CALHOUN STATE PRISON

Analysis written on August 16, 2026.

Calhoun State Prison, in Morgan in rural Calhoun County, is a medium-security prison for adult men that opened in 1994. GDC rates it for 1,677 people, but the facility's original design capacity was 750; GPS's database shows 1,657 people in custody as of the August 2026 snapshot — 98.8 percent of rated capacity and more than double the building's original design. Under Warden Kendric Jackson, Calhoun has become a place where several of the crises that Georgia Prisoners' Speak (GPS) and federal investigators have documented across the Georgia system converge: classification drift that packs close-security men into a medium-security compound, homicides and deaths in custody that outrun official accounting, gang control of housing and food, contraband phone and drug economies, and a 2026 wave of transfers that emptied the facility of long-serving lifers. GPS has tracked 29 deaths at Calhoun since 2020 — seven of them homicides — with most of the remainder still recorded as unknown or pending.

A Medium-Security Prison Carrying Close-Security Weight

Calhoun is officially designated medium-security. The Georgia Department of Public Health's food-service inspections, taken alone, describe a facility scoring near-perfect marks on routine walkthroughs. The security picture told a different story by October 2025, when GDC's own records showed 487 close-security inmates housed at Calhoun — 29.4 percent of the population. That is not an isolated quirk. In its investigation The Classification Crisis: How Four Medium Security Prisons Are Killing People, GPS obtained open-records data showing Dooly, Wilcox, Calhoun, and Washington State Prisons were holding close-security populations of roughly 28 to 30 percent — far above properly classified medium-security facilities — while operating without the staffing and infrastructure that close custody demands. The piece documented homicide rates four to five times higher than properly classified prisons and 33 deaths across those four facilities in 2024 alone, more than half of them men under 50. The Department of Justice, GPS noted, had found all four facilities in violation of the Eighth Amendment; GDC's response, the report said, was to stop reporting causes of death.

The DOJ's Calhoun Findings and a Death Roster

When the Justice Department's civil-rights investigation into Georgia's prisons became public, WALB reported in February 2026 that federal investigators concluded GDC fails to provide incarcerated people the constitutionally required minimum of physical safety. The findings did not spare Calhoun. Federal investigators documented the case of an incarcerated man who died in February 2023 of dehydration with renal failure: staff had shut off his water, closed the door flap, and not delivered meals for two days. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported separately that the man was 24 years old, that the denial followed an incident in which he threw water through his cell-door flap, and that the coroner believed he had been dead seven to eight hours before he was found. In the 2022 killing of DaQuavious Cachone Lackey, 21 — beaten by a cellmate with a fan motor in a net bag after staff moved the assailant through segregation and general population without following classification and housing procedures — the DOJ concluded the classification failure directly contributed. A grievance alleging extortion and gang violence was rejected as untimely with no follow-up.

GPS's mortality database, which begins in 2020 and counts only what it can verify, records 29 deaths at Calhoun: seven homicides, fifteen unknown or pending causes, five natural or medical deaths, one suicide, and one classified as deliberate indifference. The count is a floor — GDC reports deaths roughly two months late. Named among those killed since 2022 are Lackey; Martel Dorsey, 34, stabbed by other prisoners on October 4, 2023; Kenneth Piper, 37, killed in an inmate-to-inmate assault on May 4, 2024; and Gonzalo Colmenero, 54, who died July 17, 2024 after an inmate-to-inmate assault, per AJC incident-report tracking. The family of Willie Andrew Willis Jr. alleges he was thrown from a balcony and that nearly an hour passed before he was airlifted; medical records list sepsis as his cause of death, while nurses gave what the family calls a conflicting account — that he had walked to medical for Tylenol and collapsed after returning to his dorm. Matthew Len Nutt, 37, appears in GPS's database as a December 21, 2025 homicide; GDC has not confirmed his death.

Systemwide, the DOJ documented the scale of undercounting this estate masks: in the first five months of 2024, Georgia reported six prison homicides while internal GDC incident reports showed at least eighteen. Across all GDC facilities, GPS has tracked 1,861 deaths since 2020. GPS's internal records reinforce the picture at Calhoun over the twelve months to mid-2026: twelve distinct sources across four months reported inmate-on-inmate assaults, nine family accounts expressed fear for a loved one's life, eight reported deaths in custody, and eight alleged medical neglect. External complaints went to the DOJ Civil Rights Division and other federal and local bodies, with clusters of critical-severity death and assault signals logged in January and February 2026.

