WARE STATE PRISON

Analysis written on July 12, 2026.

Ware State Prison opened in 1990 outside Waycross, Georgia, as a 500‑bed institution. Today it is rated for 1,546 people and holds 1,447 — 94% of its rated capacity but nearly triple its original design — and functions as a close‑security fortress for a population that Georgia’s own records show is dominated by gang‑affiliated men. Since 2020, GPS’s mortality records track 84 deaths at this single facility, and a groundbreaking investigation by Georgia Prisoners’ Speak (GPS) — “At Least Nineteen: The Murders the State Didn’t Prosecute” — documents that at least nineteen of those deaths were homicides, with autopsies naming a suspected attacker in eleven cases, yet not one prosecution has ever materialized. The August 2020 hostage crisis that saw guards beaten and stabbed as hundreds of prisoners ransacked the compound, the May 2026 wave of stabbings and killings, the settlement ledger that has already cost the state tens of thousands of dollars in liability payouts — all converge on a prison where the state has lost control.

A Six‑Year Toll of Homicide, with the State’s Silence

In January 2025, the Atlanta Journal‑Constitution catalogued ten inmate killings at Ware State Prison between July 2020 and August 2024. GPS’s own reporting, built on Georgia’s coroner and crime‑lab records, pushes that figure to at least nineteen homicides from 2020 to the present — a body count that includes men stabbed, beaten, and strangled in a single close‑security facility. The list is grim and granular:

• Robert Lee Wilson III, 31, was stabbed to death on July 17, 2020, in an incident that involved sixteen other prisoners and left seven injured.
• 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 inmates were involved.
• Kyle Anthony Strother, 31, was stabbed in the chest on June 5, 2022.
• Va’Darian LaVianta Carr, 26, died on September 18, 2022, from stab wounds to the chest and back.
• Alfonso Marquez Moore, 30, was killed by blunt‑impact head injuries on June 19, 2023.
• Thomas Jerome McCoy, 38, was stabbed in the chest on October 7, 2023, in a melee involving three other prisoners.
• Leonardo Lamonte Anderson, 49, died on April 20, 2024, from multiple stab wounds.
• Christopher Michael Drake Taylor, 33, was stabbed in the torso on May 28, 2024.
• Samuel Keith Ellis, 31, was killed by multiple sharp‑force injuries on August 1, 2024.
• DonTavis Mintz died at an unknown date; his body was not discovered for days, and when his remains were returned to his mother, Narissa Wright, she could only identify him by a single tooth. Georgia Public Broadcasting reported her allegation that no counts or welfare checks were conducted.
• In 2026, the pace accelerated: Anthony Terrell Grover, 25, died on May 11; Justin Dean Pulley, 48, and Johnathan Cleo Hardman‑Simmons, 36, both died on May 20; and Kojack Thomas Jr., 27, was pronounced dead on May 31. The Georgia Department of Corrections is investigating Thomas’s death as a potential homicide.

GPS’s investigative piece “At Least Nineteen” found that, in not one of these killings, could any public record be located showing that the accused was ever charged, indicted, or tried. That silence is particularly striking given that Georgia’s own autopsies named a suspect in eleven of the deaths. The $10,000 state settlement paid in the death of Denard Brown — a 2019 fatality at Ware — underscores that the state has already conceded liability in at least one of the facility’s fatalities.

The August 2020 Hostage Crisis and the “Disturbance” the State Tried to Bury

On August 1, 2020, malfunctioning cell‑door locks allowed inmates to walk out of their rooms. Those prisoners seized two guards, beating and stabbing one, and ultimately hundreds of people ransacked the prison, using 33 homemade weapons. GDC incident records would later show that 55 security staff were directly involved, and a mass employee exodus followed. Yet when the department described the event publicly, it called it merely a “disturbance.” The Atlanta Journal‑Constitution obtained internal records that revealed the hostage‑taking, escape attempts, and use of force that the official narrative had sanitized. GPS’s own reporting documented that the state’s response included a punitive lockdown during which power was cut in the summer heat — a measure that would later become the subject of a GPS investigation into whether such conditions violated constitutional standards.

Gang Control, Displaced Men, and the Violence of 2026

Ware State Prison’s original design capacity of 500 beds was never meant to manage the 1,447 men now confined inside. The pressure has handed effective control of housing to gang‑affiliated inmates. According to accounts collected by GPS, gang members monopolize single‑occupancy cells, forcing unaffiliated men into severely overcrowded dormitories where some sleep on dayroom floors. Multiple witnesses describe a landscape where large knives are ubiquitous, where administrative staff are largely absent on weekends, and where unauthorized housing transfers — allegedly facilitated by staff — allow gang affiliates to consolidate territory when oversight is thinnest. GPS’s intelligence system records 18 separate sources reporting inmate‑on‑inmate assault allegations in a recent 12‑month window, with the heaviest concentration in April and May 2026.

