LEE STATE PRISON

Last updated August 23, 2026.(DS)

Lee State Prison: A Medium-Security Facility Inside a Collapsing System

Lee State Prison in Leesburg, Georgia, is a medium-security men's prison opened in 1979. It houses 860 people against a current rated capacity of 762 — 112.9% of rated capacity, and 134% of its original 640-person design capacity. The facility has 11 general-population housing units with two-man cells plus specialized housing for isolation, medical, and mobility-impaired prisoners, and also functions as a transfer hub and intake point for certain movements within the system. It provides outside work details and basic programming. Warden Letitia Burks leads the facility, with Deputy Warden Security Martin Jones, Deputy Warden C&T Willether Brown, and Deputy Warden Admin Matasha Cook.

GPS has tracked six deaths at Lee State Prison since 2020: two in 2020, one in 2021, two in 2024, and one in 2025. Three are classified as Unknown/Pending, two as Natural/Medical, and one as Suicide. The most recent recorded death is Quinton Pearson, 45, who died on September 8, 2025, with cause still listed as Unknown/Pending. As with all GPS mortality figures, these counts are a floor — GDC reports deaths roughly two months late.

Food-Safety Scores That Coexist With a Systemwide Sanitation Crisis

The Georgia Department of Public Health has inspected Lee State Prison's food service six times since July 2023, and the scores are uniformly strong: a 90 (Grade A) in July 2023, followed by five consecutive perfect 100s — January 2024, July 2024, January 2025, July 2025, and January 2026. The July 2023 inspection cited two violations: proper cold holding temperatures, and physical facilities installed, maintained, and clean. The subsequent five inspections, all conducted by inspector Ken Collins, found no violations at all.

But GPS's systemic findings complicate what those scores mean. GPS has documented a pattern of food-service sanitation failure across GDC kitchens that DPH inspection scores systematically fail to capture: tray-sanitizing dishwashers broken for sustained periods, sustained roach and rodent infestation in kitchen and serving areas, and meals served on visibly contaminated trays. The pattern is hidden from DPH scores, GPS has found, because inspections are scheduled walkthroughs that do not assess equipment under load, and because GPS has documented professional overlap between inspectors and facility staff in small-county settings. High DPH scores at GDC facilities coexist with sustained witness reports of equipment failure and food contamination; the contradiction is the analytical center of GPS's investigation "Dunked, Stacked, and Served."

The stakes are concrete. GDC spends approximately $1.69 per person per day on food in 2024, with a proposed $1.60 per day in FY27 — under 60 cents per meal — against the FDA Thrifty Food Plan estimate of roughly $10 per day for an adult man's nutritionally adequate diet. The state spends approximately 14 times more on medical care for incarcerated people ($432 million) than on their food. The Marshall Project independently reported on May 16, 2026 — rats in kitchens, insects in food, moldy trays, and visible malnutrition across Georgia facilities — and quoted GPS connecting chronic underfeeding to the violence pattern the DOJ documented in October 2024.

Staffing Collapse and Gang Control as the Structural Backdrop

Lee State Prison operates inside a system where officer vacancies have run between 49.3% and 60% systemwide for multiple years, against a national standard of no more than 10%. At Valdosta State Prison the rate reached 80% by April 2024. The hiring pipeline cannot close the gap: acceptance rate under 15%, 82.7% of new hires leave in their first year, and Georgia ranks last of 50 states for correctional-officer pay. The October 2024 DOJ findings letter concluded that "the leadership of the Georgia Department of Corrections has lost control of its facilities" and faulted GDC for placing "too much blame on gangs and insufficient emphasis on understaffing."

Approximately 31% of the system's ~49,000 incarcerated population are validated members of 315 different security threat groups — more than double the national average. DOJ and the Guidehouse 2024 consultant assessment independently concluded that gangs effectively run multiple facilities, controlling access to phones, showers, food, and bed assignments. Tyler Ryals, a former GDC sergeant forced out in 2024 after whistleblowing, told GPS he had personally been the only security person on the entire Telfair compound of ~1,250 maximum-security inmates.

GPS treats staffing collapse plus gang assumption of facility control as the integrated structural finding that explains the per-facility violence, classification, mortality, and infrastructure-failure narratives. Most GDC facilities are 30-40+ years old, with documented patterns of deferred maintenance that have produced systemwide infrastructure failures: broken cell-door locks (Hays 2012 audit ~42% non-functional, Guidehouse 2024 confirmed), inoperative surveillance and fire-alarm systems, mold and water failures, broken kitchen sanitization equipment, and pest infestations. GPS treats infrastructure collapse as a force multiplier for the violence, classification, gang-control, and mortality crises GPS has documented at the facility level.

