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SMITH STATE PRISON

State Prison Close Security GDC (Georgia Dept. of Corrections) Male
45 Source Articles 3 Events

Facility Information

Original Design Capacity
750 (at 148% capacity)
Bed Capacity
1,526 beds
Current Population
1,112
Active Lifers
286 (25.7% of population) · Jun 2026 GDC report
Life Without Parole
195 (17.5%)
Why design capacity matters: Adding beds to a prison does not increase medical facilities, educational programs, kitchen capacity, counseling services, or recreation areas. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Plata that severe overcrowding beyond design capacity violates the 8th Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.
Read: Brown v. Plata - A Legal Roadmap for Georgia's Prison Crisis →
Address
9676 Hwy 301 North, Glennville, GA 30427
Phone
(912) 654-5000
Fax
(912) 654-5305
Mailing Address
P.O. Box 726, Glennville, GA 30427
County
Tattnall County
Opened
1993
Operator
GDC (Georgia Dept. of Corrections)

Leadership & Accountability (as of 2025 records)

Officials currently holding positional authority at this facility, with deaths attributed to GPS-tracked records during their leadership tenure. Inclusion reflects role-based accountability, not legal findings of personal culpability. Death counts shown as facility / career.

RoleNameSinceDeaths
this facility / career
Warden (facility lead) Mims, Charles Michael2025-01-013 / 35
DEPUTY WARDEN (facility deputy) Warren, Willesha2022-01-0125 / 25
DEPUTY WARDEN (facility deputy) Carver, Keenan2024-01-019 / 9
DEPUTY WARDEN (facility deputy) Kennedy, Ashley L2024-01-019 / 9
DEPUTY WARDEN (facility deputy) Foulks, Rodney2024-01-017 / 7

About

Smith State Prison in Glennville, a close-security men's prison, has become the epicenter of Georgia's corrections crisis — a warden indicted for running a criminal enterprise, dozens of in-custody killings including a murder by smuggled firearm, two-thirds of correctional officer posts left empty, and a food safety sc

Mortality Statistics

39 deaths documented at this facility from 2020 to present.

Deaths by Year

  • 2026: 4
  • 2025: 1
  • 2024: 6
  • 2023: 11
  • 2022: 5
  • 2021: 7
  • 2020: 5

View all deaths at this facility →

County Public Health Department

Food service and sanitation at SMITH STATE PRISON fall under the jurisdiction of the Tattnall County Environmental Health Department. Incarcerated people cannot choose where they eat — public health inspectors carry an elevated responsibility to hold this kitchen to the same standards applied to any restaurant.

Contact

Title
EH Specialist
Name
Lance Dasher
Address
P.O. Box 353
Glennville, GA 30427
Phone
(855) 473-4374
Email
Lance.Dasher@dph.ga.gov
Website
Visit department website →

Why this matters

GPS has documented black mold on chow-hall ceilings, cold and contaminated trays, spoiled milk, and pest contamination at Georgia prisons. The Department of Justice's 2024 report confirmed deaths from dehydration and untreated diabetes tied to food and water deprivation. Advance-notice inspections let facilities stage temporary fixes that disappear once inspectors leave.

Unannounced inspections by the county health department are one of the few outside checks on kitchen conditions behind the fence.

How you can help

Write to the county inspector and request an unannounced inspection of the kitchen and food service operation at this facility. A short, respectful letter citing Georgia food-safety regulations is more powerful than you think — inspectors respond to public concern.

Email the Inspector

Food Safety Inspections

Georgia Department of Public Health

Latest score: 72 (Feb 16, 2026)
View DPH report ↗

What the score doesn't measure. DPH grades kitchen compliance on inspection day — food storage, temperatures, pest control. It does not grade whether today's trays are clean. GPS reporting has found broken dishwashers at most Georgia state prisons we've documented; trays go out wet, stacked, and visibly moldy — including at facilities with recent scores near 100.

Who inspects. Most Georgia state prisons sit in rural counties — often with fewer than 20,000 people, several with fewer than 10,000. The environmental health inspector lives in that community and often knows the kitchen staff personally. Rural inspection regimes don't have the structural independence you'd expect in a city-sized health department. Read the scores accordingly.

Read the investigation: “Dunked, Stacked and Served: Why Georgia Prison Trays Are Making People Sick”

Recent inspections

DateScorePurpose
Feb 16, 202672Routine
Jun 27, 202585Routine
Jan 19, 202482Routine
Jun 29, 202384Routine

Source: Georgia Department of Public Health — data last refreshed April 24, 2026. Search all Georgia inspections ↗

Analysis written on June 4, 2026.

