Brief written November 8, 2026 from GPS Intelligence System data.(DS)

Violence and Safety in Georgia's Prisons

Georgia's prison system does not have a violence problem at its margins. It has a violence problem at its center, and the federal government has said so in writing. On October 1, 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division and the U.S. Attorney's Offices for the Northern, Middle and Southern Districts of Georgia released a 94-page findings report concluding that the State of Georgia and the Georgia Department of Corrections violate the Eighth Amendment — that the state "fails to protect incarcerated people from violence and harm by other incarcerated people." The report described "near-constant, life-threatening violence" as the norm and stated flatly that "loss of control over the prisons has set in."

What follows traces that finding through its component parts: the homicide curve, the staffing collapse that federal investigators tied directly to the bloodshed, the gang structures that filled the vacuum, the specific deaths that make the statistics concrete, and the accountability record — criminal charges against officers, lawsuits that settled, and families who learned of deaths from other prisoners rather than from the state.

The Homicide Curve: From Seven to Sixty-Six

The numbers are the cleanest entry point because they are the state's own. According to GDC mortality reports cited throughout the DOJ findings, Georgia prisons recorded 7 homicides in 2018, 13 in 2019, 28 in 2020, 28 in 2021, 31 in 2022, and 35 in 2023. Over the six-year period from 2018 through 2023, GDC reported 142 homicides — 48 in the first three years and 94 in the latter three, a 95.8 percent increase. The DOJ stated that this rate significantly exceeds the most recent available national data on homicide rates in correctional facilities. In 2019, the national average homicide rate in state prisons was 12 per 100,000 people; Georgia's was 34 per 100,000, nearly triple.

The curve did not bend. In the first five months of 2024 alone, there were 18 confirmed or suspected homicides in GDC custody. By the middle of October 2024, 44 people had been killed in Georgia prison custody that year. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that GDC told the paper it investigated 66 prisoner deaths statewide deemed to be homicides in a single year, while the AJC independently identified 62 people who died from suspected or confirmed homicides — the deadliest year in state history by either count.

The DOJ also found that the official numbers understate what happened. Investigators identified seven deaths from 2022 that GDC categorized as undetermined or natural until eventually reclassifying them as homicides in 2024, "although other official records made clear much earlier that the deaths were homicides." The report stated that GDC "inaccurately reports these deaths both internally and externally, and in a manner that underreports the extent of violence and homicide in its prisons," and that investigators identified multiple additional homicide deaths the agency's reported totals fail to reflect. In one illustration, GDC's June 2024 mortality data reported 6 homicides for the first five months of the year, even though at least 18 deaths were categorized as homicides in GDC's own incident reports.

GPS has independently tracked 1,928 deaths in GDC custody since January 1, 2020 — a figure that is always a floor, because GDC reports deaths roughly two months late. The full registry is published at https://gps.press/georgia-prison-deaths/.

What 1,400 Incidents Look Like When You Count Them

Between January 2022 and April 2023, there were more than 1,400 reported incidents of violence — fights, assaults, hostage incidents, and homicides — across the close-security prisons and most of the medium-security prisons. Of those incidents, 19.7 percent involved a weapon, 45.1 percent resulted in serious injury, and 30.5 percent resulted in offsite medical treatment.

The DOJ cautioned that even this figure is a severe undercount. Violent incidents are consistently underreported due to a lack of staff supervision, causing some incidents never to be reported at all, and incidents are often mischaracterized using inappropriate incident-type categories, under-counting assaults and fights. In interviews at 16 of the 17 GDC prisons investigators visited in 2022 and 2023, incarcerated people consistently reported that they had witnessed life-threatening violence, including stabbings, and that weapons are widespread. Contraband weapons, illicit drugs, and cellphones are commonplace across the system, and a steady stream of contraband cellphone videos showing assaults, injuries, weapons, and drug use has been shared to social media.

