CALHOUN STATE PRISON

Analysis written on July 19, 2026.

A Medium-Security Prison Acting as Close Custody

Calhoun State Prison opened in 1994 and was built for 750 men. Today it holds 1,659 — more than double its design capacity — and, as of October 2025, 487 of those incarcerated people were classified as close-security. That 29.4% figure places Calhoun squarely among the four medium-security prisons that Georgia Prisoners’ Speak (GPS) identified in a November 2025 investigation as operating as de facto close-security facilities, with homicide rates four to five times higher than properly classified medium-security prisons. The Department of Justice documented this classification drift directly at Calhoun: its October 2024 findings report described staff failing to follow classification and housing-assignment procedures, a breakdown that led to the 2022 homicide of DaQuavious Cachone Lackey, 21, who was beaten to death with a fan motor inside a net bag by a cellmate after a series of unmonitored moves between segregation and general population.

The population mismatch is not accidental. GPS has documented that the Georgia Department of Corrections systematically places close-security individuals into medium-security prisons without adding the staffing, programming, or infrastructure that a higher-security facility would require. At Calhoun, that contradiction has produced a record of violence that the state’s own numbers obscure. The DOJ found that from January through May 2024, Georgia listed only six prison homicides while internal incident reports showed at least 18; the agency’s practice of reporting homicides as “unknown” or “undetermined” causes of death, the report concluded, was deliberate. GPS has independently tracked 1,848 deaths in GDC custody since 2020, 29 of them at Calhoun State Prison.

The Toll: Homicides, Neglect, and Deaths Behind Walls

The deaths at Calhoun form a pattern that federal investigators called “an environment of fear and complacency.” In May 2022, DaQuavious Lackey was killed after a roommate with a violent history was placed in his cell without proper screening. In February 2023, a 24-year-old incarcerated man was found dead in a restrictive-housing cell, his body already seven to eight hours dead; the coroner ruled dehydration with renal failure. The DOJ later determined that staff had shut off his water, closed his door flap, and failed to deliver meals for two days. In October 2023, Martel Dorsey, 34, ran from a dorm chased by other prisoners and was stabbed to death. In May 2024, Kenneth Piper, 37, was killed in an inmate-on-inmate assault. Two months later, on July 17, 2024, Gonzalo Colmenero, 54, died in another assault. In January 2025, Willie Andrew Willis Jr. suffered catastrophic injuries after what his family alleges was a fall from a balcony — or being thrown — and died of sepsis after nearly an hour passed before he was airlifted.

In December 2025, Matthew Len Nutt, 37, died at Calhoun. His death has not been officially confirmed by the GDC, but GPS’s mortality database records it under cause category 3. Freddie Lee Patterson, 51, died in May 2026; Jimmy McMullen, 67, in January 2026. A Georgia Department of Public Health inspection is not the instrument for detecting these failures. The DOJ found that less than 10% of fights, less than 23% of inmate-on-inmate assaults, and less than 6% of incidents involving weapons were forwarded for investigation. GPS’s intelligence system recorded 12 distinct assault-by-inmate signals in the past year, along with multiple death-in-custody reports and at least nine external complaints filed to entities including the DOJ Civil Rights Division and federal investigators.

The Quiet Purge: 87 Lifers Out, Short-Timers In

In late 2025 and early 2026, under Warden Kendric Jackson, Calhoun State Prison executed a mass transfer that GPS has called a systematic population swap. Over less than three months, 87 incarcerated people serving life sentences were transferred out of the facility. GPS data shows that 79% were sent to Level 5 close-security prisons — among them John Morgan Coleman, 82, who was moved from medium-security Calhoun to Hancock State Prison. A concentrated wave of 36 lifers moved in the final week of March 2026 alone. No other medium-security prison in Georgia was doing anything similar.

