WARE STATE PRISON

Analysis written on June 21, 2026.

Ware State Prison, a close-security men’s facility in Waycross, sits in the flat pine country of southeast Georgia. Opened in 1990 with an original design capacity of 500, the prison now holds 1,446 people in a rated bed space of 1,546—a figure that obscures how little the physical plant and staffing model have grown to match an incarcerated population that is younger, more gang-affiliated, and more violently contested than anything the facility was built to contain. GPS’s own data show that 86 people have died in Ware’s custody since 2020. In the four-year span from July 2020 through August 2024, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution identified ten homicides inside the perimeter. The pace of death did not slow: in May 2026 alone, GPS-tracked mortality records capture at least six fatalities, one of the deadliest single months ever documented at any single Georgia prison.

A Trail of Homicides

The names of the dead tell a story that Georgia Department of Corrections statistics rarely tell. According to incident reports obtained by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the homicides span a range of weapons and circumstances, but share a common background of extreme understaffing and gang warfare.

Robert Lee Wilson III, 31, was stabbed to death on July 17, 2020, in an incident that left seven other people injured and involved 16 prisoners. Christopher Arnett Rawls, 32, was strangled on September 5, 2020. Christopher Eli Gresham, 39, died on September 30, 2021, from stab wounds to his back and lower extremities; three other prisoners were involved. Kyle Anthony Strother, 31, died from a stab wound to the chest on June 5, 2022. Va’Darian LaVianta Carr, 26, suffered stab wounds to the chest and back on September 18, 2022. Alfonso Marquez Moore, 30, died from blunt‑impact head injuries on June 19, 2023. Thomas Jerome McCoy, 38, was stabbed in the chest on October 7, 2023; again, three others were involved. In 2024 the killing accelerated: Leonardo Lamonte Anderson, 49, died of multiple stab wounds on April 20; Christopher Michael Drake Taylor, 33, died from a stab wound to the torso on May 28; and Samuel Keith Ellis, 31, was killed by multiple sharp‑force injuries on August 1, with three other prisoners listed in the incident report.

These ten deaths alone would mark a staggering homicide rate for a prison of roughly 1,500 people. But they do not capture the full toll. In October 2024, Georgia Public Broadcasting reported the case of DonTavis Mintz, whose body went undiscovered for days inside Ware because, as his mother Narissa Wright alleged, no counts or welfare checks were conducted. When his remains were returned, Wright could identify her son only “by a single tooth.” The GDC later confirmed that Kojack Thomas Jr., 27, pronounced dead on May 31, 2024, was being investigated as a potential homicide. And in May 2026, the violence surged again: GPS records show deaths on May 11 (two), May 19, May 21 (two), and May 31—among them Justin Dean Pulley, 49, and Jonathan Zimmons. GPS has received accounts of multiple inmate‑on‑inmate killings and a large‑scale fight at Ware that month that reportedly sent several people to outside hospitals.

The August 2020 Disturbance and Its Aftermath

The homicide trail began not in isolation but in the wake of a mass breakdown of order. On August 1, 2020, malfunctioning cell‑door locks allowed prisoners to walk out of their rooms at Ware. According to GDC internal records later reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, those prisoners took two correctional officers hostage, beating and stabbing one. What GDC publicly called merely a “disturbance” involved hostage‑taking, escape attempts, and widespread assault. Thirty‑three homemade weapons were used, 55 security staff were directly involved, and a mass exodus of employees followed.

Georgia Prisoners’ Speak (GPS) has also documented that the punitive lockdown that followed the 2020 riot included cuts to electrical power during the summer heat, a measure that independent reporting and federal‑court rulings in other states have since flagged as potentially unconstitutional. The lockdown and its harsh conditions did not restore order; they deepened the resentment and desperation that fuel bloodshed.

Gang Control, Understaffing, and Classification Drift

Underneath the body count is a structural reality that the Georgia Department of Corrections has repeatedly acknowledged but failed to remedy. Ware is a close‑security prison that, like many GDC facilities, operates with officer‑vacancy rates that have hovered between 49% and 60% systemwide for years. At such levels, the ability to conduct routine security rounds, break up fights, or even maintain a consistent count of the living evaporates. The October 2024 Department of Justice findings letter explicitly concluded that GDC leadership “has lost control of its facilities” and faulted the agency for blaming gangs while under‑emphasizing staffing failures. At Ware, that loss of control has given gangs de facto governance of daily life.

