PULASKI STATE PRISON

Leadership Vacuum and Untested Administration

In April 2025, Pulaski State Prison installed Wendy Jackson as warden — a leader described by GPS sources as having limited experience — at one of the most troubled women's prisons in the United States. Jackson took over a facility with an already well-documented history of constitutional violations, gang-controlled environments, and deadly medical failures. GPS has received reports from families, advocates, and incarcerated women describing conditions under Jackson's leadership that echo the facility's worst prior periods.

Multiple sources report that women who speak up about conditions — whether to advocates, family members, or through the formal grievance process — are explicitly and implicitly warned that doing so will make things worse. One incarcerated woman reported being confronted and verbally berated by the warden during a facility inspection, then placed in a filthy unused bathtub area before being moved to extended lockdown lasting five or more days, with restrictions on phone access, showers, and commissary. This incident reportedly occurred after the woman had already been assaulted and had a safe housing request denied — a sequence that raises compounding concerns about retaliatory housing and the facility's failure to protect vulnerable individuals.

Prior to Jackson's appointment, Pulaski's grievance infrastructure had already been identified as dysfunctional. Staff members allegedly discarded grievances before they could reach leadership, and counselors reportedly failed to process complaints. A source described a parallel system of corruption in which staff stole items from recovered inmate packages, then distributed those items to other incarcerated women as bribes for intelligence — effectively weaponizing the contraband recovery process. Families with purchase receipts reported being unable to recover stolen property.

Documented Retaliation and Inhumane Conditions

GPS has documented a pattern of retaliation at Pulaski that appears to function as a deliberate deterrent against outside communication. One incarcerated woman reported being held in lockdown with water access cut off for the first three days following her contact with outside advocates, followed by 11 days without showers or clean clothes and only one permitted phone call. Staff also allegedly confiscated her belongings, with a stated intent to prevent her from retrieving them upon release — an allegation consistent with the broader pattern of package theft documented at the facility. The woman reported filing complaints with regional administration, the state commissioner, the ombudsman, and inmate affairs, and stated she feared retaliation for doing so.

A first-person account published by GPS in February 2026 from a former incarcerated woman who was held at Pulaski from 2023 through July 2025 described a facility in a state of chronic operational collapse. Security bubbles were routinely empty. Officers were absent from dormitories for hours at a time. When medical emergencies occurred — including overdoses involving K2 — other incarcerated women had to call their families and have those family members call the facility to summon help. The source described multiple simultaneous fights lasting more than 30 minutes, with blood and other fluids left on dormitory floors. Women who sought medical care after assaults often declined to do so out of fear, managing their own wounds.

The response to this violence was collective punishment: entire dormitories were placed on lockdown and stripped of commissary access regardless of individual involvement. The source noted that those actually fighting typically had no commissary privileges to lose — meaning the punishment fell disproportionately on uninvolved women. Scheduled block movement for medical, dental, education, and mental health appointments was reportedly missed approximately 90% of the time, a failure so severe that the facility was forced to assign an individual officer to escort women from each dormitory just to reach mental health appointments.

Medical Neglect, Deaths, and Accountability Failures

GPS intelligence indicates that Pulaski State Prison has experienced at least 22 deaths under a single physician who had a documented history of malpractice deaths in another state prior to being hired by the facility. That physician was hired despite this prior history and subsequently received a raise after implementing cost-cutting measures that involved denying medical care to incarcerated women. Previous medical leadership at the facility was eventually terminated — not for overseeing the deaths, but for application fraud — a sequence that illustrates the GDC's consistent prioritization of administrative compliance over patient safety. Families have reported ongoing concerns about medical care under the facility's current administration.

A woman died at a Georgia state correctional facility housing women after staff refused to seek medical care during what was reported as an overdose. Staff did not call an ambulance for approximately 30 minutes while the woman lay on the floor. An allegation exists that this medical response delay was subsequently covered up. While GPS cannot independently confirm this death occurred specifically at Pulaski rather than another women's facility, the intelligence finding is consistent with the broader pattern of medical neglect documented at Pulaski and warrants inclusion as a contextual data point pending further verification.

A death recorded on January 10, 2025, with an official cause listed as acute respiratory failure and possible drug overdose, illustrates the layers of opacity that surround deaths at women's facilities in Georgia. Official mortality records placed the death at a state women's correctional facility, but a source suggested the death may have occurred at a different location. The deceased's records were subsequently removed from the GDC offender database, and a family-posted article about the death is no longer accessible online. GPS tracks deaths in GDC custody independently — the GDC does not publicly report cause of death — and the erasure of records following a custodial death is a pattern GPS has documented as consistent with institutional suppression of accountability.

Georgia has paid out significant settlements in cases tied to deaths at Pulaski. The state settled the wrongful death lawsuit of Thomas Henry Giles for $5,000,000. A settlement of $4,000,000 was reached in the Henegar wrongful death lawsuit. These settlements reflect findings of inadequate protection, improper medical care, or failure to monitor — and represent only a fraction of the cases GPS believes warrant legal scrutiny.

