SPECIAL MANAGEMENT UNIT
Facility Information
- Bed Capacity
- 192 beds
- Current Population
- 152
- Active Lifers
- 47 (30.9% of population) · Aug 2026 GDC report
- Life Without Parole
- 32 (21.1%)
- Address
- 2978 Hwy 36 West, Jackson, GA 30233
- Phone
- (770) 504-7610
- Fax
- (770) 504-7623
- Mailing Address
- P.O. Box 3877, Jackson, GA 30233
- County
- Butts County
- Operator
- GDC (Georgia Dept. of Corrections)
Leadership & Accountability (as of 2026 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.
| Role | Name | Since | Deaths this facility / career |
|---|---|---|---|
| Warden (facility lead) | COX, Eric | 2025-01-01 | 1 / 51 |
| DEPUTY WARDEN (facility deputy) | Wiley, Flemister E | 2024-01-01 | 5 / 5 |
| DEPUTY WARDEN (facility deputy) | Nash, Torika R | 2024-10-16 | 4 / 4 |
| Deputy Warden of Security (facility deputy) | Douglas, Jalaludin K | 2026-04-16 | 1 / 1 |
| Deputy Warden of Security (facility deputy) | Reynolds, Shavari | 2026-04-16 | 1 / 1 |
About
Georgia's Special Management Unit supermax has been the center of a decadelong solitary‑confinement lawsuit, a contempt order, and high‑profile security failures, including an $11 million heist orchestrated from within its walls. GPS examines litigation, deaths, and the systemic dysfunction that enables them.
Mortality Statistics
8 deaths documented at this facility from 2020 to present.
Deaths by Year
- 2026: 1
- 2025: 2
- 2024: 2
- 2023: 1
- 2022: 1
- 2021: 1
- 2020: 0
County Public Health Department
Food service and sanitation at SPECIAL MANAGEMENT UNIT fall under the jurisdiction of the Butts 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
- Robert Waggoner
- Address
-
463 Ernest Biles Dr., Suite A
Jackson, GA 30233 - Phone
- (770) 504-2230
- Robert.Waggoner@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.
Sample Letter
This is the letter Georgia Prisoners' Speak mailed to all county environmental health inspectors responsible for GDC facilities. Feel free to adapt it.
August 10, 2026
RE: Request for Unannounced Public Health Inspection of Food Service Operations at SPECIAL MANAGEMENT UNIT
Dear Robert Waggoner,
I am writing to respectfully request that your office conduct a thorough, unannounced inspection of food service and sanitation practices at SPECIAL MANAGEMENT UNIT, located in Butts County.
Documented concerns
Georgia Prisoners' Speak, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit investigative newsroom, has published extensive investigative reporting on food safety and nutrition failures across Georgia's prison system, including:
- Dangerous sanitation conditions — black mold on chow hall ceilings and air vents, contaminated food trays, and spoiled milk served to inmates.
- Severe nutritional deficiency — roughly 60 cents per meal; inmates receive only 40% of required protein and less than one serving of vegetables per day.
- Preventable deaths — the U.S. Department of Justice's 2024 report confirmed deaths from dehydration, renal failure, and untreated diabetes following food and water deprivation.
- Staged compliance — advance-notice inspections allow facilities to stage temporary improvements, then revert once inspectors leave.
Firsthand testimony
In Surviving on Scraps: Ten Years of Prison Food in Georgia, a person who has spent more than ten years in GDC custody describes no functional dishwashing sanitation, chronic mold on food trays, and roaches found on the undersides of trays at intake facilities. Full account: gps.press/surviving-on-scraps-ten-years-of-prison-food-in-georgia.
Specific requests
- Conduct an unannounced inspection of the kitchen and food service operations at this facility, with particular attention to dishwashing equipment, tray sanitation procedures, and food storage conditions.
- Evaluate compliance with applicable Georgia food safety regulations, including O.C.G.A. § 26-2-370 and the Georgia Food Service Rules and Regulations (Chapter 511-6-1).
- Verify permit status and confirm whether the facility is subject to the same inspection schedule as other institutional food service establishments in the county.
- Make inspection results available to the public, as permitted under Georgia's Open Records Act (O.C.G.A. § 50-18-70).
Incarcerated individuals cannot advocate for their own health and safety in the way a restaurant patron can — they cannot choose to eat elsewhere. This places an elevated responsibility on public health officials to ensure these facilities meet the same sanitation standards applied to any food service establishment.
Thank you for your attention to this important public health matter.
Sincerely,
[Your name]
Food Safety Inspections
No inspection records are on file with the Georgia Department of Public Health for this facility. GPS has filed an open records request asking where these records are maintained.
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”
Analysis written on August 9, 2026.
