When Andrew Phillips took a job as a corrections officer at Georgia’s Smith State Prison in 2021, he was desperate for work. Shortly after he started, he noticed a problem. The prison housed about 1,500 men, and each shift was supposed to have 30 officers to guard them, but most days there were half that, …
The man who pulled off an astounding multi-million dollar heist from inside Georgia’s toughest state prison was sentenced Friday to more than 11 years in federal prison. In imposing the sentence of 135 months, U.S. District Court Judge Steve Jones also ordered Arthur Lee Cofield Jr. to pay more than $12.5 million in restitution — …
Opinion: Georgia must fix prison corruption crisis On the face of it, the mission of the Georgia Department of Corrections seems simple enough: “To protect Georgians by operating secure facilities and providing opportunities for offender rehabilitation.” But, as our investigation has revealed, the very opposite is happening. The department – and the state that funds …
As the Georgia Department of Corrections has seen record numbers of deaths from homicides, suicides and drug overdoses since 2020, it has tightened its grip on information about its prisons.Two such efforts made headlines. For six months, the GDC fought a subpoena from the U.S. Department of Justice for records related to the government’s investigation …
Listen Listening… / GPB’s Peter Biello speaks with Brian Randolph, executive director of the Human and Civil Rights Coalition of Georgia, who has been tracking reports of deaths of incarcerated people. By: Listen Listening… LISTEN: GPB’s Grant Blankenship reports on the latest number of prison deaths from the Georgia Department of Corrections. — In the …
Feds: For more than a decade, Georgia prison gang carried out murders, assaults In spite of being locked up in Georgia’s state prisons, members of the Sex Money Murder gang and their associates carried out a series of murders, brutal assaults, and fraud and drug-trafficking operations, according to a federal indictment announced Monday in Atlanta …
Little B’s prison release places focus on Ga’s juvenile justice policies The world had changed since Michael Lewis was incarcerated in 1997. As he stood in a hotel lobby following his release from Macon Transitional Facility last month his eyes darted across the room. The flat-screen TVs. The ability to pay a bill with the …
Georgia prison inmate killed after reported altercation The day after advocates held a protest over conditions in Georgia prisons, a state inmate died after a violent incident at Baldwin State Prison in Hardwick. The Georgia Department of Corrections confirmed Thursday morning the death of Johnny Vaughn “after an altercation with several inmates.” His death is …
Inside Georgia’s prisons, wave after wave of prison employees have become criminals themselves — smuggling in contraband or allowing others to do it and at times pocketing payoffs in the thousands, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation found. Prisoners have run elaborate drug-trafficking networks and cybercrime schemes as well as extortion and other criminal enterprises, all with …
Former Clayton County Sheriff Victor Hill was sentenced to 18 months in prison on Tuesday, five months after he was convicted of violating the civil rights of detainees in a facility he once called “Georgia’s toughest para-military jail.” Hill, whose reputation as a tough-as-nails lawman became so widely known that the creators of Grand Theft …