Staffing Collapse and the Gangs' Grip

The forces that produced this ledger are structural. GPS's systemic findings put officer vacancies between 49.3 and 60 percent statewide for multiple years, against a national standard of no more than ten percent, with Valdosta State Prison reaching 80 percent by early 2024. Georgia ranks last among the fifty states in correctional-officer pay, more than four in five new hires leave within a year, and the October 2024 DOJ letter concluded that GDC leadership "has lost control of its facilities." Roughly 31 percent of the system's population are validated members of 315 different security-threat groups — more than double the national average — and the DOJ and the Guidehouse 2024 assessment both concluded that gangs effectively run multiple facilities, controlling access to phones, showers, food, and beds. GPS's reporting put two former commanders on the record on this point: Tyler Ryals, a former GDC sergeant forced out in 2024 after whistleblowing, told GPS he was at times the only security person on the entire Telfair compound of roughly 1,250 maximum-security inmates; a second former commander, Zirkle, went on record alongside him in GPS's "Two Commanders Say Georgia Hides Its Prison Staffing Crisis."

At Calhoun, GPS staff observed reported patterns consistent with gang control of housing and weekend supervision gaps, and GPS has received recurring accounts of food distribution run by stronger or gang-affiliated prisoners rather than staff, of housing placements that put nonviolent and near-release men in cells with violent or gang-affiliated cellmates, and of staff using gang members to enforce discipline. GPS has received accounts of staff deploying Tasers and pepper spray for nonviolent infractions, and of meals and commissary denied to entire housing units as group punishment. Multiple reports to GPS also described cell doors padlocked from the outside during a lockdown; GPS's review notes that such a practice, if it occurred as described, would conflict with normal lockdown procedure and create an emergency-egress hazard. The stakes were visible systemwide: on April 1, 2026, GPS documented coordinated Blood-on-Blood gang violence that locked down at least a dozen Georgia prisons, with stabbings at five and life flights dispatched to two.

The Quiet Purge: Shedding the Lifers

In early 2026, GPS's reporting documented a population shift with no announced policy behind it. In less than three months, Warden Kendric Jackson transferred 87 lifers out of Calhoun, 79 percent of them to Level 5 close-security facilities; 36 of those moved in the final week of March alone. GPS's clean-checked investigation, "The Quiet Purge: Calhoun Edition," characterized it as a systematic population swap — stable, long-term men shipped to close custody while younger short-timers arrived from those same facilities — and found no other medium-security prison in Georgia doing anything comparable. Among those moved was John Morgan Coleman, 82, transferred from Calhoun to Hancock State Prison, a Level 5 close-security facility. GPS's internal analysis identifies Calhoun as a statistical outlier in the share of statewide medium-to-close transfers of life-sentenced people, with wave patterns in 2024–2025 and again in early 2026. GPS staff launched a data-verification investigation to confirm the transfer reports using offender-data tools; in doing so, staff observed that intake documentation at Calhoun omitted prior parole-hearing and appeals history — gaps that complicate any independent review of how classification and transfer decisions were made.

Contraband, Collapsed Drug Prosecutions, and a Paid Perimeter

Calhoun's contraband economy has repeatedly outrun the cases meant to punish it. In February 2020, correctional officers Corlethia Lattimore and Imani Ferguson were arrested after arriving for their shifts with Hot Pockets packages that allegedly contained 112 grams of methamphetamine — about four times the trafficking threshold — and tobacco; both were fired. In June 2025, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the charges were dismissed in July 2023 because no crime-lab or law-enforcement report supported them: GDC investigator Ruby Long took out the warrants but never submitted the drug evidence for testing, and the four-year statute of limitations then ran. The same AJC investigation found nearly two dozen cases tied to Calhoun — 33 arrests between 2018 and 2021 — dismissed by District Attorney Joe Mulholland because drug evidence was never sent to the GBI lab, sending five prison employees and dozens of other suspected smugglers free. The Calhoun County Sheriff's Department, the AJC found, failed to submit evidence in twelve of its own cases despite the sheriff's claim that deputies had sent everything to the state lab. A grand jury heard 35 Calhoun-related cases on June 2, 2025, with more than 300 still pending afterward, according to the Superior Court clerk.

