HAYS STATE PRISON

Hays State Prison, a close-security men's facility opened in 1990 in Trion, Chattooga County, sits at the center of nearly every category of failure documented in the Georgia prison system. Designed for 448 people and now holding 1,097 — a population it sustains only by reclassifying its rated capacity upward to 1,101 — Hays has been repeatedly cited for failures of lock security, staffing, and the protection of people in its custody. The Department of Corrections itself describes the facility as housing some of the state's "most challenging offenders." What follows is an analysis of the public record at Hays: a sustained homicide pattern stretching back more than a decade, a documented staff-corruption pipeline that has produced federal sentences, a $24 million construction response that the state is piloting on the very compound where it lost control, and a death toll that GPS's own mortality database puts at 36 incarcerated people tracked at the facility.

A Sustained Homicide Pattern, From 2012 Through 2026

The killings at Hays did not begin recently. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and GPS's investigative coverage of GDC violence both anchor the modern history of the prison in late 2012 and early 2013, when three men were murdered within a single month and a correctional officer was stabbed 22 times and survived. Contemporary reporting on that period also documented that 42% of the facility's locks were non-functional or easily defeated — a structural failure that helps explain why the homicide pattern was never an anomaly but a feature.

The pattern persisted across the decade that followed. Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporting on GDC homicides documents Anthony L. McGhee Jr., 34, who died at Hays on March 29, 2020 from complications of blunt force head trauma and sharp force trauma to the torso and extremities; Jorge Renberto Ventura-Cabrera, 35, who died on June 5, 2021 from stab wounds to the neck, torso, and upper extremities, with two other incarcerated people identified in the incident report; Quintez Smith, 25, who died on August 29, 2022 from multiple sharp force injuries; Talore Stihles Blackford, 31, who died on October 28, 2023 from multiple stab wounds to the neck; Jeremy Edward Price, 36, who died on March 2, 2024 from stab wounds to the neck and chest, classified as a homicide in incident reports and on his death certificate; and Freddie Lee Talley, 31, who died on May 6, 2024 of a stab wound to the chest in an incident from which officers recovered seven weapons ranging from 9 to 22 inches in length, with four other incarcerated people identified in the incident report. Three of those individuals received disciplinary reports but, at the time of AJC's reporting, had not been charged. Talley's stabbing produced an alternate AJC framing as well, with weapons described as ranging from 10.5 to 22 inches — a fact the paper attributed directly to the incident report.

GPS's mortality database, which tracks deaths irrespective of GDC's manner-of-death determinations, registers 36 total deaths at Hays. Recent entries include Melvin Gay Johnson, 35, who died January 27, 2026; James Cannon, 48, who died October 25, 2025; Lawrence L. Williams, 30, who died October 24, 2024; and Raymont Savion Farley, 36, who died June 15, 2025. Tammy Price, the mother of Jeremy Price, told the AJC that she still does not know what happened to her child, and has alleged that GDC is hiding its inability to protect prisoners by omitting manner-of-death information from its mortality reports — a structural complaint that GPS's parallel database is specifically designed to surface.

The Melvin Johnson Killing and the Counselor Decision

The death of Melvin Johnson at Hays in early 2026 has been treated in GPS reporting as a paradigmatic case of the facility's failures. GPS's investigative coverage describes accounts that Johnson was beaten into brain death after being returned to a dorm despite expressing safety concerns, with the decision to send him back attributed to a counselor; he subsequently died on life support. GPS's mortality records place Johnson's date of death at January 27, 2026, age 35, in the homicide cause category. The case sits at the intersection of two failures the DOJ has already documented system-wide: deliberate indifference to known safety risks, and the operational consequences of a staffing model that leaves classification and housing decisions concentrated in the hands of overworked counselors.

A historical analogue surfaces in court-anchored AJC reporting on Charles Lee Broady Jr., who at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison asked to be moved to another dorm because gang members were threatening to kill him; after being moved, six gang members slashed his face. He was subsequently transferred to Hays, where he reportedly attempted suicide and died in November 2017. The pattern — incarcerated people identifying a specific threat, being moved or returned in ways that fail to address it, and then dying — is not new at Hays. GPS has additionally received reports of an inmate-on-inmate assault pattern at the facility concentrated in April 2026, with multiple sources contributing accounts at critical, high, and moderate severity.