Smith State Prison, a close-security men’s compound in Glennville that opened in 1993 with a design capacity of 750 but held roughly 1,100 people in recent years, has become the most concentrated expression of the crises tearing through the Georgia Department of Corrections. Over the past three years, its former warden was indicted for racketeering, an inmate killed a food-service worker with a firearm smuggled inside the walls, and a cascade of homicides — many preceded by warnings that went unheeded — produced a body count mirrored only by the facility’s staffing voids. GPS has independently tracked 1,818 deaths in GDC custody since 2020; Smith State Prison alone accounts for 37 of those deaths as of May 2026.

The Warden’s Enterprise and the Hit Outside the Walls

The corruption at Smith State Prison reached its institutional peak with former Warden Brian Adams, whom a Tattnall County grand jury indicted in May 2026 on six felony counts — violation of the Georgia RICO Act, making false statements, tampering with evidence, and two counts of violating his oath as a public officer. The indictment, returned after 39 months of investigation, caps a case in which Adams is alleged to have taken part in a sprawling contraband scheme known as the Saint Laurent Squad, run by inmate Nathan Weekes from inside the prison.

According to reporting by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The Georgia Virtue, Weekes and his associates allegedly orchestrated the 2021 murder of 88-year-old Bobby Kicklighter, who was shot to death in his bed in Glennville in a case of mistaken identity. Investigators determined that Weekes had ordered a hit on a correctional officer who lived next door, but the killers went to the wrong house. Prosecutors have tied Weekes to two other murders outside the prison, all arranged via contraband cellphones. The AJC reported that Adams remained warden for nearly eighteen months after GDC learned of at least two murders tied to the prison’s contraband pipelines, before his eventual termination and arrest in February 2023. He later bonded out of the Tattnall County jail.

A civil lawsuit filed in May 2026 also names Adams and former correctional officer Ireon Moore, alleging they allowed cellphones, narcotics, weapons, designer clothing, and tobacco to flow into the prison and facilitated a criminal conspiracy to kill a non-complicit correctional officer. The suit contends Moore was paid to participate, with financial arrangements carried out via text message.

The indictment and lawsuit mark the most senior-level GDC prosecution in the state’s recent history, and they fit a pattern the AJC documented in a series showing that more than 425 GDC employees have been arrested since 2018 for on-the-job crimes — the majority for contraband smuggling. Georgia does not research the credit or financial histories of its applicants, a practice the AJC noted differs from the federal prison system and leaves financially vulnerable staff susceptible to corruption.

A Gun in the Kitchen and a Warning System That Failed

On June 16, 2024, at 4:30 a.m., inmate Jaydrekus Hart shot and killed 24-year-old Aramark food-service worker Aureon Shavea Grace in the Smith State Prison kitchen, then turned the weapon on himself. The GDC initially described the killing as an isolated incident arising from a personal relationship, but subsequent reporting by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Georgia Public Broadcasting, and the lawsuit later filed by Grace’s mother Deshonda Hagins painted a far more damning picture of systemic negligence.

Investigators believe the firearm was smuggled in by drone. Multiple outlets reported that prison staff were repeatedly warned by incarcerated people that a gun was on the premises, yet no lockdown, extensive search, or protective measures were put in place. The AJC noted that there were no guards in the area when Grace was shot. Hagins’s lawsuit, filed in Fulton County State Court, alleges that GDC was repeatedly warned of the weapon and failed to act. After Grace’s death, the department accused her of helping Hart smuggle the gun — an assertion her mother denied, telling reporters the gun was there before Grace started the job.

Hart, according to the AJC, was allowed to work in the kitchen without authorization but was allegedly favored by staff and permitted to violate rules with impunity. The shooting triggered a statewide lockdown of all Georgia prisons and prompted Governor Brian Kemp to announce a system-wide assessment by the consulting firm Guidehouse Inc. — an acknowledgment, as the AJC framed it, of the magnitude of the problems.

Two-Thirds of Posts Empty and a Compound Run on Exhaustion

The contraband pipelines and the Grace killing occurred inside a facility that multiple news investigations have described as one of the most understaffed in the state. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported in early 2024 that only 53 correctional officers remained at a prison designed for 160 — roughly two-thirds of posts unfilled. That statistic sits inside a systemwide crisis GPS has documented in which officer vacancies have run between 49.3% and 60% for multiple years, against a national standard of no more than 10%.

