Calhoun State Prison

Calhoun State Prison is a medium-security GDC facility in Morgan, Calhoun County, built in 1993 and opened in 1994. Designated to house adult male felons, the facility carries an official capacity of 1,677 against an original design capacity of 750 — meaning it operates at more than double the population the physical plant was engineered to hold. As of the most recent population snapshot, 1,663 people are confined there. Warden Kendric Jackson assumed the facility lead role in December 2024.

What that designation conceals is the substance of this analysis. By October 2025, 487 of the people held at Calhoun — 29.4% of the population — were classified as close-security custody, the second-highest tier in Georgia's system. GPS reporting has identified Calhoun as one of four nominally medium-security prisons functioning as de facto close-security facilities, a phenomenon GPS terms "classification drift." The consequences documented below — a federal Department of Justice investigation citing the facility by name in connection with two prisoner deaths, a generation of contraband-smuggling prosecutions that collapsed because evidence was never tested, prisoner-run interstate fraud rings operating through smuggled cell phones, and a sustained wave of lifer transfers that began reshaping the facility's population in 2024 — describe an institution in which the gap between designation and reality has become the operational condition.

A Medium-Security Designation Operating as Something Else

GPS's investigative reporting frames Calhoun as one of four Georgia medium-security prisons housing close-security populations in the 27.7%–29.7% range without the staffing or infrastructure that close-security designation requires. In the report "The Classification Crisis: How Four Medium Security Prisons Are Killing People," GPS documents 8–10 confirmed homicides at these four facilities between January and November 2025, against just two at all other medium-security prisons combined — a four-to-five-fold differential. GPS's reporting attributes that gap to classification drift compounded by correctional-officer vacancy rates that have averaged roughly 50% statewide while prison populations have doubled.

The system-wide framing supplied by GPS's reporting is that GDC operates at 99.9% of claimed capacity (50,238 of 50,279) while many individual facilities exceed their original design capacity by 188%–568%. Calhoun's own ratio — 1,663 people in housing designed for 750 — sits squarely inside that band. GPS staff observations of incoming-classification documentation at Calhoun indicate that parole-hearing history and prior appeals are not consistently captured at initial contact, a procedural gap with downstream implications for housing assignment and parole posture.

The DOJ Investigation and Two Named Deaths

The U.S. Department of Justice's 2024 investigation of the Georgia Department of Corrections found, as WALB and other Georgia outlets reported, that the system fails to provide constitutionally required minimum physical safety. Federal investigators concluded that less than 10% of prison fights, less than 23% of inmate-on-inmate assaults, and less than 6% of incidents involving weapons were forwarded for investigation system-wide; that EMS responses to GDC facilities are delayed an average of 30 minutes by understaffing; and that incarcerated people were documented cleaning their own wounds with toothpaste, coffee grounds, and dirt because medical help was unavailable. WALB also reported the DOJ finding that Georgia deliberately underreports prison homicides, listing deaths identified as homicides in internal incident reports as "unknown" in official mortality data — a discrepancy GPS reporting illustrated with the June 2024 figures showing 18 internally documented homicides reported externally as 6.

Two deaths at Calhoun anchor the DOJ's facility-specific findings. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported the May 2022 killing of DaQuavious Cachone Lackey, 21, who died from a stab wound to the neck and multiple blunt-force injuries inflicted by his cellmate using a fan motor stuffed in a net bag. The DOJ report alleged that staff failed to follow procedures when moving Lackey's assailant between segregation and general population, resulting in Lackey being housed with the man who killed him. The second case — reported by both the AJC and WALB — involved a 24-year-old in a restrictive-housing cell who died of dehydration with renal failure in February 2023 after staff cut off his food and water following an incident in which he threw water through his cell door flap. WALB reported that staff shut off his water, closed the door flap, and did not deliver meals for two days; the coroner believed he had been dead for seven to eight hours before being found. A grievance filed by an incarcerated person at Calhoun alleging extortion and gang violence was, per WALB, rejected as untimely with no follow-up — one of the procedural failures cited in the federal findings.

