MONTGOMERY STATE PRISON

Last updated September 13, 2026.(DS)

Montgomery State Prison opened in 1972 in Mt. Vernon, in Montgomery County, as a medium-security facility for adult male felons, and was renovated in the mid-1990s. Its original design capacity was 206 beds; it is now rated for 900. The prison holds general-population prisoners who also staff Correctional Industries assignments and outside work details, and its stated mission emphasizes structured programs and reentry preparation. As of GPS's most recent facility record, it held 396 people — 44% of rated capacity. Warden Tracy Glynn Page has led the facility since June 2024, with Deputy Warden of Care and Treatment Tony D. Crapps (since June 2026) and Deputy Warden Stefanie Cooper Calhoun (since November 2023). The threads below — a clean inspection record, a half-million-dollar liability settlement, two GPS-tracked deaths, and the systemwide pressures of classification drift and staffing collapse — are what GPS's record for this facility actually supports.

A Clean Inspection Record, and the Limits of What It Establishes

Montgomery State Prison's food-service operation has posted consistently strong scores on Georgia Department of Public Health inspections. Routine inspections on June 9, 2023, February 18, 2025, and March 10, 2026 each returned a perfect score of 100 (Grade A). Two intervening inspections — December 28, 2023, and June 20, 2024 — scored 98 (Grade A). The earlier of those cited three violations, involving in-use utensil storage, physical facilities installed, maintained, and clean, and adequate ventilation and lighting with designated areas used; the latter cited a single violation related to physical facilities maintenance and cleanliness.

That record is worth holding against GPS's systemic findings on food-service sanitation across GDC facilities. GPS has documented a pattern in which high DPH inspection scores coexist with sustained witness accounts of tray-sanitizing dishwashers broken for extended periods, roach and rodent infestation in kitchen and serving areas, and meals served on visibly contaminated trays — accounts collected at Dooly State Prison and Coastal State Prison, and corroborated by The Marshall Project's May 16, 2026 investigation of Georgia prison food. GPS's analysis attributes the gap to the structure of the inspections themselves: DPH walkthroughs are scheduled and do not assess equipment under load, and GPS has documented professional overlap between inspectors and facility staff in small-county settings. Montgomery County is the kind of small-county context in which that dynamic has been observed. The facility's scores therefore establish that scheduled walkthroughs found no violations on the days they occurred; they do not, on their own, resolve the broader question GPS has raised about whether inspection scores capture the lived conditions of food service in Georgia's prisons. The state's food budget — approximately $1.69 per person per day in 2024, with $1.60 proposed for FY27, under 60 cents per meal, against an FDA Thrifty Food Plan estimate of roughly $10 per day for an adult man's nutritionally adequate diet — frames the material constraints under which any GDC kitchen operates, whatever its inspection record.

A $500,000 Settlement and the Question of What Happened

Georgia Department of Administrative Services risk management records, obtained through open records, document a $500,000 state liability payout tied to Montgomery State Prison, stemming from an incident dated February 17, 2020. The settlement ledger entry resolves a claim involving Richard Alan Lankford. What the ledger establishes is that the state paid half a million dollars to resolve a claim arising from an incident at this facility; it does not, on its face, describe the underlying events, the nature of the harm alleged, or any admission or denial of liability. GPS holds no additional public record detailing the circumstances of the Lankford matter. The payout stands as a documented fiscal consequence of an incident at Montgomery State Prison, and as a data point in the broader pattern of state liability expenditures tied to conditions and events inside GDC facilities.

Two Deaths in GPS's Record

GPS's mortality database records two deaths at Montgomery State Prison since its coverage began on January 1, 2020 — a figure that is a floor, not a ceiling, because GDC reports deaths roughly two months late. Jimmy M. Smith, 61, died at the facility on July 31, 2020, of natural or medical causes. Dante Todd, 50, died on July 12, 2026; his cause of death is recorded as unknown or pending. GPS has recorded no other deaths at this facility in the intervening years.