The human texture of those numbers emerged vividly in a Marshall Project investigation that profiled former officer Andrew Phillips, who was once the sole officer assigned to an area housing 600 men. Phillips worked 11 consecutive days, faced a mass mattress fire with empty fire extinguishers, and was called to escort a stabbing victim to the hospital after days without a break. He described the environment as “too brutal, too disgusting” and said he and his colleagues had no energy to care for the people they were supposed to supervise. Phillips permanently left the GDC in February 2023.

The consequences of that staffing collapse were lethal. The Marshall Project recorded that overstretched staff failed to notice a dead and decomposing body for five days — an incident the AJC corroborated in connection with the death of Anthony Joseph Zino III, 71, whose badly decomposed body was discovered in April 2023 after he had likely been dead for days. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that guards working alone have watched fatal attacks on prisoners without immediately trying to intervene, and that due to chronic understaffing, people can be dead in their cells for hours or days before anyone notices, “making a mockery of official processes for checking on high-risk inmates.”

A Cascade of Violence and a Waterboarding Inside the Walls

The AJC’s homicide tracker has chronicled a relentless series of killings inside Smith State Prison. Correctional Officer Robert Danford Clark, 42, died in October 2023 from multiple stab wounds after being assaulted by an incarcerated person with a homemade weapon. Among the prisoner deaths, the AJC recorded: Quenton G. Mayo, 30, stabbed to death in August 2023 in an incident involving four prisoners; Shaquan Jahrel Boykins, 31, killed by blunt impact trauma to the head in May 2023; Calvin Darrell Denson Jr., 31, stabbed in the chest in April 2023 during a fight involving seven inmates; James Adams Jr., 72, dead from blunt force trauma to the head and neck in November 2023; and Nathan Michael Mahan, 37, killed by stab wounds in October 2022. Earlier, in 2021, four men — Christopher Ray Reynolds, Derrick Dionte Deshun Harvey, Hiwatha Abdulcah Hakeem Jr., and Desmond Hill — died by sharp-force or strangulation injuries in a cluster of homicides between January and July. A lawsuit over Hakeem’s death alleges that his attackers had a known history of violence and that prison officials failed to provide timely medical care. Hill’s family told the AJC he had called his mother the day before his death to say his cellmate had threatened to kill him.

One case stands apart in its brutality. In 2020, an incarcerated man was tied up, beaten, waterboarded, and sexually assaulted by his cellmate. When hospitalized, bars of soap that had apparently been used in the assault fell out of his body; he also bore ligature marks on his neck and most of his upper teeth were broken. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution recounted those details in a report that anchors GPS’s systemic finding that sexual violence in Georgia prisons is rampant — a conclusion the U.S. Department of Justice reached in its October 2024 findings letter, which stated that sexual assault is “rampant” and that GDC does not reasonably protect incarcerated people, including LGBTI individuals, from sexual harm. GPS’s own investigation of Lee Arrendale State Prison has documented a pattern of staff sexual misconduct, including the 2024 Cameron Cheeks hire-fire-rehire case, and three women strangled in a single housing unit between 2022 and 2024 — a figure that exceeds the entire national BJS-recorded count of women murdered in state prisons across two decades.

Feeding the Crisis: A Grade C Kitchen and Systemic Malnutrition

Food safety inside Smith State Prison has deteriorated in parallel with its security. Georgia Department of Public Health inspections scored the kitchen an 82 (B) in January 2024, an 85 (B) in June 2025, and then a 72 (C) in February 2026 — a decline that GPS’s systemic research argues understates the true conditions. GPS has documented a systemic pattern of food-service sanitation failure across GDC kitchens that DPH scores systematically miss: tray-sanitizing dishwashers broken for sustained periods, thousands of roaches inside kitchen equipment, meals served on visibly contaminated trays. The Marshall Project’s May 2026 investigation of Georgia prison food independently corroborated reports of rats in kitchens, insects in food, moldy trays, and visible malnutrition.

The per-diem food budget the state allocates — approximately $1.69 per person per day in 2024, with the governor proposing $1.60 for FY27 — works out to under 60 cents per meal, against an FDA Thrifty Food Plan estimate of around $10 per day for a nutritionally adequate diet. GPS has found that Georgia spends roughly 14 times more on medical care for incarcerated people than on their food. The malnutrition and contamination, GPS contends, are a force multiplier for the violence and mortality patterns that the DOJ documented.