A Mortality Record That Outruns the Headlines

GPS-tracked mortality records document 28 deaths at Calhoun State Prison, a roster considerably larger than the two cases at the center of the DOJ findings. The recent record includes several deaths the AJC has covered as homicides — Gonzalo Colmenero, 54, killed in an inmate-to-inmate assault on July 17, 2024; Kenneth Piper, 37, killed in an inmate-to-inmate assault on May 4, 2024; and Martel Dorsey, 32 in GDC's official record but reported as 34 by the AJC, stabbed by other prisoners and chased from a dorm in incidents the AJC's reporting and GPS's mortality database both register. WALB and other outlets reported the death of Willie Andrew Willis Jr., 27, on October 21, 2024, after he suffered catastrophic injuries at the facility; medical records list sepsis as the cause. His family alleges he was thrown from a balcony by other prisoners and that nearly an hour passed before he was airlifted for treatment, with family members publicly disputing nurses' accounts that Willis came to the medical unit for Tylenol and returned to his dorm before collapsing.

More recent deaths sit in GPS's mortality database without corresponding public news coverage to date. Matthew Len Nutt, 37, died on December 21, 2025; GPS records the death in cause-category 3, the same category assigned to several of the AJC-reported homicides at the facility. GDC has not officially confirmed Nutt's death. Jimmy McMullen, 67, died on January 28, 2026. Theodore Roundtree died on January 19, 2025, also in cause-category 3. The pattern of deaths concentrated in the close-security-deflected population GPS has been tracking — younger men dying violently alongside older men dying of medical causes the facility's clinical posture has not been able to forestall — runs the length of the recent record.

GPS records additionally show a sustained pattern of reports in this category: across the past twelve months, eight death-in-custody signal sources at Calhoun reaching critical severity, nine assault-by-inmate-alleged sources, eight medical-neglect-alleged sources, and eight family-fear-for-life sources, with monthly concentration spiking in January and February 2026. The aggregate pattern corroborates the trajectory the named cases describe.

A Generation of Collapsed Contraband Prosecutions

Some of the most concrete documentation of operational failure at Calhoun comes from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's reporting on a sustained breakdown in drug-evidence handling. In February 2020, correctional officers Corlethia Lattimore and Imani Ferguson were arrested after arriving for their shifts with Hot Pockets packages alleged to contain — in Lattimore's case — 112 grams of methamphetamine, four times the trafficking-charge threshold, and in Ferguson's, tobacco. Both were immediately fired. Charges against both were dismissed in July 2023 because no crime lab report or law enforcement report existed to support them: GDC investigator Ruby Long had taken out the arrest warrants but, the AJC reported, never submitted the drug evidence to the GBI crime lab for testing, and the four-year statute of limitations ran out.

The Hot Pockets dismissal was not isolated. The AJC documented that nearly two dozen Calhoun-related drug-smuggling cases producing 33 arrests between 2018 and 2021 were dismissed by District Attorney Joe Mulholland for the same reason — drug evidence was never submitted to the GBI crime lab. Five prison employees and dozens of other suspected smugglers walked free. The AJC found that GDC failed to submit drug evidence in at least 11 dismissed cases involving 15 defendants, including five prison employees, undermining the agency's stated "zero tolerance" policy on drug smuggling. The Calhoun County Sheriff's Department failed to submit evidence in 12 of its own cases despite the sheriff's claim that deputies had sent evidence to the state lab. The AJC also reported that GDC's public statement on the number of dismissed cases conflicted with what the paper found in court files. In May 2021, three civilians were arrested on meth-trafficking charges connected to the facility; the case was dismissed in July 2022 with GBI confirming testing was incomplete.

A 2019 case stands as a counterexample of what successful prosecution from these arrests looks like: Calhoun officer Temperess Johnson was caught attempting to smuggle eight cellphones and 2.6 pounds of meth in a GDC van, the AJC reported, and was sentenced to five years in federal prison.

Prisoner-Run Criminal Enterprises and the Cell-Phone Problem

The contraband at Calhoun has not been only consumed inside the walls. The AJC reported that prisoners at the facility have used smuggled cellphones to run substantial criminal enterprises. Edwin Murillo brokered major methamphetamine sales in several northeast Georgia counties from inside Calhoun and was sentenced to 300 months in federal prison in April 2019; he was later sentenced to life for directing a 2021 torture and murder. The AJC reported that Murillo ordered the killing of a woman after a business relationship collapsed and he no longer trusted her, resulting in her torture, murder, and dismemberment. Pedro Barragan Valencia was sentenced in December 2023 to 400 months in federal prison for brokering distribution of at least 250 kilograms of methamphetamine from inside the facility. Jonathan Alvin Pope led a drug ring operating in at least seven Georgia counties going back to 2018, with 13 others indicted — seven of them also incarcerated — and was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison. Irvin Falcon, 23, used a contraband cellphone to direct meth deliveries in the Fitzgerald area and was sentenced to 260 months in federal prison; six others were also convicted.