Those two deaths sit against a system in which GPS has independently tracked 1,890 deaths in GDC custody since 2020. Montgomery's count is low in absolute terms, and its population — 396 people against a 900-bed rating — is well below capacity. Neither fact is a clean bill of health: a floor count reflects what has been reported and recorded, and a below-capacity census says nothing about the conditions of confinement for the people who are there.

Classification Drift and the Medium-Security Question

Montgomery State Prison is designated medium-security, and its current population sits well below its rated capacity. That positioning matters because GPS has documented a systemic pattern of classification drift across Georgia's medium-security prisons: facilities designated medium-security housing disproportionate numbers of close-security inmates without the staffing or infrastructure that close-security classification demands. GPS's reporting on this pattern describes medium-security facilities operating as de facto higher-security institutions, and the October 27, 2025 GDC data underlying that work shows medium-security prisons across the state functioning like high-security facilities — a dynamic GPS identifies as fueling the system's deadly crisis. Montgomery's 44% occupancy rate does not by itself exempt it from that dynamic, because classification drift is a question of who is housed, not merely how many.

The staffing picture is systemwide and severe. Officer vacancies in Georgia's prisons have run between 49.3% and 60% 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 — an acceptance rate under 15%, with 82.7% of new hires leaving in their first year — and Georgia ranks last of 50 states for correctional-officer pay. The October 2024 Department of Justice 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." Former GDC Assistant Warden Russell Zirkle has stated on the record, in a timestamped interview documented in GPS's reporting "Two Commanders Say Georgia Hides Its Prison Staffing Crisis," that certain Georgia prisons were running officer vacancy rates of 70 to 80%, naming Telfair State Prison and Smith State Prison. Montgomery State Prison is not among the facilities Zirkle named, but the collapse he describes is systemwide in scope, and no GDC facility operates outside its shadow.

The Broader System Context

Montgomery State Prison's record sits inside a system GPS has documented as structurally failing. The October 2024 DOJ findings letter concluded that sexual assault is "rampant" across GDC facilities and that the department does not reasonably protect incarcerated people, including LGBTI individuals, from sexual harm; of 456 sexual-abuse allegations recorded in 2022, only 35 were substantiated, and GDC's own consultants found that not one of 388 PREA investigation files reviewed in May 2022 met the law's standards. Georgia has never submitted a PREA certification of full compliance in the law's two-decade history. The DOJ's findings, the Guidehouse 2024 assessment, and Commissioner Oliver's public "end of life" statements all corroborate a pattern of infrastructure collapse across facilities that are 30 to 40-plus years old — broken cell-door locks, 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 it has documented at the facility level.

None of the specific incidents in that systemic record occurred at Montgomery State Prison. The at-knifepoint sexual assaults documented by DOJ were at Pulaski State Prison; the 2020 waterboarding and sexual assault case was at Smith State Prison, where a smuggled firearm was also used in June 2024 to kill a food-service worker; the staff arrests and the three women strangled in A Unit between 2022 and 2024 were at Lee Arrendale State Prison. They belong to other facilities, and GPS's reporting places them there. What Montgomery shares with every GDC facility is the structural context: a staffing pipeline that cannot close a systemwide vacancy gap, officer pay ranked last of 50 states, and a food budget that allocates under 60 cents per meal. Against that backdrop, Montgomery State Prison's clean inspection scores and below-capacity population make it an outlier in some respects — and a facility whose record GPS will continue to track as the systemic pressures documented elsewhere in the system evolve.

Sources

This analysis draws on Georgia Department of Public Health food-safety inspection records for Montgomery State Prison; Georgia Department of Administrative Services risk management settlement records obtained through open records; GPS's mortality database and facility records; GPS's own investigative reporting on classification drift, staffing collapse, food-service sanitation, and systemic violence, including "Two Commanders Say Georgia Hides Its Prison Staffing Crisis"; on-record, timestamped testimony from former GDC Assistant Warden Russell Zirkle; the October 2024 Department of Justice findings letter; the Guidehouse 2024 assessment; and The Marshall Project's May 2026 investigation of Georgia prison food.