PULASKI STATE PRISON

Pulaski State Prison, a medium-security women's facility in Hawkinsville that opened in 1994, holds approximately 1,184 women against a stated capacity of 1,223 — more than double its original design capacity of 500. The compound sits at the intersection of nearly every failure pattern GPS tracks across Georgia's prison system: a documented physician who presided over at least 22 deaths before the state gave him a raise; deputy wardens arrested for sexual contact with the women in their custody; a federal civil rights investigation; a cascading series of food-safety failures; and, under new leadership installed in 2025, a fresh wave of accounts describing retaliation, extended lockdowns, and a grievance process that families say no longer functions. What follows draws together public-record reporting, GDC personnel records, Georgia Department of Public Health inspection data, and firsthand narratives published through GPS's Tell My Story project.

A Decade of Deaths Under a Contract Physician

The defining scandal of Pulaski's recent history is the medical-care record assembled under Dr. Yvon Nazaire, the facility's contract physician from 2005 to 2015. GPS reporting on the facility documents that at least 22 women died under Nazaire's care during that period, and that he came to Georgia with a known history of malpractice deaths in New York — a history the state knew about when it hired him. Rather than treat that record as a warning, the state, according to GPS's published investigation, praised him for cutting costs by denying women medical care and gave him a raise even as the deaths accumulated.

Two of those cases reached the civil courts and have been documented in Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporting. Bonnie Rocheleau, who had long suffered from COPD, failed to receive adequate care at Pulaski when she developed pneumonia, and died in March 2015. Mollianne Fischer was left in a vegetative state in May 2014 after she did not receive adequate medical care at the facility. Both cases were the subject of litigation and AJC reporting that named Pulaski as the site of the alleged neglect.

The numbers in GPS's mortality database show the pattern did not end with Nazaire's departure. GPS-tracked mortality records count 26 deaths at Pulaski State Prison, including four in the most recent reporting window: Denecia Nichelle Randall, 28, on March 30, 2026; Ronika Lashawn Carswell, 50, on December 12, 2025; Candace Lajon Morgan, 41, on June 11, 2025; and Esmeralda Carillo Hernandez, 50, on May 22, 2025. For a facility of roughly 1,200 women, that is a mortality cadence that demands scrutiny rather than dismissal.

Deputy Wardens, Sexual Contact Charges, and a Federal Investigation

In May 2024, Deputy Warden Alonzo L. McMillian was arrested at Pulaski and booked into the Pulaski County jail on charges of sexual contact with a prisoner, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. McMillian was released the next day on a $10,000 bond. According to the AJC's reporting on the arrest warrants, McMillian was accused of having a "sexual relationship" with an incarcerated woman and of specifically engaging in improper sexual contact with her on February 24 and 25. GDC spokesperson Joan Heath confirmed to the AJC that McMillian and a second supervisor, Clark, were both terminated on May 2 following their arrests. The paper noted that the arrests came as the prison system was facing a civil rights investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice, and quoted independent corrections monitor Michele Deitch on the possibility that the alleged sexual misconduct of two prison supervisors could signal a larger systemic problem within GDC.

That DOJ investigation, GPS reporting and its own published documentation note, formally identified constitutional violations at Pulaski State Prison as part of the 2022–2023 federal review of Georgia's prison system — placing the facility on a short list of GDC institutions where the federal government has affirmatively found constitutional-grade failures.

Staff Failures Around Inmate-on-Inmate Violence

Pulaski's security operation has, by AJC reporting, repeatedly failed to detect serious violence happening inside its own walls. In one case reported by the paper, officers and staff did not notice a prisoner being stabbed until an outside caller reported it; the woman later said she had been assaulted hours earlier by 10 people who stomped, hit, and kicked her. On July 15, 2023, the AJC reported, inmates at Pulaski destroyed building property in a disturbance in which 11 incarcerated people were directly involved, using weapons that included broomsticks, a crowbar, metal spray, shanks, and locks; nine security staff responded and chemical spray was used to quell the situation.