At the same time, GPS’s transfer tracking reveals that Calhoun was receiving short-term inmates from the very close-security facilities to which it was exporting lifers. The result was a population shift away from a stable long-term cohort toward a younger, higher-turnover group with release dates within a few years. The transfer wave disproportionately affected Black lifers and older incarcerated people; a significant share were over 60, many had clean disciplinary records, and almost none had parole ineligibility — they were not serving life without parole. Family members and inmate witnesses reported that administration had expressed a goal of removing life-sentenced people from the facility. The transfers, GPS staff determined from scheduling patterns, followed a pre-planned rotating schedule consistent with an administrative initiative, not a response to individual incidents.

The GDC has not explained the transfers. In June 2026, Charles Leonard Hudson replaced Kendric Jackson as warden. The transfers stopped. GPS’s internal analysis confirmed that a disproportionate share of all medium-to-close-security lifer transfers statewide in 2024–2025 originated at Calhoun, making the prison a statistical outlier.

Staff Misconduct and the Evidence That Vanished

Contraband cell phones made Calhoun a command center for crime well beyond its walls. In January 2026, a five-day federal trial convicted Joey Amour Jackson and Lance Riddle of running a nationwide wire-fraud and extortion operation from inside the prison that stole $464,920 from 119 victims in six states. They spoofed police department phone numbers, threatened women with arrest warrants, and instructed victims to strip naked in store bathrooms. Before that, Edwin Murillo brokered meth sales from Calhoun and was sentenced to 300 months; he later received a life sentence for directing a 2021 torture and murder. Jonathan Alvin Pope led a multi-county drug ring that led to the indictment of 13 others, seven also incarcerated. Pedro Barragan Valencia brokered more than 250 kilograms of meth. Irvin Falcon, 23 at the time, directed meth deliveries in the Fitzgerald area.

Staff were often the conduits. Correctional officer Temperess Johnson was caught in 2019 smuggling eight cellphones and 2.6 pounds of meth in a GDC van and received a five-year federal sentence. In February 2020, officers Corlethia Lattimore and Imani Ferguson arrived for work with Hot Pockets packages that allegedly contained 112 grams of methamphetamine and tobacco; both were immediately fired. Yet charges against them were dismissed in July 2023 because the drug evidence was never submitted to the GBI crime lab for testing. An Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation in June 2025 revealed that the GDC failed to submit drug evidence in at least 11 cases involving 15 defendants, including five prison employees, collapsing prosecutions and prompting a superior court clerk to note that more than 300 cases remained pending after a grand jury heard only 35. The Calhoun County Sheriff’s Department similarly failed to submit evidence in 12 cases it investigated near the prison. GDC investigator Ruby Long obtained arrest warrants in the Hot Pockets case but never sent the drugs to the lab.

The DOJ documented that staff at Calhoun retaliated against incarcerated people who complained: grievance files reviewed by investigators included a complaint alleging extortion and gang violence that was rejected as untimely with no follow-up. An incarcerated person who died of dehydration had his food and water cut off after he threw water through his cell door flap. GPS has received multiple inmate accounts of staff threatening to use pepper spray on crowds for talking, denying meals as punishment, and using racial slurs. Family members report that during lockdowns, cell doors were padlocked from the outside — a practice that GPS analysis notes creates a fire-safety hazard because staff cannot rapidly open multiple cells without individual keys.

Food, Sanitation, and the Inspection Mirage

On paper, Calhoun’s kitchens are clean. Georgia Department of Public Health routine inspections from 2023 through January 2026 returned scores between 96 and 100 — all Grade A. The violations cited were minor: handwashing-facility accessibility, physical-facilities maintenance, pest control. But GPS’s systemic investigation “Dunked, Stacked, and Served” has documented a pattern across Georgia’s prisons in which high DPH scores coexist with broken tray-sanitizing dishwashers, sustained vermin infestation, and meals served on visibly contaminated trays. The state spends roughly $1.69 per person per day on food — under 60 cents per meal — against an FDA Thrifty Food Plan estimate of around $10 per day for an adequate diet. Inmate witnesses at Calhoun describe food distribution controlled by gang-affiliated individuals, with stronger inmates selling or trading food away from the weak. Group punishment that denies meals or commissary for an entire housing unit, witnesses report, creates food scarcity that fuels violence. The Marshall Project’s May 2026 investigation into Georgia prison food, which documented rats in kitchens, moldy trays, and visible malnutrition, cited GPS’s work connecting chronic underfeeding to the violence pattern the DOJ found.

