News from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Lawmakers get jump on prison budget during rare subcommittees meeting This article originally appeared in Politically Georgia AM. Gov. Brian Kemp won’t reveal his budget for another week. But we’ll get a sneak peek at a big part of it today during a special meeting at the state Capitol. Department of Corrections Commissioner Tyrone Oliver …
TORPY: Inhumanity rules at Georgia’s prisons. But does anyone care? The conditions in Georgia’s prison system are anything but humane. But the humans involved are convicted criminals, so that largely draws shrugs. In October, federal investigators released a report that “lays bare the horrific and inhumane conditions” inside Georgia’s prisons. “Our statewide investigation exposes long-standing, …
Georgia prison system engages in deception as crisis builds U.S. District Judge Marc T. Treadwell had seen enough. The defendants in a long-running civil case had come into his courtroom and repeatedly claimed to have lived up to the terms of a settlement when they clearly had not. He did not mince words. “The Court …
New report: Georgia laws on crime contribute to school-to-prison pipeline Former Gov. Zell Miller is most often remembered for the monumental HOPE Scholarship that sent more Georgia students to college at a minimal cost. A report on the school-to-prison pipeline released Tuesday contends Miller also sent more teens to prison as a result of changes …
As an ER doctor, I see it all in the prison-hospital-prison pipeline All we had was this empty hall spot. The 4-foot barrier separating the gurneys from the computer workstations had a few opened apple juice containers on top of it from the previous patient. I grabbed them and tossed them in the trash and …
Rare killings of women come to light as Georgia prisons set homicide record When a prisoner at Lee Arrendale State Prison was found dead in her cell this spring, Hallie Reed called her mother in a panic. Reed was in the same mental health unit as the dead woman, Sherry Joyce, and she told her …
Death behind bars: Here’s how Georgia prisoners are being killed Georgia prisons saw an unprecedented 38 homicides in 2023, topping the previous record of 31 the year before. This year’s death toll has already set another horrific record. At least 44 people have been homicide victims so far in 2024. Among the recent homicides is …
Georgia prison guards convicted in contraband trial A Baldwin County jury found three former correctional officers guilty Wednesday in a trial that exposed a scheme to smuggle drugs and cellphones into a privately operated state prison. Natashia Seals, Tierra Harrison and Shanell Brown, who all worked at Riverbend Correctional Facility in Milledgeville, were found guilty …
Georgia preps for fight as feds expose horrific prison conditions One by one they stepped to the podium in a spare room at the Richard Russell federal building in Atlanta, the Justice Department’s top civil rights official and all three of Georgia’s U.S. attorneys. They used different words and offered up their own disturbing examples, …
DOJ finds Georgia prisons in chaos, state ‘indifferent’ to unsafe conditions A federal investigation has uncovered stunning violence, rampant sexual assaults, gang-run facilities and other startling conditions in an out-of-control Georgia state prison system, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Tuesday. “The findings report we issue today lays bare the horrific and inhumane conditions that …