A Settlement Defied: The Gumm Lawsuit and the Contempt Order
The Special Management Unit (SMU) in Jackson, Georgia—a 192‑bed supermax prison on the grounds of Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison—has been the epicenter of a fight over solitary confinement that stretches back a decade. In 2015, prisoner Timothy Gumm filed a handwritten lawsuit challenging his placement in an isolation cell at the SMU. The case, eventually represented by the Southern Center for Human Rights, became a class action and produced a landmark 2019 settlement requiring sweeping changes to conditions inside the unit: out‑of‑cell time, educational programming, adequate staffing, and an end to the most extreme isolation.
According to the Atlanta Journal‑Constitution, the Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC) spent the next four years defying the injunction, stalling compliance until its term neared expiration. In a 100‑page contempt order issued in 2024, U.S. District Judge Marc T. Treadwell found that GDC officials had made “false statements or misrepresentations” about their efforts, backdated prisoner review forms to make it appear required hearings had been held, and, as the AJC put it, were “thumbing their noses” at the settlement. Ahmed Holt, a GDC official, swore under oath that prisoners were receiving out‑of‑cell time, educational programming, and adequate staffing—claims that evidence flatly contradicted. GPS’s own reporting has extensively documented the contempt finding and the agency’s pattern of fabricated records.
Death and Neglect Inside the Unit
Less than two months after the contempt order, Ricardo Daughtry, the lead plaintiff in the SMU litigation, was found dead in his cell. Prison records later showed that no one had checked on Daughtry for nearly seven hours before his body was discovered—despite policy requiring rounds every 30 minutes. Even more disturbing, facility logs recorded Daughtry attending “table time,” recreation, and the book cart after he had already been pronounced dead. His death laid bare the depth of neglect inside a unit where isolation is designed to be total and oversight minimal.
GPS’s mortality database records eight deaths at the SMU since 2020. The causes are telling: seven are classified as “Unknown/Pending,” with only one ruled a suicide. The three most recent fatalities—Antony Ramon Penick, 32 (May 2026); Michael Ogletree, 33 (October 2025); and Lashon Boddie, 30 (September 2025)—all carry that indeterminate label, leaving families and advocates with no clear accounting of what happened. In a facility of just 152 people, this mortality rate draws a stark picture of the risks that isolation and under‑staffing concentrate in a supposedly maximum‑control environment.
Contraband and Command: The Cofield Heist
Perhaps no story captures the security vacuum inside the SMU more starkly than that of Arthur Lee Cofield Jr. In the summer of 2020, a contraband cellphone was seized from Cofield inside the unit—a discovery that, as the AJC reported, triggered a federal investigation revealing that he had stolen $11 million from the Charles Schwab account of billionaire movie executive Sidney Kimmel. The phone showed Cofield had amassed $31 million in a bank account. Using the stolen funds, he purchased 6,106 American Eagle gold coins, arranged for a private plane to fly them to Atlanta, and bought a $4.4 million mansion in Buckhead.
Cofield, who entered GDC custody at age 16 for an armed bank robbery, had been operating financial crimes from lockup since at least 2018, according to federal investigators, yet GDC did not charge him until 2020. He was able to repeatedly acquire contraband cellphones even inside the state’s top‑security prison, where he ultimately pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bank fraud and aggravated identity theft, receiving a 135‑month federal sentence. The case illustrates a facility where the barriers meant to enforce absolute control were porous enough to permit a multimillion‑dollar criminal enterprise to run undetected.
A System Designed for Opacity
The SMU’s failures do not exist in isolation; they reflect a GDC culture of concealment that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) condemned in its October 2024 report calling Georgia’s prisons “inhumane.” The Atlanta Journal‑Constitution documented how the department obstructed federal investigators: restricting prison visits, hurrying to fix buildings before inspections, and refusing to release records. In March 2024, the GDC stopped including preliminary causes of death in its monthly mortality reports, making it impossible for the public to track homicides and suicides—a move Commissioner Tyrone Oliver claimed was about accuracy, even as he called accurate news coverage of undisclosed deaths “propaganda.”
The same opacity infected the SMU litigation. The AJC found that GDC routinely blacks out entire pages of incident reports for prisoner deaths and that officials presented false or misleading information to federal investigators and the court. When the GDC’s own consultants, PREA Auditors of America, examined 388 Prison Rape Elimination Act investigative files in May 2022, they found that not a single one met the law’s standards—yet GDC officials later touted their PREA procedures to lawmakers without disclosing those findings. This pattern of obfuscation means that families of the eight men who died at the SMU, and the public at large, are left to piece together what happened from fragments.