The Lockdown Spiral and a System Frozen Again

On April 1, 2026, a gang-related altercation at Smith State Prison sent two incarcerated people to local hospitals by airlift and triggered a system-wide lockdown of every GDC facility. The incident was contained to one dorm, but the GDC said the lockdown was imposed “out of an abundance of caution.” It echoed the lockdown that followed the June 2024 Grace shooting, and the cycle of reactive freezes — in facilities where entire dorms are presided over by a single officer — has become a sign of the department’s inability to sustain baseline security. GPS’s aggregate signal data records nine sources in the past 12 months alleging staff misconduct at the facility, with peaks in May 2026 coinciding with the Adams indictment and multiple high-severity misconduct signals. Three lawsuits were filed in that month alone, including the Adams/Moore civil suit and a separate case from Grace’s mother.

A History of Neglect: From the 2010 Strike to Today

The violence and neglect at Smith State Prison are not new. In December 2010, incarcerated people at Smith and at least five other Georgia prisons launched a six-day coordinated strike — one of the largest prison protests in U.S. history — refusing to leave their cells to report to work. Organizers alleged overcrowded, substandard conditions with little heat in winter and oppressive heat in summer, the widespread availability of contraband cellphones purchased from correctional officers, denial of medical care, and the capricious denial of parole. Prison staff locked down four facilities, attempted to transfer organizers, cut off hot water, and revoked phone privileges. A statement from a Smith participant, recorded in In These Times, said the protest was called off after six days to allow administrators time to address concerns and to pursue a prison conditions lawsuit.

More than fifteen years later, the grievances are all but unchanged. A Tell My Story account published by GPS in April 2026, “The Man Who Turned On the Heat,” describes a unit manager in a Georgia prison who turned on the heat during a July heatwave as punishment, then later became warden at Smith State Prison and later still the warden at Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison in Jackson — a trajectory the author calls emblematic of a system that punishes the vulnerable and promotes the architects of cruelty. Another GPS-published Tell My Story narrative, “Seventy Dollars,” recounts the author’s sexual exploitation at Smith State Prison in the 1990s, describing a facility that “was understaffed back in the early ’90s, so I can only guess how bad it is now.” The account, written by a man who served seven years at Smith, details the normalization of sexual predation and survival violence that GPS treats as a structural consequence of abandonment by the state.

Smith State Prison, by every measure the public record affords, illustrates in microcosm the collapse that the DOJ described when it wrote that “the leadership of the Georgia Department of Corrections has lost control of its facilities.” The indictments of a warden, the killing of a civilian employee by a smuggled firearm, the decomposition of bodies unnoticed for days, and a kitchen serving food from a failing kitchen with a C inspection score all point to a facility where nearly every system of oversight — security, custody, food, medical — has buckled under the weight of deliberate underinvestment and impunity.

Sources

This analysis draws on reporting from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Marshall Project, Georgia Public Broadcasting, The Georgia Virtue, and In These Times; federal and state court filings; Georgia Department of Public Health inspection records; GPS-authored systemic investigations and Tell My Story firsthand narratives; and aggregate signal data drawn from GPS’s case and intelligence systems.

Recent reports (60)

Source-attributed observations and allegations from news coverage and reports submitted to GPS. Each entry credits its source.

  • ALLEGATION According to WTOC Published: May 1, 2025
    A former employee sexually assaulted a corrections employee.
    "A former employee of Smith State Prison in Georgia has been charged with sexual assault involving a corrections employee."
    Read source →
  • ALLEGATION According to The Georgia Virtue Published: May 13, 2026
    Adams allegedly participated in a RICO organization (Yves Saint Laurent Squad) and accepted currency bribes through a pattern of racketeering associated with the enterprise run by inmate Nathan Weekes.
    "They also contended that Adams participated in a RICO organization, being Yves Saint Laurent Squad run by then-Smith State Prison inmate Nathan Weekes, and he committed the offenses of Bribery and False Statements and Writings in furtherance of the RICO organization. Adams, they said, was bribed when he accepted currency through a pattern of racketeering associated with the RICO enterprise."
    Read source →
  • ALLEGATION According to The Georgia Virtue Published: May 13, 2026
    Agents alleged that Adams provided false statements in an April 13, 2022 interview when he stated he had not been solicited or bribed by a GDC inmate in the past 10 years.
    "Agents alleged that Adams provided false statements in an April 13, 2022 interview when he stated he has not been solicited or bribed by a Georgia Department of Corrections inmate in the past 10 years."
    Read source →
  • ALLEGATION According to The Georgia Virtue Published: May 13, 2026
    The civil suit alleges Adams should have noticed contraband including cell phones, narcotics, weapons, designer brand clothing, jewelry, and tobacco at Smith State Prison.
    "Specifically, the lawsuit contends that the contraband items, including cell phones, narcotics, weapons, designer brand clothing, jewelry, and tobacco should have been noticed by Warden Brian Adams."
    Read source →
  • ALLEGATION According to The Georgia Virtue Published: May 13, 2026
    The civil suit alleges that Ireon Moore was paid to participate in the conspiracy, with financial arrangements carried out through text message.
    "It also alleges that Ireon Moore was paid to participate in the conspiracy and the financial arrangements were carried out through text message."
    Read source →