The individual incidents the DOJ documented read as a catalogue of what understaffing produces. On March 27, 2023, Smith State Prison went into lockdown immediately before a federal site inspection because of a fight with weapons following a Ramadan breakfast inside the D-2 dorm; seven people required hospitalization, two by air evacuation, and the melee began while there were no officers in the dorm. On January 6, 2023, a lieutenant at Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison responded to a housing unit and found two wounded people — one with an apparent broken ankle after jumping from an upper-level walkway to escape an assault, the other with a jaw laceration — and six others with assault wounds including stabbings. Four nights later, four more people were assaulted in the same unit, one by masked men, one brandishing a "sword," demanding his CashApp account. In August 2022 at Pulaski State Prison, staff received a call from outside advising that an incarcerated woman was being stabbed; they toured the dorm and reported all was secure, then heard a faint cry for help and found her locked in her cell, slumped over the toilet, bleeding profusely, with a bruise in the shape of a footprint. She reported being assaulted by more than 10 people, stomped, hit, and kicked, then forced into the shower to wash off the blood.

Staffing Collapse and the Vacuum Gangs Filled

The DOJ did not treat violence as a cultural failing of the incarcerated. It identified a mechanism. Correctional officer vacancy rates ran around 50 percent systemwide and over 70 percent at ten of the largest facilities. By the end of 2023, GDC still had over 2,800 unfilled correctional officer positions. The trajectory: from 2014 to 2018, the annual average vacancy rate climbed from almost 11 percent to over 18 percent; between 2018 and 2023 staffing fell precipitously, reaching a systemwide rate of 60 percent in April 2023.

The consequences were documented at the level of the shift roster. At a large close-security men's prison, staffing rosters from mid-2023 confirmed at least one, and sometimes up to four, officers assigned to two buildings at a time — each officer single-handedly responsible for nearly 400 beds. At several GDC prisons, one officer was assigned to supervise two buildings at once, each comprising two or more housing units and hundreds of people, for an entire 12-hour shift. On a weekend day shift in August 2023, one officer was assigned to three separate buildings; a victim was stabbed 32 times in his back, head, and stomach. The logbook from the building where the stabbing occurred has no entries after 8:54 a.m. that day, and the following day no officer was assigned to that building for the second shift. In 2022, at a close-security men's prison, a man was killed after being assaulted while handcuffed; the investigation found the officer on duty was single-handedly supervising a control center as well as both sides of the housing unit where the homicide took place.

The DOJ's causal chain is explicit: chronic understaffing at 50 percent or below, inability to conduct basic daily counts or maintain supervision, gangs filling the vacuum and controlling housing units, incarcerated people able to unlock their own cells and wander at will, classification becoming meaningless when no staff enforce security boundaries, and violence becoming the norm. "With housing units left unsupervised for sustained periods of time," the report states, "incarcerated persons can engage in illicit activities, including exchanging contraband, abusing drugs, making homemade weapons, fetching contraband via drone drops, and engaging in violent assaults. Violent incidents are more likely to occur. Gangs and other threat groups tend to step in to fill the void in leadership, telling people where they can or can't sleep and exerting control over prison life."

The report found gangs have "unacceptable levels of control over large sections of Georgia's prison system," dictating where individuals live, who eats, who showers, who gets a job, and how units operate — and extorting incarcerated people and their families for money. A small number of personnel were assigned to investigate, track, and respond to incidents involving more than 14,000 validated STG members. State-hired consultants reached the same conclusion independently, finding that gangs are "effectively running the facilities." The DOJ also faulted GDC's own framing: the agency placed "too much blame on gangs and insufficient emphasis on understaffing."

GPS has documented this integrated structural finding — staffing collapse plus gang assumption of facility control — as the explanation running through the per-facility violence, classification, mortality, and infrastructure narratives. Former GDC sergeant Tyler Ryals, forced out in 2024 after whistleblowing, told GPS he had personally been the only security person on the entire Telfair compound of roughly 1,250 maximum-security inmates. In his published testimony, Ryals described shakedowns at Telfair where he "found over a hundred shanks in an 80-man dorm" — more than one weapon for every man in it — and the experience of being told a man had been stabbed hours earlier: "you go down to the building and it's too late. There's no saving nobody after they've been stabbed up two hours ago."