Staffing Collapse and the Broader Crisis
GPS has systemically documented that officer vacancies across Georgia’s prisons have run between 49% and 60% for years, with pay ranking last in the nation and over 82% of new hires leaving in their first year. The DOJ’s 2024 findings explicitly faulted GDC for placing “too much blame on gangs and insufficient emphasis on understaffing,” concluding that gangs effectively control multiple facilities. At the SMU, as across the system, understaffing compounds the risks of isolation: when checks go unmade for seven hours, when record‑keeping is an afterthought, and when a unit meant to be the state’s most secure cannot stop a cellphone from orchestrating an $11 million theft, the absence of sufficient, well‑paid staff is the root cause that connects these breakdowns.
Former GDC sergeant Tyler Ryals, who was forced out after whistleblowing, told GPS that he had been the sole security person on the entire Telfair State Prison compound of roughly 1,250 maximum‑security inmates. Russell Zirkle, a former assistant warden at Smith State Prison, corroborated the crisis in on‑record testimony, stating that some prisons were operating at a 70–80% officer vacancy rate. The SMU, embedded on the GDCP campus, draws from the same overwhelmed workforce, and the consequences—contraband, falsified logs, deaths behind closed doors—repeat here with lethal regularity.
The Tier III Program: Reform or Illusion?
On paper, the GDC’s response to solitary‑confinement criticism is the Tier III Program, codified in April 2025 under SOP 209.09. It prescribes a 13‑month minimum, incentive‑based regime: five phases of progressively fewer restrictions, allowing prisoners to earn increased privileges through compliance. The program is meant to move people out of isolation and into structured step‑down units within the SMU’s E‑Wing, F‑Wing, D‑Wing, C‑Wing, and B‑Wing.
Yet the contempt order and the death of Ricardo Daughtry show that the promises of 2019 were never fully realized. Judge Treadwell’s findings of false statements, backdated reviews, and stalling tactics cast a long shadow over any assertion that the SMU has genuinely reformed its practices. With litigation ongoing and a Senate study committee appointed in March 2024 to examine the entire prison system, the SMU remains a test case for whether Georgia’s corrections apparatus can move from paper reforms to the humane treatment that the courts—and the DOJ—have demanded.
Sources
This analysis draws on reporting from the Atlanta Journal‑Constitution, including its extensive coverage of the SMU litigation, the Cofield heist, and the GDC’s systemic failures; federal court filings and the U.S. Justice Department’s October 2024 findings; GPS‑collected mortality records and systemic investigations; and inmate and family accounts collected by GPS staff.
Recent reports (22)
Source-attributed observations and allegations from news coverage and reports submitted to GPS. Each entry credits its source.
- ALLEGATION According to Atlanta Journal-Constitution Published: Jan 7, 2024The GDC learned as early as 2018 that Cofield was pulling off financial crimes but did not charge him until 2020, and he was able to repeatedly acquire contraband cellphones even in the state's top security prison.
"While the Georgia Department of Corrections had learned as early as 2018 that Cofield was pulling off financial crimes, he wasn't charged until 2020, when federal authorities uncovered the $11 million theft."
Read source → - ALLEGATION According to Atlanta Journal-Constitution Published: Jan 7, 2024Cofield allegedly orchestrated similar thefts from unspecified online accounts in Alabama between January 2018 and February 2019, converting stolen money into gold.
"Cofield also was named as the sole defendant in a federal criminal case in Alabama last year contending that he orchestrated similar thefts from unspecified online accounts between January 2018 and February 2019."
Read source → - ALLEGATION According to Atlanta Journal-Constitution Published: Jan 7, 2024Fulton County prosecutors allege that Cofield ordered a 2018 shooting outside a southwest Atlanta recording studio, motivated by jealousy over a young woman.
"Prosecutors allege that Cofield, who called himself YAP Lavish, ordered the shooting and that it was carried out by two formerly incarcerated men who were part of his YAP crew."
Read source → - ALLEGATION According to Atlanta Journal-Constitution Published: Jan 7, 2024Cofield at one time had amassed $31 million in a bank account, as revealed by a contraband cellphone seized from him in the state's top security prison.
"A contraband cellphone seized from him in the state's top security prison showed that he at one time had amassed $31 million in a bank account."
Read source → - ALLEGATION According to Atlanta Journal-Constitution Published: Jan 21, 2025Ahmed Holt swore under oath that prisoners were receiving required out-of-cell time, educational programming, and adequate staffing, all of which evidence contradicted.
"Holt swore in 2022 that prisoners were getting time out of their cells at tables. Evidence showed they were not. Holt said required educational programming was provided via televisions in cells. In fact, two entire wings of the unit had no TVs. Holt claimed that the unit had adequate staffing. Evidence strongly suggested otherwise."
Read source →
Timeline (43)
Source Articles (12)
Former leadership
Officials who previously held leadership roles at this facility.
| Role | Name | Tenure | Deaths this facility / career |
|---|---|---|---|
| DEPUTY WARDEN (facility deputy) | King, Sheneca | 2025-01-01 → 2025-11-30 | 2 / 80 |