Gang Violence, Extortion, and Staff Sexual Misconduct

Gang control at Pulaski State Prison has been documented not as an isolated problem but as a systemic condition affecting daily life for incarcerated women and their families. Pamela Dixon, an advocate whose daughter was incarcerated at Pulaski, has described paying over $10,000 in extortion demands to gang members who threatened to disfigure her daughter's face if $300 was not sent via Cash App by a specific deadline. The AJC documented this extortion pattern in June 2022, finding that gang members were using violence to extort both inmates and their families at the facility. Sexual assaults by gang members at knifepoint were also documented during this period.

Staff misconduct has reached the highest supervisory levels at Pulaski. In May 2024, Alonzo L. McMillian, the deputy warden for administration at Pulaski State Prison, was arrested on charges that he engaged in a sexual relationship with a prisoner and specifically engaged in improper sexual contact with her on February 24 and 25, 2024. McMillian, 44, was arrested at the Hawkinsville prison and booked into the Pulaski County jail on May 2, 2024, then released the following day on a $10,000 bond. The GDC confirmed both McMillian and a lieutenant at another facility were terminated on May 2, 2024. The arrest of a deputy warden — a position with direct authority over administrative operations — illustrates the depth of institutional failure at Pulaski and the degree to which the power differential between staff and incarcerated women has been exploited.

A separate intelligence finding from April 2026 documents a detainee at a state correctional facility sustaining severe facial and orbital trauma from a sustained assault involving improvised weapons, with concerns raised about whether a prior protective custody request was documented and whether adequate supervision or protective measures were implemented. While GPS cannot confirm this incident occurred specifically at Pulaski pending further verification, it reflects conditions consistent with the facility's documented pattern of inadequate supervision and failure to honor protective custody requests.

Legal Challenges, DOJ Investigation, and Systemic Accountability

The U.S. Department of Justice conducted an investigation of Georgia prisons from 2022 through 2023, releasing findings in October 2024 that documented constitutional violations system-wide, with Pulaski among the facilities examined. The DOJ's findings documented gang-controlled environments, deadly stabbings as routine events, homicide rates far exceeding national averages, and systemic inadequacies in medical and mental health care. The GDC's initial response was to claim the state was 'exceeding' constitutional standards — a position that appeared to signal the state would contest federal findings rather than negotiate remediation, mirroring a pattern seen in DOJ interventions in other states that led to protracted litigation.

A significant legal development directly implicating Pulaski involves Janice Buttrum, a 63-year-old woman housed in the Honor Dorm at Pulaski State Prison. Buttrum was sentenced to death at age 17 in 1981 for a crime committed as a juvenile; her death sentence was subsequently converted to life. On March 17, 2026, U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg of the Northern District of Georgia denied the State Board of Pardons and Paroles' motion to dismiss Buttrum's lawsuit in Buttrum v. Herring, ruling that Buttrum's attorneys had plausibly alleged that Georgia's parole process for people serving life sentences for crimes committed as juveniles is so hollow it may violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. When Buttrum's attorneys requested documents showing how the board distinguishes between juvenile and adult offenders — as U.S. Supreme Court precedent requires — the board responded that it has none. Buttrum has had her last disciplinary infraction in 1999 and has applied for parole five times, receiving nearly identical form letters each time.

The cumulative legal exposure facing Georgia from Pulaski-related cases is substantial. In addition to the $5,000,000 Giles settlement and the $4,000,000 Henegar settlement, GPS has documented that since 2018, Georgia has paid out nearly $20,000,000 in prison-related settlements system-wide — a figure that legal advocates argue reflects not exceptional cases but the predictable cost of operating an unconstitutional system. The Buttrum litigation, if it proceeds, may force the first judicial examination of whether Georgia's parole board has ever meaningfully individualized its review of juvenile lifer cases.

Population, Classification, and Systemic Context

Pulaski State Prison operates within a GDC system under sustained population pressure. As of April 3, 2026, the total GDC population stood at 52,915, with an additional backlog of 2,389 individuals waiting in county jails for GDC bed space. System-wide demographics as of April 1, 2026, show 53,514 total inmates, with 1,261 individuals classified as having poorly controlled health conditions and 47 in active mental health crisis — figures that illuminate the scale of medical and psychiatric need that facilities like Pulaski are expected to absorb. Across the GDC system, GPS has independently tracked 1,771 deaths in its database, including 301 deaths in 2025 and 333 in 2024, reflecting a mortality crisis that the GDC has never publicly explained through cause-of-death reporting.

The pattern at Pulaski reflects what GPS and independent researchers have described as classification drift — where a facility's operational reality diverges sharply from its formal designation, without the staffing, infrastructure, or oversight those conditions require. The first-person account from a former Pulaski incarcerated person describes a facility where the security apparatus had effectively ceased to function: no officers in dormitories, no response to emergencies, no movement enforcement, and a collective punishment model that penalized compliance rather than misconduct. This is not a facility operating at its designed security level — it is a facility where the absence of meaningful supervision has ceded operational control to whoever is willing to exercise violence.