The Named Dead

Behind the counts are people, and Georgia's pattern is that the public often learns their names from other prisoners, coroners, or reporters rather than from the department.

Maurice Antonio Brown, 36, died September 3, 2026, at Wilcox State Prison; GPS's registry lists the cause as homicide. Walter Brown, 66, died August 3, 2026, at Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison, with the cause listed as unknown and pending. Timothy Wilson, 48, died June 7, 2026, at Telfair State Prison, cause unknown and pending. Jerrod Johnson, 27, died February 18, 2026, at Hancock State Prison, homicide. Jaylin Bell, 32, died February 6, 2026, at Hancock State Prison, homicide. Melvin Gay Johnson, 35, died January 27, 2026, at Hays State Prison, homicide. Steven Monroe Wood, 54, died January 25, 2026, at Hancock State Prison, homicide. Jerry Wayne Merritt, 59, died January 20, 2026, at Augusta State Medical Prison, homicide. Jimmy Lee Trammell, 42, died January 11, 2026, at Washington State Prison, homicide. Preston C. Phelps, 28, died December 13, 2025, at Telfair State Prison, homicide. Marquis Young, 37, died October 22, 2025, at Macon State Prison, homicide. William Stacey Springer, 36, died September 16, 2025, at Valdosta State Prison, homicide. Andre Rashad Weems, 36, died September 9, 2025, at Hancock State Prison, homicide. Malindzo Eddy Hatcher, 42, died July 21, 2025, at Telfair State Prison, homicide. Corey Jose July, 33, died June 17, 2025, at Hancock State Prison, homicide. Dominique Cornelius Cole, 37, died June 8, 2025, at Wilcox State Prison, homicide. William Holeman died January 30, 2025, at Hancock State Prison, homicide. Prince Porter died January 30, 2025, at Hancock State Prison, homicide. Jonathan Mitchell died January 21, 2025, at Macon State Prison, homicide. Sinjuan Harmon died January 12, 2025, at Valdosta State Prison, homicide. Joshua Parrott, 45, died January 12, 2025, at Dooly State Prison, homicide. Lawrence L. Williams, 30, died October 24, 2024, at Hays State Prison, homicide. Willie Andrew Willis, 27, died October 21, 2024, at Calhoun State Prison, homicide. Travon Montrell Walthour, 29, died October 13, 2024, at Hancock State Prison, homicide. Brandon Lashaun Mincey, 37, died October 11, 2024, at Phillips State Prison, homicide.

Some of these deaths carry documented detail. The AJC reported that Hancock County Coroner Dontrelle Andrews found Holeman and Porter in the same dorm about 15 to 20 feet apart; Porter had a single puncture wound in his upper back while Holeman had no marks on his body. Joshua Andrew Brock, 38, was later convicted of malice murder in Porter's death and sentenced to life without parole. In the Hancock killing of Jaylin Bell, the coroner said the incident happened around 7:00 a.m. and he pronounced Bell dead at 10:42 a.m.; Octavio Pugacerantes was indicted on malice murder, felony murder and aggravated assault. Omarion Lyles was indicted for stabbing and killing Jerrod Johnson on February 18. In the Merritt case, Columbia County deputies charged John Jaquis Trimier with murder; the arrest warrant stated Trimier assaulted Merritt with a sharpened object causing a stab wound to the left side of his chest and shoulder. Trimier was later indicted on malice murder, felony murder, unlawful acts of violence in a penal institution, and possession of a knife during commission of a felony.

The registry is capped at the most recent entries here; the full list of 1,928 deaths since 2020 is published at the link above.

The Roommate Problem and the Classification Failure

A large proportion of Georgia's prison homicides occur between cellmates, and the DOJ traced many of them to classification and housing decisions that were not decisions at all.