GPS reporting documented that two Calhoun inmates were convicted of running a nationwide wire-fraud and extortion operation from inside the facility using contraband cell phones; the scheme targeted 119 victims across six states. GDC installed a Managed Access System (MAS) at Calhoun in mid-2025 — after that operation had already run its course. The MAS deployment, GPS reporting documents, spans 34 state prisons at a capital cost of $50 million and ongoing operating expenses exceeding $15 million annually, intended to monitor and block unauthorized cellular signals at facilities including Hays, Calhoun, Wilcox, and Dooly.

GPS reporting also documented that in the first three months of 2025, GDC paid Calhoun County Sheriff Josh Hilton and eight of his deputies nearly $127,000 for off-duty perimeter patrol of Calhoun State Prison at $45 per hour — a notable adjacent arrangement given the parallel evidence-handling failures the AJC documented in cases the sheriff's department investigated. The AJC also reported that a June 2, 2025 grand jury heard 35 Calhoun-related cases, with more than 300 cases remaining pending afterward according to the Superior Court clerk.

The Lifer Transfer Wave

Beginning in 2024 and accelerating sharply through March 2026, GPS's reporting and GPS staff verification using the offender data tool documented a systematic outflow of life-sentenced incarcerated people from Calhoun State Prison. GPS reporting recorded the transfer of 87 lifers out of the facility, with 79.3% routed to Level 5 close-security facilities over a three-month period. A concentrated wave of 36 lifer transfers occurred in the final week of March 2026 alone. One case GPS surfaced — John Morgan Coleman, age 82, a lifer at Calhoun — was transferred to Hancock State Prison, a Level 5 close-security facility.

GPS staff initiated a verification investigation against the underlying transfer reports, using GDC offender data, and observed that classification and initial-contact documentation at the facility omitted parole-hearing history and prior appeals — a procedural gap that complicates any external review of whether these reclassifications were justified by individual record or driven by population-management decisions. GPS records show recurring family-attestation and inmate-witness reports describing transfers of long-tenured residents with clean disciplinary records to higher-security facilities, with simultaneous inflow of close-security disciplinary transfers reclassified to medium — a pattern GPS analysis frames as a deliberate shift in population composition from a long-term-stable medium-security population toward a short-term throughput model. GPS records additionally document four due-process-violation-alleged sources reaching the DOJ Civil Rights Division in connection with the facility over the past twelve months.

Inspections, the Routine Side of the Record

Apart from the violence and contraband record, Calhoun's most routine external scrutiny — Georgia Department of Public Health food-safety inspections — has produced uniformly passing results. DPH inspector Ken Collins's most recent rounds, conducted January 7, 2026, returned scores of 96, 96, and 98, all Grade A. Earlier 2025 inspections returned scores of 100, 100, and 99 in July and 100, 100, and 98 in January. The 2024 and 2023 inspection rounds posted similar results, with scores consistently between 96 and 100. The DPH record does not capture the conditions issues — medical-response delay, classification failures, weapons circulation, food-deprivation as restrictive-housing practice — that drive the federal findings and the mortality record at this facility.

External Complaints and the Outside Eye

GPS records show that, over the past twelve months, ten distinct sources contributed to external-complaint-filed signals at Calhoun reaching critical, high, and moderate severity, with named external recipients including the DOJ Civil Rights Division, federal investigators, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and a named detective. Six staff-misconduct-alleged-named signal sources reached the system over the same period, and an additional four unnamed-staff signals registered. The concentration of these external referrals — federal civil-rights, federal investigators, and the state's leading newspaper of record all named in the recipient field — places Calhoun among the GDC facilities whose conditions have been most aggressively pushed into outside accountability channels in the past year.

Sources

This analysis draws on extensive reporting by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on contraband prosecutions, prisoner-run criminal enterprises, evidence-handling failures, and named homicides at Calhoun State Prison; on WALB television reporting of the DOJ findings and the Willie Andrew Willis Jr. case; on the U.S. Department of Justice's 2024 investigation of the Georgia Department of Corrections; on GPS's own investigative reporting including "The Classification Crisis: How Four Medium Security Prisons Are Killing People" and GPS's tracking of lifer transfers, Managed Access System deployments, and statewide coordinated gang violence; on Georgia Department of Public Health food-safety inspection records; on GDC personnel records and GPS's mortality database; and on accounts collected by GPS staff from incarcerated people, families, and other sources at the facility.