Multiple inmate accounts gathered by GPS describe gang‑affiliated prisoners monopolizing single‑occupancy cells, while non‑affiliated individuals are forced to sleep on dayroom floors or crammed into small cells in what GPS treats as conditions‑of‑confinement violations. Weapons—including large homemade knives—are described as ubiquitous. Violence concentrates on weekends, when administrative oversight is reduced and observers report that gang members exploit the lack of supervisors both to carry out attacks and to orchestrate unauthorized housing moves. One consistent theme in the reporting is that physical assaults are routinely classified by staff as “horseplay” rather than formally documented, a practice that makes the true scale of violence invisible to official record‑keeping and shields staff from accountability. GPS intelligence tracking recorded 17 distinct sources of inmate‑assault allegations across a recent six‑month window, the majority rated critical or high severity.

The classification crisis that GPS documented in its 2025 investigation “The Classification Crisis: How Four Medium Security Prisons Are Killing People” directly implicates Ware’s role in the larger system. Although Ware is itself a close‑security facility, the report found that medium‑security prisons across Georgia are operating as de facto higher‑security institutions without the staffing or infrastructure to manage them, and that Ware is one of the destinations for large numbers of close‑security inmates when those medium facilities cannot hold them safely. The result is a churn of high‑risk people into a facility that lacks both the physical plant and the officer presence to separate warring factions—a dynamic that GPS has argued makes mass casualty events inevitable.

Official Accounts and the Invisibility of Violence

GDC’s public statements and official reporting systems routinely minimize the violence that incarcerated people and their families describe. The agency’s characterization of the August 2020 hostage‑taking as a “disturbance” is one example; the handling of DonTavis Mintz’s death is another. GPS has received persistent accounts that Ware officers classify serious physical assaults as “horseplay”—a practice that, if true, not only leaves inmates without protection but also strips the public and the courts of an accurate data picture. When deaths occur, GDC’s Office of Professional Standards typically launches an investigation, but the outcomes rarely produce public accountability. The death of Kojack Thomas Jr. was publicly announced as a potential homicide in June 2024; no public finding has yet been released. The same pattern—bodies sent to the GBI crime lab, investigations opened, and silence thereafter—repeats across the facility’s recent history.

Retaliation and Segregation Allegations

Beyond the physical violence, GPS has received accounts of staff at Ware using segregation and transfer as instruments of retaliation. Family members allege that an incarcerated person’s release from segregation was conditioned on the family member ceasing contact with facility staff, and that threats were made to return a person to segregation for the duration of their sentence if the person sought legal counsel or communicated with oversight authorities. One set of reports describes a transfer to Ware that, in the family’s view, was designed to cut off a person’s ability to reach the Department of Justice. The aggregate signals in GPS’s intelligence system recorded three distinct sources of staff‑misconduct allegations in May 2026 alone, corroborating the family accounts that retaliation is not an isolated occurrence.

A System in Decay

Ware does not exist in a vacuum. It is a node in a statewide prison system that the Justice Department has described as having “lost control of its facilities,” where approximately 31% of the incarcerated population are validated members of 315 different security threat groups—more than double the national average. Georgia’s officer vacancies have run between 49% and 60% for years, and 82.7% of new hires leave within their first year. The state spends about $1.69 per person per day on food—under 60 cents per meal—while independent investigations have documented rats in kitchens and meals served on visibly contaminated trays. GDC’s infrastructure failures, from broken cell‑door locks to inoperative fire alarms, have been confirmed by both a 2024 Guidehouse assessment and the DOJ’s findings.

GPS’s 2025 exposé “Why Georgia Hasn’t Had Its Attica—Yet” argued that fear and fragmentation suppress the kind of mass uprising that catastrophic conditions might otherwise produce. That argument looks increasingly precarious at Ware, where the death toll is climbing and gang‑enforced order can fracture overnight. This is not the Ware of the early 1990s, remembered by one lifer in Georgia Prisoners’ Speak – Tell My Story as a place where “white guys and anyone who would have been preyed upon in Alto walked freely through the prison” and officers were “much more professional and personable.” That writer, who arrived at Ware in 1997 after surviving the predatory violence of Lee Arrendale, witnessed the system’s long transformation into a “dangerous, gang‑dominated warehouse.” At Ware today, the transformation feels complete.

Sources

This analysis draws on homicide and incident data reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Georgia Public Broadcasting; facility inspection reports from the Georgia Department of Public Health; GDC’s own disclosures of death investigations; GPS’s systemic investigations into classification drift, staffing collapse, food‑service failures, and sexual violence; GPS’s internal mortality database and intelligence system; and first‑hand narratives collected through Georgia Prisoners’ Speak – Tell My Story. Inmate and family accounts, aggregated to prevent source identification, inform the sections on gang housing control and staff retaliation.