SPECIAL MANAGEMENT UNIT
Facility Information
- Bed Capacity
- 192 beds
- Current Population
- 155
- Active Lifers
- 47 (30.3% of population) · Jun 2026 GDC report
- Life Without Parole
- 33 (21.3%)
- 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 supermax, the Special Management Unit in Jackson, has been held in federal contempt for falsifying records and violating a 2019 settlement meant to end unconstitutional solitary confinement. A lead plaintiff died after going unchecked for hours, and an inmate stole $11 million from his cell; GPS has tracked 8
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.
June 29, 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 nonprofit public advocacy organization, 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 June 28, 2026.
The Special Management Unit (SMU) sits on the grounds of Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison (GDCP) in Jackson, designed as the state’s most restrictive housing for 192 men deemed the highest security risks. But over the past decade, the SMU has become a case study in institutional defiance: a federal court found that the Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC) fabricated records, backdated documents, and misled a judge to evade reforms ordered after a class-action lawsuit over the unit’s brutal isolation. While GDC officials swore under oath that prisoners received required out-of-cell time, education, and staffing, evidence showed the opposite — and the lead plaintiff in that litigation, Ricardo Daughtry, was found dead in his cell less than two months after the contempt order, his body undiscovered for nearly seven hours despite a policy mandating checks every 30 minutes.
A Court-Ordered Reckoning: The 2019 Settlement and the Contempt Finding
The legal challenge began in 2015 when prisoner Timothy Gumm filed a handwritten lawsuit challenging his placement in solitary confinement at the SMU. The Southern Center for Human Rights took the case to federal court, and in 2019 the parties reached a landmark settlement that promised sweeping changes: regular out-of-cell time, meaningful educational programming, adequate staffing, and timely review hearings before continuing isolation. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that GDC officials almost immediately stalled compliance, running a strategy of delay until the injunction’s term neared expiration. According to GPS’s own investigative reporting, which corroborated the AJC’s findings, U.S. District Judge Marc T. Treadwell issued a blistering contempt order in April 2024, finding that the agency and its officials had falsified prisoner review forms to make it appear required hearings had been held and backdated records to cover gaps in monitoring. The order, which ran to 100 pages, concluded that GDC was “thumbing its nose” at the court’s requirements.
GPS reporting documented that Ahmed Holt, a GDC official, testified under oath that prisoners were receiving constitutionally adequate treatment, yet internal records showed none of it was happening. The AJC further disclosed that after Daughtry’s death, his attorneys discovered prison records listing him attending “table time,” recreation, and the book cart — all after he had already been pronounced dead. Those falsified entries mirrored the very conduct Judge Treadwell condemned, illustrating how the unit’s paper trail had been systematically manipulated to conceal the lack of supervision that ultimately became fatal.
The $11 Million Heist from Solitary Confinement
While the SMU was failing to meet basic safety requirements, another crisis unfolded from within its walls. In 2020, a contraband cellphone seized from inmate Arthur Lee Cofield Jr. inside the SMU revealed that he had orchestrated an $11 million theft from the Charles Schwab account of billionaire movie executive Sidney Kimmel. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Cofield, who entered the GDC at age 16 for armed bank robbery, used the phone to impersonate Kimmel, transfer funds, and purchase 6,106 American Eagle gold coins — arranging for a private plane to fly the coins to Atlanta and using a portion to buy a $4.4 million mansion in Buckhead. The phone also showed Cofield had amassed $31 million in a bank account.
The GDC learned of Cofield’s financial crimes as early as 2018, the AJC found, yet did not charge him until 2020. Even while housed in what was supposed to be the state’s top-security prison, he repeatedly acquired contraband cellphones. Warden Jose Morales discovered the device that sparked the federal investigation. Cofield eventually pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bank fraud and aggravated identity theft, and in April 2024 was sentenced to 135 months in federal prison and ordered to pay over $12.5 million in restitution. The episode demonstrated not only the failure of security protocols at the SMU, but the GDC’s tolerance of such breaches — a pattern GPS’s investigations have shown to be endemic when facilities are starved of staff and basic control.
