. 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 to the U.S. Department of Justice in the law's two-decade history.

The documented clusters are specific: the DOJ-documented at-knifepoint sexual assaults at Pulaski State Prison; the 2020 Smith State Prison case in which an incarcerated person was waterboarded and sexually assaulted by his cellmate; and at least four staff arrests for sexual assault since 2020 at Lee Arrendale State Prison, Georgia's largest women's facility, including the November 2024 Cameron Cheeks plea — a hire-fire-rehire case GPS treats as an artifact of the staffing and hiring-standards collapse. GPS has also documented three women strangled in Lee Arrendale's A Unit between 2022 and 2024 — Sherry Joyce, Hallie Reed, and Angela Anderson — a figure exceeding the entire BJS-recorded national women-in-state-prison homicide total across 2001–2019. The Ashley Diamond litigation established the constitutional baseline and launched the DOJ investigation.

GPS treats this pattern as the analytical center of any GDC violence or staff-misconduct narrative, not as facility-isolated incidents. Richmond County Prison is a male medium-security institution; the Lee Arrendale and Pulaski findings are not its findings. But the PREA substantiation rate and the auditors' conclusion describe a systemwide investigative apparatus, and no facility's compliance record can be read in isolation from it.

Infrastructure Decay as a Force Multiplier

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 percent 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 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.

Richmond County Prison opened in 1962 — older than most of the stock the systemic finding describes. GPS holds no facility-specific inspection or maintenance record for it in this evidence base, and this page does not assert one. The point is structural: a 1962 plant with two segregation dorms and eight open dormitories is exactly the kind of physical asset the systemwide finding describes, and the burden of proof runs the other way — the absence of a documented failure here is not evidence of adequate maintenance.

What the Record Does and Does Not Show

The honest summary of Richmond County Prison is that GPS's public record on it is thin: a static profile, a warden appointed in 2024, a population snapshot at 86.4 percent of capacity, and one death — Stuart Ransom Martin, 49, August 9, 2022, listed as Natural/Medical. Everything else on this page is the systemwide context in which that thin record sits, and the reader should hold the distinction firmly. GPS has not documented a violence cluster, a sanitation failure, or a staffing collapse at this specific facility. It has documented all three across the system, and it has documented that the system's own oversight mechanisms — DPH inspections, PREA investigations, the hiring pipeline — fail in ways that make facility-level absence of evidence a weak signal.

Accounts collected by GPS from incarcerated people and their families across Georgia describe recurring themes of extortion, retaliation, and medical neglect, and GPS has received such accounts in connection with facilities throughout the state. Those accounts are aggregated here as background; none is attributed to Richmond County Prison in this record, and none should be read as a finding about it.

Sources

This analysis draws on GPS's facility records and mortality registry; the Georgia Department of Corrections facility profile and programs listing for Richmond County Prison; the October 2024 U.S. Department of Justice findings letter on Georgia prisons; the 2024 Guidehouse consultant assessment; PREA Auditors of America's May 2022 review of GDC investigation files; the FDA Thrifty Food Plan; and reporting by The Marshall Project ("Rats, Insects and Mold," Schwartzapfel, May 16, 2026). It also draws on GPS's own investigative work, including the investigation "Dunked, Stacked, and Served," and on firsthand narratives published in Georgia Prisoners' Speak — Tell My Story.