Classification Drift: Medium-Security in Name Only

Lee State Prison is designated medium-security, but GPS has documented systemic classification drift across Georgia's medium-security prisons — facilities operating as close-security without adequate staffing and infrastructure. GPS's October 27, 2025 data analysis, published in "Georgia Prison Security Levels," shows how medium-security prisons are now functioning like high-security facilities. The Classification Crisis reporting documents medium-security facilities housing disproportionate numbers of close-security inmates.

This drift is not abstract. The April 1, 2026 Blood-on-Blood gang violence that erupted across Georgia's prison system — at least 12 prisons locked down, life flights dispatched to two facilities, stabbings at five — is the direct product of a system where gang factions operate with near impunity inside facilities that lack the staffing to control them. GPS has demanded gang separation for months, noting that Arizona cut violence 50% with such a strategy while Georgia still refuses.

The violence at Washington State Prison on January 11, 2026, is the sharpest illustration of what this produces. Four people died in a gang-related disturbance there: Teddy Jackson, 27; Ahmod Hatcher, 23; Jimmy Trammell, 42, who had days remaining on his sentence; and Silas Westbrook, 42, who died of his injuries on January 17 after hospital release. A fifth man, Dajhmere Hall, 30, was found dead two days before the riot. Twelve inmates were charged with felony murder, aggravated assault, and gang participation, announced around April 28, 2026. Washington State Prison has remained on continuous lockdown since — the facility never reopened, more than five months later.

Sexual Violence as a Systemic Condition

The October 2024 DOJ findings letter concluded that sexual assault is "rampant" in GDC facilities and that GDC does not reasonably protect incarcerated people, including LGBTI individuals, from sexual harm. Of 456 sexual-abuse allegations recorded in 2022, only 35 were substantiated (7.7%). GDC's own consultants, PREA Auditors of America, reviewed 388 PREA investigation files in May 2022 and found that not one met the law's standards. Georgia has never submitted a PREA certification of full compliance to the U.S. Department of Justice in the law's two-decade history.

Specific clusters include the DOJ-documented at-knifepoint sexual assaults at Pulaski State Prison, the 2020 Smith State Prison case in which an incarcerated person was waterboarded and sexually assaulted by his cellmate, and the at-least-four staff arrests for sexual assault since 2020 at Lee Arrendale State Prison, Georgia's largest women's facility, including the November 2024 Cameron Cheeks plea — a hire-fire-rehire case that GPS treats as an artifact of the staffing and hiring-standards collapse. GPS has also documented three women strangled in Lee Arrendale's A Unit between 2022 and 2024 — Sherry Joyce, Hallie Reed, and Angela Anderson — a figure exceeding the entire BJS-recorded national women-in-state-prison homicide total across 2001-2019. The Ashley Diamond litigation established the constitutional baseline and launched the DOJ investigation.

Lockdowns and Violence at Lee State Prison

Inmate accounts collected by GPS describe recurring lockdowns and fights at Lee State Prison in 2026, with multiple witnesses reporting the facility was placed on lockdown during that period. GPS's internal analysis flagged a high-severity violence incident at the facility. These reports sit inside the statewide pattern: the April 1, 2026 Blood-on-Blood violence locked down at least 12 prisons systemwide, and GPS has documented coordinated gang violence across the system with multiple stabbings and life-flight helicopter dispatches.

The facility's role as a transfer hub and intake point means it sits at a chokepoint in the system's movement of people — a position that makes it vulnerable to the same gang pressures and classification drift GPS has documented statewide. When medium-security facilities house close-security populations without adequate staffing, the designation becomes a paperwork fiction, and the violence that follows is the predictable result.

Sources

This analysis draws on Georgia Department of Public Health food-safety inspection records; GPS-tracked mortality data; GDC weekly population snapshots and monthly demographic reports; GDC Standard Operating Procedures; GPS's own investigative reporting, including "Dunked, Stacked, and Served," "The Classification Crisis," "Georgia Prison Security Levels," "Blood on Blood: Georgia Statewide Prison Lockdown," and "315 Gangs, Zero Strategy"; the October 2024 DOJ findings letter; the Guidehouse 2024 consultant assessment; The Marshall Project's May 16, 2026 investigation of Georgia prison food; and inmate and family accounts collected by GPS staff.