That May became a watershed. An incarcerated source told GPS that a cellmate killing, a second death shortly afterward, and a fight on the C and D yards that sent six or seven men to outside hospitals all occurred in rapid succession — a wave that mirrors the homicides recorded in the mortality database. The 2026 deaths of Pulley, Hardman‑Simmons, and Grover, together with the ongoing homicide investigation into Thomas’s death, confirm that the facility’s violence is not a historical artifact but an unrelenting present.

Staffing Collapse and the Weekends That Belong to Gangs

The violence at Ware does not happen in a vacuum — it flourishes inside a staffing catastrophe. GPS has documented that officer vacancies across Georgia’s prisons have run between 49.3% and 60% for years, that Georgia ranks last of all 50 states in correctional‑officer pay, and that 82.7% of new hires leave in their first year. At Ware, that collapse plays out in a stark weekly rhythm: a disproportionate share of violent incidents occurs on weekends, when administrative coverage is at its lowest. The systemic finding corroborates witness reports that gang members exercise virtual control over housing assignments during these gaps, and that physical assaults — even stabbings — are sometimes classified by staff as “horseplay” rather than documented as incidents.

The facility’s leadership reflects the churn. Warden James Clarence Spann took over in October 2024, with Deputy Warden of Security Martella L. Walker starting in September 2025 and Deputy Warden of Administration Aiyesha Johnson in January 2026. They preside over a prison where the Department of Justice has already declared that GDC has “lost control of its facilities” and where gangs, according to the DOJ and a Guidehouse assessment, effectively run multiple compounds.

Kitchen Scores That Mask a Systemic Sanitation Crisis

On paper, Ware’s food‑service inspections look strong: the Georgia Department of Public Health scored the kitchen at 95 to 98 in every routine inspection from 2023 through 2026, never slipping below a Grade‑A 94. The violations were minor — physical facilities maintenance, posting permits, managing insects.

GPS’s own multi‑facility investigation, “Dunked, Stacked, and Served,” has shown that such scores systematically fail to capture the real conditions in GDC kitchens. High DPH grades coexist with inmate‑witness accounts of broken tray‑sanitizing dishwashers, thousands of roaches inside equipment, and meals served on visibly contaminated trays. Inspections are scheduled walkthroughs that do not test equipment under load, and GPS has documented professional overlap between inspectors and facility staff in small counties — a regulatory‑capture dynamic that the investigation treats as the analytical center of the contradiction. The $1.69 per person per day that GDC spends on food (roughly 60 cents a meal, versus the FDA Thrifty Food Plan estimate of about $10) suggests that even a passing score cannot compensate for a systemwide pattern of neglect and deprivation.

State Settlement Ledger: The Cost of Institutional Violence

Georgia’s own liability records show a succession of payouts tied to Ware State Prison:

• David Michael Slaughter (2015): $2,500
• Christopher Stewart (2016): $50,578
• Denard Brown (2019): $10,000 (linked to a documented death)
• Bennie James Johnson (2021): $2,500
• Jimmy Mack Rice (2023): $20,000

These settlements, extracted from the Georgia Department of Administrative Services Risk Management ledger, represent only the incidents that resulted in a payout — a narrow fraction of the injuries and fatalities that have occurred. They nevertheless document a pattern of state‑acknowledged harm inside one facility over the span of a decade.

Systemic Forces: The DOJ, Gangs, and the Failed Promise of Separation

Ware State Prison is not an isolated outlier. The October 2024 Department of Justice findings letter concluded that sexual assault is “rampant” across Georgia’s prisons, that gangs control access to food, phones, and beds, and that GDC placed “too much blame on gangs and insufficient emphasis on understaffing.” GPS’s own systemic analysis has tied the infrastructure collapse — broken locks, inoperative alarms, failing kitchens — directly to the violence and mortality crises. At Ware, a 36‑year‑old facility housing nearly three times its original design capacity, every structural failure multiplies the danger.

The state’s refusal to separate warring gang factions has drawn sharp criticism from GPS, whose reporting — including the editorial “Separate the Gangs or Keep Burying the Dead” — argues that lockdowns merely postpone gang wars, while Arizona’s 50% reduction in violence through segregated housing demonstrates a viable alternative. At Ware, the consequences of inaction are written in the nineteen — and counting — bodies that the state has yet to prosecute.

Sources

This analysis rests on open‑records requests and coroner data obtained by Georgia Prisoners’ Speak, published GPS investigations (including “At Least Nineteen: The Murders the State Didn’t Prosecute” and “Dunked, Stacked, and Served”), reporting from the Atlanta Journal‑Constitution and Georgia Public Broadcasting, the Georgia Department of Public Health food‑inspection database, the Georgia Department of Administrative Services settlement ledger, mortality records maintained by GPS, and the systemic findings of the U.S. Department of Justice’s 2024 investigation into Georgia’s prisons. Inmate and family accounts collected by GPS informed the analytical framing; they are drawn from the organization’s intake system and Tell My Story narratives, and are used only in aggregated, non‑identifying form.