Staff Corruption and the Contraband Pipeline

The corruption record at Hays is documented with unusual specificity in federal sentencing records and AJC reporting. The AJC reported that Lieutenant Lakeshia Thomas was recorded by GBI in 2019 arranging to smuggle marijuana for Gangster Disciples member Jarico Deshun Brown; she pleaded guilty in April 2022 and was sentenced to 15 years with two to serve in confinement. In a separate case, AJC reporting documented that Hays officer Voltaire Pierre, over a four-month period in 2018, received $7,000 for bringing marijuana, cocaine, and methamphetamine into the prison concealed in noodle soup containers; he was sentenced to more than eight years in federal prison. A third former Hays guard was federally sentenced after smuggling methamphetamine and other contraband to incarcerated people for over a month.

The AJC's broader investigative series, cited in GPS reporting, has documented more than 425 GDC employee arrests since 2018 for on-the-job crimes — a denominator against which the Hays cases are individual data points in a system-wide pattern. GPS reporting has also described accounts of broader GDC leadership misconduct, including the arrest of a warden identified as Brian Adams on charges related to misconduct.

The $24 Million Hardened Module

In 2025, Georgia announced a $600 million prison spending surge that includes the construction of four identical "hardened" 126-bed modules across the state system. GPS reporting confirms that the first of those modules — a $24 million unit — is under construction at Hays State Prison. The decision to pilot the hardened-module approach at Hays is itself an admission about the facility: the state is treating Hays as the laboratory for whatever it intends to build elsewhere.

The bet has analytical weight given what GPS-tracked budget data show about where Georgia is otherwise spending. The Governor's Budget Report for the FY2027 cycle proposed, and the General Assembly approved, $5,521,230 for additional technology costs for the Over Watch and Logistics (OWL) Unit, framed as enhancing safety, security, and technology in state prisons. The same cycle funded three security threat group regional coordinators at $377,168, with an additional $137,802 in start-up costs for those positions appropriated in the FY2026 amended budget. The approved budget also directed GDC to "explore all options for additional closed-security, single-cell inmate capacity and report to OPB and chairs of Appropriations Committees." The legislative direction is consistent: more surveillance, more gang intelligence, more single-cell close-security beds — none of which addresses the staffing collapse that GPS reporting documents at a statewide average correctional-officer vacancy rate of roughly 50%.

The April 2026 Gang War and the Cell-Phone Blackout

Hays sits inside a system-wide event that GPS has covered extensively: a coordinated Blood-on-Blood factional war between ROLACC and G-Shine sets that erupted across Georgia prisons in 2026. GPS reporting documents 13 facilities placed on lockdown, multiple stabbings, two life-flight helicopter dispatches, and the deployment of 50-person TAC squads. GPS's own statistical compilation registers 23 homicides and 67 total deaths system-wide in Q1 2026 alone — figures GPS reporting contrasts with the 66 homicides GDC reported in 2024 (against GPS's own count of 100 for that year, with 333 total deaths).

Hays appears in this story in two ways. First, GPS reporting documents that a high-ranking ROLACC Blood set leader was stabbed multiple times in the neck during an official inspection at Hays State Prison and required CPR — an incident notable both for its target and for the fact that it occurred while inspectors were on the compound. Second, the gang war coincided with GDC's statewide rollout of Managed Access System (MAS) cell-phone blocking technology at Hays, Calhoun, Wilcox, and Dooly state prisons, and the subsequent elimination of the WiFi workaround that had given incarcerated people residual access to communication. GPS reporting on Washington State Prison documents that four people were killed there in gang violence on January 11, 2026 following the network shutdown — among them Jimmy Trammell, who had 72 hours remaining on his sentence — and that the facility has remained on continuous lockdown since.

GPS's investigative coverage links these events analytically: the $50 million MAS deployment since 2024 has coincided with record prison violence, and the loss of incarcerated people's communication channels has, in GPS's framing, removed one of the only channels through which families and outside observers learned what was happening inside in real time.