In May 2022, a 21-year-old man was killed by his cellmate at Calhoun State Prison following multiple failures in GDC's classification and housing systems. Staff had moved the assailant out of segregation, to general population, and then back to segregation without following procedures. The assailant requested a particular cell and staff housed him there. The next day, both cellmates told an orderly they wanted to be separated, and that was communicated to an officer. One day later, an orderly saw the man being beaten; he died of blunt force trauma injuries and a stab wound to the neck. GDC closed its criminal investigation without a thorough administrative review, and no discipline or counseling appeared in the personnel files of three employees whose errors contributed to the death. DaQuavious Cachone Lackey, 21, died May 16, 2022, at Calhoun from a stab wound of the neck and multiple blunt force injuries.

At the same facility, an officer had previously reported that two men should not share a cell because of both men's STG status and because the assailant was significantly bigger — seven feet tall and 340 pounds. A supervisor failed to verify the room status, and an officer failed to respond to an orderly's report that the men wanted to be separated. A day later another orderly saw the assailant beating the victim with a fan motor in a net bag; the victim died of multiple blunt force traumas and a stab wound to the neck. In a third Calhoun killing, a validated STG member was placed in a segregation cell with a non-gang member classified as sexually aggressive, and killed him.

The DOJ found that classification decisions in Georgia prisons appear driven by bed availability rather than risk assessment, that GDC does not enforce classification housing assignments, and that gangs dictate housing as a matter of course. The report describes a Baldwin State Prison case in which a man was assaulted in his housing unit by members of the Gangster Disciples with a lock in a sock — and was then placed in segregation in a cell with an individual from the same gang that had attacked him.

The consequences of getting this wrong are not abstract. Jamari McClinton, 21, was stabbed to death at Baldwin on August 11, 2021, five days after being transferred from Phillips State Prison, where he had been in protective custody after threats from gang members; the protection was removed when he was transferred. The Eleventh Circuit later affirmed summary judgment for all five defendants in McClinton v. Warden, holding that none possessed the requisite subjective knowledge of the risk of harm. In a separate Baldwin case, the Eleventh Circuit reversed dismissal of Eighth Amendment failure-to-protect claims against Deputy Warden Doug Underwood and Corrections Officer Cager Edward Davis, holding they were not entitled to qualified immunity at the pleading stage.

At Macon State Prison, the family of Joseph Walter Brown — killed by his cellmate in July 2022 — filed a federal lawsuit alleging that the cellmate had three prior attacks on cellmates over the prior year, two involving stabbings with shanks, and three instances of being caught with deadly homemade weapons, and that this record should have led to his placement in the most restrictive tier before he was celled with Brown. The complaint also states it marks the third time Lieutenant Latrice Hatcher has been sued for ignoring an inmate's pleas not to be housed with a violent cellmate who went on to stab or kill them.

Sexual Violence, LGBTI People, and the Investigations That Went Nowhere

The DOJ found that the State fails to adequately protect people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex from a substantial risk of serious harm from sexual violence and abuse by staff and other incarcerated people. "Gangs that run housing units often target LGBTI individuals with physical and sexual violence," the report states. "Instead of making individualized assessments, GDC houses transgender women with men based on their external genitalia despite the risk this poses to their safety."

One transgender woman housed in a men's facility described herself to investigators as the "possession" of rival gangs that used her for sex and fought over access to her; she said staff did nothing about it. At Augusta State Medical Prison, a transgender woman reported that one night in March 2023, when there was only one officer, she was held at knifepoint and sexually assaulted after count.

The investigative apparatus fared no better than the housing decisions. A Sexual Abuse Response Team concluded that a man's allegation that his cellmate at Dooly State Prison sexually assaulted him must be false because the two men were assigned to different cells — apparently without considering that the cellmate might not have been in his assigned cell. At ASMP, a man alleged that another incarcerated person entered his cell, threatened him with a knife, and forcibly penetrated his mouth over two hours; despite the narrative stating the allegations were substantiated, SART investigators checked a box stating they were unsubstantiated, so the district attorney declined to prosecute and the Office of Professional Standards closed its investigation administratively. In a December 2022 GDCP case, a man reported that six men came into his cell, extorted him, and two forcibly penetrated his mouth, then locked him in the cell for about 13 hours; investigators recommended closing the case for lack of evidence when a sexual assault nurse examiner could not detect seminal fluid.