Timeline (127)

May 13, 2026
Tattnall County Grand Jury Indicts Former Smith State Prison Warden arrest
A Tattnall County grand jury indicted a former warden from Smith State Prison on Tuesday.
Source: The Georgia Virtue
May 13, 2026 (approx.)
Civil Lawsuit Filed Against Brian Adams and Ireon Moore in Tattnall County State Court lawsuit
A lawsuit filed in Tattnall County State Court seeks damages from former Warden Brian Adams and former Corrections Officer Ireon Moore, alleging they allowed contraband including cell phones, narcotics, and weapons, and facilitated a criminal conspiracy to kill a non-complicit…
Source: The Georgia Virtue
May 13, 2026
Adams allegedly participated in a RICO organization (Yves Saint Laurent Squad) and accepted currency bribes through a pattern of racketeering associated with the enterprise run by inmate Nathan Weekes. report
May 13, 2026
Agents alleged that Adams provided false statements in an April 13, 2022 interview when he stated he had not been solicited or bribed by a GDC inmate in the past 10 years. report
May 13, 2026
The civil suit alleges Adams should have noticed contraband including cell phones, narcotics, weapons, designer brand clothing, jewelry, and tobacco at Smith State Prison. report
May 13, 2026
The civil suit alleges that Ireon Moore was paid to participate in the conspiracy, with financial arrangements carried out through text message. report
May 13, 2026
Adams remained as warden even after GDC learned of at least two murders alleged to have been orchestrated from behind the walls of Smith State Prison, some eighteen months prior to his eventual termination. report
May 13, 2026
The civil suit alleges Adams and Moore facilitated a criminal conspiracy to kill a non-complicit correctional officer by allowing illegal use of mobile phones. report

Source Articles (36)

The Game They Learned: How GDC's Closed Promotion Pipeline Made Its Own Wardens — and Its Own Indictments
May 16, 2026
Dunked, Stacked, and Served: Why Georgia Prison Trays Are Making People Sick
Apr 10, 2026
The Man Who Turned On the Heat
Apr 6, 2026
GDC prisons locked down statewide after multiple inmates injured in 'gang-related' fights - WGXA
Google News - GDC · Apr 3, 2026
GDC prisons locked down statewide after multiple inmates injured in ...
Google API · Apr 3, 2026

Former leadership

Officials who previously held leadership roles at this facility.

RoleNameTenureDeaths
this facility / career
WARDEN 3 (facility lead) Beasley, Jacob2023-01-01 → 2024-12-3117 / 54
Warden (facility lead) Adams, Brian2019-10-01 → 2023-02-0817 / 17
CORRECTIONAL SUPERINTENDENT (facility lead) Todd, Curtis J2025-01-01 → 2025-01-31— / —
DEPUTY WARDEN (facility deputy) McFarlane, Andrew M2019-01-01 → 2022-12-3117 / 49
Deputy Warden of Security (facility deputy) Henderson, Marcus2019-01-01 → 2023-01-0117 / 17
DEPUTY WARDEN (facility deputy) COX, Eric2021-01-01 → 2021-12-317 / 50
DEPUTY WARDEN (facility deputy) Epperson, Alicia2022-01-01 → 2022-12-315 / 5
DEPUTY WARDEN (facility deputy) Brown, Vashti J2019-01-01 → 2020-12-315 / 5
DEPUTY WARDEN (facility deputy) Smith, Tarmarshe A2016-01-01 → 2017-12-31— / 36

View full GDC Leadership Accountability page →

Location

9676 Hwy 301 North, Glennville, GA 30427 31.97303, -81.91568

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Aerial View

Aerial view of SMITH STATE PRISON

Architecture documents what the building was designed to hold. See the system-wide receipts at gps.press/warehouse.

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