A Landscape of Gang Control, Neglect, and Understaffing

Correctional officer vacancies across Georgia have run between 49% and 60% for years. At some prisons, the ratio of officers to incarcerated people has collapsed to the point that a single officer is responsible for an entire compound. Former GDC sergeant Tyler Ryals, who worked at multiple facilities including Telfair, told GPS that he was once the only security person on a compound of roughly 1,250 maximum-security inmates. At Calhoun, the staffing shortage is visible in the payments GDC made in the first quarter of 2025 to the Calhoun County Sheriff: nearly $127,000 to Sheriff Josh Hilton and eight deputies for off-duty perimeter patrol at $45 per hour — a public acknowledgment that the prison cannot secure its own perimeter.

The DOJ’s 2024 investigation found that gangs effectively run multiple Georgia facilities, controlling access to phones, showers, food, and bed assignments. Inmate witnesses at Calhoun report that a senior security official’s aides are all gang-affiliated, and that those aides have summoned gang members from other housing areas to carry out sanctioned beatings at the direction of a deputy warden. Multiple accounts describe nonaffiliated incarcerated people being deliberately placed into gang-controlled dorms and assaulted, with staff using inmate-on-inmate violence to enforce their will or express disapproval. GPS’s intelligence system logged assault-by-staff, excessive force, and staff-misconduct signals at high severity over multiple months, as well as repeated reports of grievanace obstruction.

The April 1, 2026, statewide coordinated gang violence — a Blood-on-Blood factional war between ROLACC and G-Shine sets — locked down at least 12 prisons. At Washington State Prison, four people were killed on January 11, 2026, and the facility remained on continuous lockdown for months. While Calhoun was not among the facilities named in that specific outbreak, its conditions — a medium-security prison flooded with close-security inmates, inadequate staffing, gang control, and retaliatory housing placements — replicate the conditions that produced the outbreak elsewhere.

External Oversight and the Price of Failure

The DOJ’s investigation named Calhoun State Prison prominently. Federal investigators concluded that staff failed to follow classification and housing-assignment procedures, leading to a foreseeable homicide; that a man died of dehydration after his water was cut off and his cell-flap closed; that EMS delays averaged 30 minutes during emergencies; and that incarcerated people cleaned and dressed their own wounds using toothpaste, coffee grounds, and dirt because medical help was unavailable or delayed. The state has paid a price for these failures: a $3.25 million settlement to the estate of Reginald Jacobs Jr. for a 2023 death at Calhoun, and payouts of $998,715 to Angel M. Ortiz, $10,000 to Asmar Rasheed, and $1,400 to Lasharon Brantley. The prison’s mortality count, according to GPS records, now stands at 29 — a number that includes homicides, suspicious deaths, and deaths from conditions that witnesses argue were neglected.

In 2025, the GDC installed a Managed Access System (MAS) at Calhoun, part of a $50 million capital investment meant to block contraband cell phones. The technology arrived after the wire-fraud ring had already victimized 119 people and after years of drug trafficking that put kilos of meth on Georgia’s streets. The Hot Pockets cases remain a cautionary example of what happens when evidence is never tested, and the mass transfer of lifers remains an open question: what did the state gain by moving 87 people, many elderly and most without disciplinary records, into higher-security prisons, and why did it stop when the warden changed?

Sources

This analysis draws on GPS’s own investigative reporting, including “The Classification Crisis,” “The Quiet Purge: Calhoun Edition,” and ongoing transfer-tracking work; the U.S. Department of Justice’s October 2024 findings report on Georgia prisons; reporting from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, WALB, and The Marshall Project; Georgia Department of Public Health inspection records; Georgia Department of Administrative Services settlement ledgers; GDC open-records productions; federal court filings and news accounts of convictions; and inmate and family accounts collected by GPS staff.