GPS has documented sexual violence in GDC facilities as systemic, not facility-isolated. The October 2024 DOJ letter concluded that sexual assault is "rampant" and that GDC "does not reasonably protect incarcerated individuals, including LGBTI individuals, from sexual harm." Of 456 sexual-abuse allegations recorded in 2022, only 35 were substantiated — 7.7 percent. GDC's own consultants, PREA Auditors of America, reviewed 388 PREA investigation files in May 2022 and found that not one met the law's standards. Georgia has never submitted a PREA certification of full compliance to the U.S. Department of Justice in the law's two-decade history.

The Staff Who Were Supposed to Stop It

The violence record includes officers as victims, officers as perpetrators, and officers as bystanders.

Correctional Officer Robert Clark, 42, died at a hospital after an inmate assaulted him with a homemade weapon at Smith State Prison in Glennville. According to GDC, Clark was escorting two inmates from the dining hall when one attacked him from behind; a second inmate who tried to help was also wounded. GDC announced that Offender Layton Lester would be charged in the assault and resulting death of Clark, as well as the assault of offender Marko Willingham. The Clark killing was the second killing of a staff member at Smith State Prison in less than a year; Aramark food service employee Aureon Grace was killed while on the job when, investigators said, inmate Jaydrekus Hart shot her in the prison kitchen in the early morning hours of June 16, 2024, and then shot himself.

At Telfair State Prison, Warden Andrew McFarlane was stabbed by a prisoner with a homemade weapon during a disturbance that began about 11:30 a.m. on March 20, 2024, when staff were conducting a shakedown to remove contraband from a dorm and those in the dorm refused to comply with the lockdown. GDC spokesperson Joan Heath said McFarlane was not seriously injured and was treated by facility medical personnel for superficial wounds. Officers deployed tear gas to regain control. The DOJ's findings report cites the episode, noting GDC records confirm the basic details.

In the other direction, federal prosecutors have charged officers with orchestrating violence. At Wilcox State Prison, a clandestine video captured a female correctional officer and another officer moving an inmate on a cart while an inmate orderly punched him. The AJC identified the officers as Melissa Lawson, a unit manager, and Tanja O'Neal, a lieutenant; both were fired and charged with battery, riot in a penal institution, and violation of their oaths as officers. According to arrest warrants cited by the AJC, the two "utilized" inmate Erlando "Big E" Horne to strike inmate Jammie Davis in the face, head, and torso while Davis's bare feet dragged on the ground. An AJC investigation reported that some Georgia correctional officers used inmates as weapons against other inmates. One incarcerated man told the AJC in a written statement that he too was attacked in Lawson's presence at Wilcox, and that inmates labeled snitches or disowned by gangs become "de facto weapons for officers," rewarded with work details, freedom of movement and contraband.

At Augusta State Medical Prison, Correctional Officer Lloyd Hopkins was charged with felony murder, aggravated assault and violation of oath by a public officer in connection with the death of Roderick Hayes. According to arrest warrants, Hopkins helped inmates Brendon Moore, Andy Ulysse and a third inmate assault another inmate with a "machete like weapon" in an attempt to retrieve a contraband cell phone; the targeted inmate, Robert Robish, defended himself and stabbed the attacker, who died. Moore and Ulysse were charged with felony murder and aggravated assault. A separate federal indictment charged former ASMP officers Robert Roberson and Marcus Phillips with violating an inmate's constitutional rights by showing deliberate indifference to a substantial risk of harm resulting in his death — leaving him in a locked cell for several hours while a smoldering fire filled it with smoke — and Roberson was also charged with falsifying a logbook to cover up his misconduct.

At Macon State Prison, Deputy Warden James Hinton and seven former members of the Correctional Emergency Response Team were charged with federal civil rights, conspiracy or obstruction offenses arising out of incidents in which inmates were allegedly assaulted by officers. Four former CERT officers were later sentenced — Darren Douglass-Griffin to 12 months, Kerry Bolden to nine months, Emmett McKenzie to six months, and Kadarius Thomas to six months. At Valdosta State Prison, four former supervisory and deputy correctional officers were sentenced in federal court in September 2022 for orchestrating, administering, and then seeking to conceal the beating of a handcuffed inmate; court documents described Sergeant Patrick Sharpe instructing subordinate officers to assault the handcuffed man in retaliation for an earlier altercation with a female officer.