The supply lines themselves were not hypothetical. Officer Temperess Johnson was caught in 2019 attempting to smuggle eight cellphones and 2.6 pounds of meth in a GDC van and later sentenced to five years in federal prison. The AJC has documented prisoners directing external drug networks from Calhoun on contraband phones: Jonathan Alvin Pope, sentenced to 20 years for leading a ring across at least seven Georgia counties; Pedro Barragan Valencia, sentenced to 400 months for brokering at least 250 kilograms of meth; Edwin Murillo, sentenced to 300 months for brokering meth sales and later to life for ordering the torture and murder of a woman; and Irvin Falcon, sentenced to 260 months for directing meth deliveries in the Fitzgerald area from a contraband phone. In January 2026, a federal trial produced convictions of two Calhoun prisoners for running a nationwide wire-fraud operation from inside the prison; GPS's reporting describes a scheme that defrauded 119 identified victims across six states of $464,920, including spoofing police department phone numbers. GDC's $50 million Managed Access System — part of a rollout across 34 prisons aimed at blocking unauthorized phone signals — was installed at Calhoun in mid-2025, after the fraud GPS documented had already occurred. The accountability failures the AJC found fit a pattern the DOJ described systemwide: less than 10 percent of prison fights, under 23 percent of inmate-on-inmate assaults, and under 6 percent of weapons incidents were forwarded for investigation — even though GDC's own incident-reporting policy, SOP 203.03, requires major incidents to be documented and reported.

Food-Service Scores and the Limits of Inspection

On paper, Calhoun's kitchens are consistently high-scoring. Georgia Department of Public Health routine inspections from July 2023 through January 2026 returned scores of 96 to 100 — all Grade A — with the only citations concerning handwashing-facility access, physical-facility upkeep, posting requirements, and, in one July 2023 inspection, a violation related to insects, rodents, and animals. But GPS's broader investigation is specifically skeptical of what those scores prove. Its systemic finding "Dunked, Stacked, and Served" documents that DPH scores systematically fail to capture what GPS has found in GDC kitchens elsewhere — broken tray-sanitizing dishwashers, sustained roach and rodent infestation, and meals served on visibly contaminated trays — because inspections are scheduled walkthroughs that do not test equipment under load. The Marshall Project independently reported on May 16, 2026 that rats, insects, and moldy trays are documented across Georgia facilities. The groundwork is statutory: O.C.G.A. § 42-5-2 places responsibility on the government unit holding custody to furnish food and needed medical attention. GDC's food spending — about $1.69 per person per day in 2024, under 60 cents a meal against a federal Thrifty Food Plan baseline near $10 — is the resource context GPS uses to explain why food at Georgia prisons is both a source of scarcity and an instrument of punishment.

The Liability Ledger

Open-records ledgers from the Georgia Department of Administrative Services Risk Management division record four state payouts tied to incidents at Calhoun. The largest is $3,250,000 to Reginald Jacobs Sr., for the estate of Reginald Jacobs Jr., linked by GPS to a 2023 death record. Earlier settlements include $998,715 to Angel M. Ortiz (2019), $10,000 to Asmar Rasheed (2018), and $1,400 to Lasharon Brantley (2020). These are liability payouts rather than adjudicated findings of fault, but they mark the state writing checks for harm alleged at this facility — a ledger that runs parallel to the criminal prosecutions that, in the drug cases above, often collapsed.

Sources

This analysis draws on the October 2024 U.S. Department of Justice civil-rights findings and the reporting on them by WALB and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution; the AJC's investigative coverage of the Hot Pockets arrests and the dismissed Calhoun drug cases; Georgia Department of Public Health inspection records; the Georgia Department of Administrative Services open-records settlement ledger; O.C.G.A. § 42-5-2; GDC Standard Operating Procedure 203.03; The Marshall Project's May 16, 2026 prison-food investigation; and Georgia Prisoners' Speak's own reporting, including "The Classification Crisis: How Four Medium Security Prisons Are Killing People," "The Quiet Purge: Calhoun Edition," and "Two Commanders Say Georgia Hides Its Prison Staffing Crisis." GPS's mortality database, internal records, aggregate signal logs, and inmate and family accounts collected by GPS staff round out the source base.