A System That Conceals and Obstructs
The SMU’s contempt order did not arise in isolation. GPS’s systemic reporting has documented that the GDC has defied not only federal courts but also the U.S. Department of Justice and state lawmakers, creating a culture of deception that allowed violence and neglect to spiral. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution exposed how, after the DOJ issued its October 2024 findings calling Georgia’s prisons “inhumane” and detailing rampant assault, rape, and killing, Commissioner Tyrone Oliver dismissed accurate news coverage as “propaganda” and told legislators the death count was “fairly typical.” In fact, GPS has independently tracked 1,841 deaths in GDC custody since 2020 — a record high — while the agency stopped including preliminary cause of death in monthly mortality reports in March 2024, making it impossible to determine how many were homicides or suicides.
The GDC also restricted federal investigators’ access to prisons, refused to release records, and hurriedly repaired buildings before visits, the AJC reported. When its own consultants, PREA Auditors of America, reviewed 388 sexual-abuse investigation files in May 2022 and found that not one met legal standards, officials continued to tout their compliance to lawmakers without disclosing the consultants’ conclusions. This institutional habit of misrepresentation directly echoed the SMU case: just as GDC officials swore to compliance that did not exist, so too had they presented a facade of order to federal monitors and the court. GPS’s investigation “The Crisis of Deception and Mismanagement in Georgia’s Prison System” traced how the department systematically shielded itself from accountability, even as the death toll inside its facilities climbed.
Understaffing and the Unraveling of Control
Underpinning every failure at the SMU is a profound lack of staff. GPS has documented officer vacancy rates between 49.3% and 60% systemwide for years, against a national standard of no more than 10%; at some prisons the rate has reached 80%. The DOJ’s October 2024 findings letter explicitly concluded that GDC leadership had “lost control of its facilities” and placed too much blame on gangs while ignoring chronic understaffing. Approximately 31% of the incarcerated population are validated members of 315 different security threat groups, and both the DOJ and the Guidehouse 2024 consultant assessment found that gangs effectively run multiple facilities, controlling access to phones, showers, food, and bed assignments.
At the SMU, those structural deficits had lethal consequences. Ricardo Daughtry’s death — where no officer checked his cell for nearly seven hours despite a policy requiring checks every 15 to 30 minutes — was the direct product of a unit so hollowed out that basic rounds could not be maintained. And GPS’s mortality database shows the toll is ongoing: at least three men have died at the SMU in the past year, including Antony Ramon Penick, 32, in May 2026; Michael Ogletree, 33, in October 2025; and Lashion Boddie, 30, in September 2025. The facility, warden Eric Cox now presides, holds a population of 155 — below its 192-bed capacity — yet remains incapable of meeting the most fundamental safety obligations.
Isolation as a Weapon
The SMU’s design purpose is severe isolation, and the legal case that spawned the contempt order challenged whether that isolation was constitutional. Testimony and GPS’s own Tell My Story project reveal what that isolation does to human beings. One mother described in “The Room Is Ready, But He’s Still Gone” how her son was transferred to the Jackson complex and communication stopped entirely; she lives in terror that contacting the facility will put a target on him, waiting in silence while news of murders in Georgia prisons fills the headlines. Another account, “Covered in Ants,” told of a man locked in a dark cell with no running water, ants biting him continuously for two weeks while officers laughed and refused help — an experience that, while not set at the SMU, captures the kind of prolonged neglect that solitary confinement units across Georgia routinely produce.
These personal narratives mirror the systemic findings. The 2019 settlement was meant to end exactly this kind of warehousing: out-of-cell time, programming, and regular review. Instead, the SMU became the emblem of a department that, court records show, would rather falsify documents than change its practices. As GPS has reported, GDC spends approximately $1.69 per person per day on food — under 60 cents per meal — while medical neglect and infrastructure collapse compound the violence driven by understaffing. The SMU, for all its high-security designation, cannot escape the same forces that have turned Georgia’s entire prison system into what the DOJ called “woefully understaffed facilities” where people are “assaulted, stabbed, raped, and killed.”
Sources
This analysis draws on reporting from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Georgia Public Broadcasting, and The Marshall Project; federal court records and contempt filings; firsthand narratives published in Georgia Prisoners’ Speak’s Tell My Story project; GPS’s own investigative reports on systemic GDC deception, staffing collapse, and mortality; and GPS-tracked mortality and personnel data.
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 |