GPS records show a statewide pattern across the past year: 368 reports of alleged inmate-on-inmate assault across 23 facilities, with the highest concentrations at Washington State Prison, Dooly State Prison, Ware State Prison, Calhoun State Prison, and Macon State Prison; 69 family reports of fear for a loved one's life across 14 facilities; 22 reports of alleged excessive force across six facilities; and 20 reports of alleged assault by staff across six facilities. External complaints in this period were directed to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the DOJ Civil Rights Division, the GBI, the Georgia Attorney General, and the U.S. Department of Justice.

What the State Knew, and When

The DOJ opened a statewide investigation in 2016 into whether GDC adequately protects LGBTI incarcerated persons from sexual abuse by staff and other incarcerated persons, and expanded it in September 2021 to include protection of all incarcerated persons at medium- and close-security prisons from violence. The findings letter, dated October 1, 2024, concluded that "the State is deliberately indifferent to these unsafe conditions. The constitutional violations are exacerbated by serious deficiencies in staffing and supervision, physical condition and security of the facilities, classification and housing, management of gangs and other security threat groups, control of weapons and other contraband, and incident reporting, response, and investigations. The State has known about the unsafe conditions for years and has failed to take reasonable measures to address them."

The report described conditions as "among the most severe violations" the DOJ has uncovered in any prison system investigation, finding that "people are assaulted, stabbed, raped and killed or left to languish inside facilities that are woefully understaffed." It recommended 82 remedial measures for GDC to implement "at minimum," addressing staffing, supervision, incident response, investigations, contraband, facility conditions, classification and housing, and sexual safety.

The department's own leadership has acknowledged the staffing gap in public. GDC Commissioner Tyrone Oliver told a Georgia Senate study committee that there is evidence of less violent conflict among inmates living in single-bed cells, referencing fewer incidents reported at Smith State Prison since more of the population was moved to single cells, and said: "When you look at our violence and most of our homicides we have it is occurring in double-man cells." Georgia Public Broadcasting reported that GDC leadership told state legislators they are making progress toward adequate staffing but are not there yet.

The DOJ's own data undercuts the idea that the prison population's composition explains the curve. The share of men in Georgia's prisons sentenced for violent crimes rose from about 51 percent in 2016 to 56 percent in 2023 — and the report states this "does not explain the dramatic rise in violence in the prisons over the past five years." A study of 1,054 men in thirty prisons, published by Lahm in 2008, found that "aggressive inmates were found to commit more assaults in prisons that were more crowded."

The View From Inside

The people living in these facilities describe the same conditions the federal report documents, in plainer terms.

A Tell My Story account published by Georgia Prisoners' Speak describes a killing during the author's first week at Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in 2015: roughly 20 men chasing a middle-aged man through an open dorm with broken broomsticks, canes, and sharpened pieces of metal, beating and stabbing him until he collapsed in front of the guard booth. "The guards gathered in there watching," the author wrote. "They did nothing until the man was dead."

Another account, from a woman held at Pulaski State Prison from 2023 through July 2025, describes an empty security bubble: "There were no officers stationed in the dorms. We went for hours with no supervision. When something happened — a medical emergency, a fight, someone overdosing on K2 — other inmates had to call their families and have them call the facility to send help. That's how we got help. We called our mothers." She described fights lasting more than thirty minutes, victims managing their own wounds, and whole dorms punished afterward.

A man at Dooly State Prison wrote of eight years there: "I've seen two people murdered here. I knew three others that were murdered." A 69-year-old serving life described the ambient threat in terms that track the DOJ's "near-constant" language: "In prison there is always the looming fog of potential violence and this creates a never-ending static crackling of danger which keeps the fog thick and your nerves on edge."