DPH Inspections and the Food-Service Record

DPH food-safety inspections at Hays since 2023, conducted by the Georgia Department of Public Health, show a kitchen operation oscillating between Grade A and Grade B. The two November 18, 2025 inspections, both conducted by Rashelle Eubanks, returned scores of 87 (Grade B) and 92 (Grade A). The two May 7, 2025 inspections returned 91 (Grade A) and 87 (Grade B). July 19, 2024 produced scores of 96 and 91, both Grade A. December 27, 2023 produced two Grade B scores of 87 and 83. August 29, 2023 produced a 97 (Grade A) and an 84 (Grade B). The split pattern — one Grade A and one Grade B from the same inspection day — is consistent with two separate food-service operations on the compound being evaluated simultaneously, with one consistently underperforming.

These DPH numbers exist alongside GPS's broader investigative framing of a systemic nutritional crisis across Georgia prisons, in which GPS-authored coverage describes accounts of severe weight loss, food rationing, and budget-driven food-service operations — accounts that GPS reporting has anchored at Rogers State Prison in particular through claims about a food service superintendent identified as Ms. Gunner.

Classification Drift, Overcrowding, and the Constitutional Question

GPS's investigative publication "The Classification Crisis: How Four Medium Security Prisons Are Killing People" frames a system-wide problem that Hays — a close-security facility — exhibits in a different form: medium-security prisons operating as close-security in fact, without the staffing or infrastructure for that role. GPS's own analytical work documents that Georgia's prison system, while claiming to operate at 99.9% of rated capacity (50,238 people against a stated 50,279), is in fact running at 188% to 568% of facilities' original design capacity. Hays's own numbers — 1,097 people in a facility designed for 448 — sit at roughly 245% of original design.

The DOJ's 2024 investigation, cited extensively in GPS reporting, found Georgia's prison system in violation of the Eighth Amendment for failing to protect incarcerated people from violence and for holding them in inhumane conditions, with specific findings of unchecked gang control, routine sexual abuse, and deliberate staff indifference to violence. GPS reporting positions Brown v. Plata (2011), the Supreme Court ruling on California prison overcrowding as cruel and unusual punishment, as the controlling precedent for any future federal intervention in Georgia.

Leadership and Continuity of Tenure

Warden Joshua Jones, GPS personnel records show, has been at Hays since at least 2015 — first as a Corrections Officer (SP), then as Correctional Officer 1 in 2020, Correctional Officer 2 in 2021 and 2022, and finally as Warden beginning July 2023, with his current rank logged as Warden 3 in 2025. He succeeded Shawn F. Emmons, who held the Warden 3 title in 2022. Three of the four current Deputy Wardens — Christopher A. McAlister (Security), Jonathan D. Swinford (Administration), and Alisa M. Hammock (Care and Treatment) — have held facility-deputy positions at Hays continuously since at least 2018; Hammock's tenure as a Hays Deputy Warden, the personnel record shows, extends back to 2016. A fourth, Gabriel IIa, holds a Deputy Warden Security role per the facility's current staff roster.

The continuity is itself a data point. The pattern of homicides, the lock failures documented in 2012–2013 reporting, the contraband convictions of 2018, 2019, and 2022, the Broady-style housing-decision failures of 2017, and the Johnson killing of January 2026 all occurred under substantially the same facility-deputy leadership team.

Sources

This analysis draws on reporting from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution — particularly its homicide-tracking and GDC-corruption coverage — and federal sentencing records cited in that reporting; the U.S. Department of Justice's 2024 investigation of the Georgia prison system; Georgia Department of Public Health food-safety inspections; GPS's own investigative coverage of the system-wide Blood-on-Blood gang war, the Managed Access System rollout, the Classification Crisis, and the $600 million prison spending surge; GPS's mortality database and personnel records; the Governor's Budget Report and approved appropriations for FY2026 amended and FY2027; and aggregate intelligence signals collected from incarcerated people, families, and community sources at Hays State Prison.