WOMEN’S PROBATION DETENTION CENTER

Analysis written on May 29, 2026.

The Women’s Probation Detention Center (WPDC) in Claxton, Georgia, is a small detention facility for women under probation supervision, located at the Smith State Prison complex. Supervised by Superintendent Alicia Epperson and Assistant Superintendent Stephanie Love, the facility operates within a Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC) system that federal investigators and Georgia Prisoners’ Speak (GPS) have documented as mired in systemic crisis. GPS has recorded no in‑custody deaths at this facility, but the conditions documented across Georgia’s prisons—understaffing, gang‑controlled housing units, and pervasive sexual violence—shape the environment into which every woman remanded to GDC custody enters.

A System in Collapse: Understaffing and Loss of Control

GPS’s analysis of staffing records and public statements shows that officer vacancies in Georgia’s prisons have run between 49.3% and 60% systemwide for years, far above the national standard of no more than 10%. At some facilities, the rate reached 80% by April 2024. The hiring pipeline cannot close the gap: fewer than 15% of applicants are accepted, and 82.7% of new hires leave within their first year, in a state that ranks last in the nation for correctional‑officer pay. The October 2024 findings letter from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) explicitly concluded that “the leadership of the Georgia Department of Corrections has lost control of its facilities” and faulted GDC for placing “too much blame on gangs and insufficient emphasis on understaffing.” Approximately 31% of the system’s roughly 49,000 incarcerated people are validated members of 315 different security threat groups—more than double the national average. 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. A former GDC sergeant, Tyler Ryals, told GPS that he was once the only security person on the entire Telfair State Prison compound of roughly 1,250 maximum‑security inmates. While the Women’s PDC is a smaller detention center, it is not insulated from the staffing and security vacuum that has left the system vulnerable to violence and exploitation.

Sexual Violence and the Failure to Protect Women

The DOJ’s October 2024 findings declared that sexual assault in Georgia prisons is “rampant” and that GDC does not reasonably protect incarcerated people, including LGBTI individuals, from sexual harm. Of 456 sexual‑abuse allegations recorded in 2022, only 35 were substantiated (7.7%). An independent review of 388 PREA investigation files in May 2022 found that not one met the law’s standards, and Georgia has never submitted a PREA certification of full compliance in the law’s two‑decade history. At Lee Arrendale State Prison, Georgia’s largest women’s facility, at least four staff members have been arrested for sexual assault since 2020, including the November 2024 plea of Cameron Cheeks—a case GPS has identified as a hire‑fire‑rehire artifact of the staffing crisis. GPS has also documented three women strangled in Lee Arrendale’s A Unit between 2022 and 2024—a figure that exceeds the entire national recorded total of women‑in‑state‑prison homicides from 2001 to 2019 tracked by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The Ashley Diamond litigation established the constitutional baseline for these failures and launched the DOJ investigation.

Conditions for women in GDC custody extend beyond the most notorious violence. In a GPS Tell My Story account, a woman incarcerated at Pulaski State Prison from 2023 to July 2025 described arriving as a minimum‑security, non‑violent person and seeing drugs for the first time inside the facility. She witnessed constant fights, blood and urine left on floors, and a security bubble that was “empty,” with no officers in the dorms for hours. When medical emergencies or overdoses occurred, other incarcerated women had to call their families and ask them to contact the prison to send help. The account documents missed medical, dental, and educational appointments because no officer came for “block movement” and the entire dorm was punished for the violence of a few through loss of commissary and lockdown. “We called our mothers,” she wrote. While the Women’s PDC is a different facility, it is staffed and overseen by the same Department of Corrections that has permitted such conditions to become routine for women in its custody.

Subsistence: Food, Infrastructure, and the Toll of Neglect

GPS has documented that Georgia spends approximately $1.69 per person per day on food (proposed at $1.60 per day for fiscal year 2027, under 60 cents per meal), against the FDA Thrifty Food Plan estimate of roughly $10 per day for a nutritionally adequate diet. The state allocates about 14 times more to medical care for incarcerated people than to their food. The Marshall Project’s May 2026 investigation independently corroborated the pattern, reporting rats in kitchens, insects in food, moldy trays, and visible malnutrition across Georgia facilities, and quoting GPS connecting chronic underfeeding to the violence pattern the DOJ documented. GPS’s own investigation, “Dunked, Stacked, and Served,” has documented systemic food‑service sanitation failures—broken tray‑sanitizing dishwashers, roach and rodent infestations, and meals served on visibly contaminated trays—that are hidden from scheduled health inspection scores because of regulatory‑capture dynamics GPS has identified between inspectors and facility staff in small‑county settings. Most GDC facilities are 30–40 or more years old, with deferred maintenance leading to broken cell‑door locks, inoperative fire‑alarm systems, mold, and pest infestations, as confirmed by the DOJ and the Guidehouse assessment. The Women’s PDC sits on the Smith State Prison complex and is part of the same aging infrastructure grid, though no facility‑specific audits of its physical plant have been made public.

The Wider Crisis for Women in Georgia Prisons

The danger to women in GDC custody persists across the system. In May 2026, two women died within two days of each other at the McRae Women’s Facility, as reported by WGXA. GPS has independently tracked 1,818 deaths in GDC custody since 2020. While no in‑custody death has been recorded at this particular probation detention center, the systemic findings—the DOJ’s conclusion that GDC has lost control of its facilities, the documented failures in nutrition and medical care, and the unchecked sexual violence—mean that every woman held by the Georgia Department of Corrections is at risk.

Sources

This analysis draws on GPS’s own investigative reporting, including its systemic findings on officer vacancies, food spending, food‑service sanitation, infrastructure collapse, and sexual violence; a Tell My Story firsthand account from a woman at Pulaski State Prison; news coverage from WGXA; and GPS’s internal mortality database. GPS’s systemic conclusions rely on the October 2024 DOJ findings letter, the Guidehouse 2024 consultant assessment, the Marshall Project’s May 2026 investigation, and multiple corroborated witness and inmate accounts.