The DOJ documented the same dynamic from the outside. Its report records prisoners dressing wounds themselves, relatives calling facilities to report emergencies inside, and a stabbing victim at Ware State Prison waiting half an hour while other prisoners beat on a window for help. On May 23, 2022, an incarcerated person at Ware was stabbed multiple times; there was no security staff in the dorm, so other incarcerated people beat on the window to draw attention, and it took half an hour for someone to respond. The victim was diagnosed with a collapsed lung, spent five days in the hospital, returned, was locked down in isolation, and was never interviewed about the incident.

GPS has also documented the connection between chronic hunger and degraded food quality in Georgia prisons and the violence pattern the DOJ described. The Marshall Project reported in May 2026 that Georgia spends about 60 cents per meal, and quoted GPS's Bernard Christian on how hunger sustained over years produces the frustration that feeds the pattern federal investigators documented. The Marshall Project's reporting described incarcerated people reporting food contaminated with rats, insects, and mold.

Accountability, Such As It Is

The record of consequences is thin relative to the scale of the harm, but it is not empty.

GDC settled a lawsuit in 2023 brought by an incarcerated man's family after he was strangled to death by his cellmate at Macon State Prison in 2020, a consequence, the family alleged, of GDC's deliberate indifference. The state settled the claim in the death of Bobby Edward Lee Jr. — who pleaded for protection after officials placed him in a cell with another prisoner who had previously killed a fellow parolee, and who was strangled to death in July 2020 — for $1.375 million. GDC agreed to pay $350,000 to settle a federal civil rights lawsuit brought by the estate of Damion MacClain, murdered at Hays State Prison; the lawsuit had alleged that prison officials knew 40 percent of the cell door locks at Hays were broken but did not fix the problem until three prisoners had been killed. A lawsuit accusing a dozen prison guards of beating, kicking and knocking out several handcuffed inmates at Hays was dismissed after officers agreed to a $93,000 settlement. A jury awarded David Cassady $150,000 in compensatory damages and $50,000 in punitive damages after he alleged that a corrections officer at Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison physically and sexually attacked him in October 2010.

Criminal accountability has run unevenly. A jury found Undrea Burley and Wesley Adams guilty of felony murder, aggravated assault and gang activity in the Calhoun State Prison killing of Joshua Brooks, and they were sentenced to life without parole; co-defendant Demetrius Smith was found not guilty. Correctional Officer Shakera Burns, charged in the same case, had her charges severed and was to be tried separately. Traquan Rashad Bangs was convicted of malice murder and related charges for the August 2024 stabbing death of Vincent Dyer at Baldwin State Prison and sentenced to life without parole plus five years. A Hancock County jury convicted Javaris Compton of malice murder in the stabbing death of his cellmate, Rashad Bolton. Frank Phillip Hardy Jr. was found "guilty but mentally ill" of malice murder and aggravated battery for the 2019 killing of Angel Ortiz at Calhoun State Prison and sentenced to life without parole.

And in some cases, the answer to a killing was a transfer. The DOJ documented a man whose March 2020 assault of another person at Coastal State Prison was referred to the Office of Professional Standards for investigation, but for which no record of an investigation could be located. He reentered the prison system in 2022 and strangled his cellmate to death at Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison.

Sources

This analysis draws primarily on the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division's October 1, 2024 findings report on Georgia prisons, issued with the U.S. Attorney's Offices for the Northern, Middle and Southern Districts of Georgia, and on the GDC mortality data, incident reports, and death-certificate records compiled in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's investigation of Georgia prison homicides. It draws on reporting by Georgia Public Broadcasting, The Marshall Project, the Valdosta Daily Times and CNHI, the Augusta Press, WGXA, WALB, 13WMAZ, WTOC, WSAV, News4Jax, the Union-Recorder, the Chattanooga Times Free Press, the Summerville News, and the Associated Press, as well as federal and state court filings, indictments, and arrest warrants in the Middle and Southern Districts of Georgia and Georgia superior courts. Firsthand accounts come from Georgia Prisoners' Speak's Tell My Story series and from GPS's own investigative reporting and mortality registry, which is published at gps.press/georgia-prison-deaths.