GPS has additionally received reports describing gang-driven extortion targeting incarcerated women and their families at Pulaski, including a publicly identified account from Pamela Dixon describing her daughter being subjected to gang extortion inside the facility. The pattern that emerges from this reporting — staff who do not see assaults until outsiders call, organized violence that staff cannot or do not interdict — is consistent with the firsthand account excerpted below.

"We Called Our Mothers": A Firsthand Account

In an account titled "The Fire Alarm Kept Ringing and No One Came," published on GPS's Tell My Story platform, the writer Trigger Cat describes being incarcerated at Pulaski from 2023 through July 2025 and walking into the facility as a minimum-security, non-violent prisoner expecting "order. Stability." Instead, she writes, "I saw inmates walking around with no officers present. I saw violence. I saw neglect."

Her account describes a security bubble that was empty, dorms left unsupervised for hours, and a system in which incarcerated women had to call their families to get the facility to dispatch help during medical emergencies, fights, and K2 overdoses. "That's how we got help. We called our mothers." She describes multi-participant fights lasting more than thirty minutes, blood and bodily fluids left on the floor, and victims who avoided medical care because they did not trust it would come. She documents block-movement appointments — medical, dental, mental health, education — being routinely missed because no officer arrived to escort her dorm: she names specific dates in May 2024 (May 15, May 16, May 19) on which first or second block movement simply did not happen, identifying Officer P and Officer Williams as among those who declined to facilitate movement. And she describes mass punishment — entire dorms losing commissary or being placed on lockdown for the actions of a few — falling hardest on women who, in her telling, had nothing to do with the violence and often nothing to lose to commissary restrictions in the first place.

Tell My Story is curated and reviewed before publication, and this narrative carries the same evidentiary weight as bylined reporting; it adds firsthand corroboration to the structural picture that the AJC and the DOJ have drawn from the outside.

The Wendy Jackson Era

Pulaski's wardenship has turned over rapidly. GDC personnel records show that Meosha S. McMillan served as warden through 2022, Karen Douglas Flowers from 2023 through April 15, 2025, and Wendy A. Jackson from January 2025, formally taking the Warden position on April 16, 2025. GPS's published investigation describes Jackson as an "untested warden" and reports that within roughly ten months of her appointment, families of women incarcerated at Pulaski began sounding the alarm.

GPS's own investigative coverage describes accounts of retaliatory housing, extended lockdowns, staff intimidation, and a grievance process that incarcerated women and their families say has stopped functioning. The reporting frames these accounts as a pattern rather than isolated complaints — intimidation, retaliation, extended lockdowns, and grievance failures appearing repeatedly across separate sources. GPS has additionally received reports from incarcerated women and family members describing extended lockdown conditions in 2024–2025, including water access cut off in cells for multiple days, denied shower access, limited phone communication, and confiscation of personal property and personal security items (locks). These accounts are consistent with the lockdown conditions described in the Tell My Story narrative, and consistent with the staffing-collapse pattern AJC reporting has documented.

The current senior leadership of the facility, per GDC personnel records, is Warden Wendy A. Jackson, with Andrea Showers as Deputy Warden of Security (in place since April 2024), KaSann Mahogany as Deputy Warden of Care and Treatment (a continuous facility deputy since at least 2019), Shelley Elizabeth Hermann as Deputy Warden of Administration (since April 2025), and Gloria Ann Turnage as Special Assistant to the Warden (since September 2024).

Food Safety: A Failing Kitchen

The Georgia Department of Public Health's food-safety inspection record at Pulaski tracks a clear deterioration. From 2023 through 2024, the facility consistently scored in the A and B range: a 92 (A) on June 27, 2023; a 91 (A) on January 18, 2024; an 82 (B) on June 6, 2024; and a 90 (A) on October 8, 2024. Starting in early 2025 the scores begin to fall — an 83 (B) on February 11, 2025; a 73 (C) on August 7, 2025; a 78 (C) followup on September 30, 2025 — and on January 29, 2026, Pulaski received a 67, a failing Grade F on a routine inspection. A follow-up inspection on February 6, 2026 returned the score to 96 (A), but the underlying conditions documented in the January 2026 inspection cycle — which is publicly accessible through the Georgia Department of Public Health inspection portal — included a nonfunctional handwashing sink, sewage backups in the kitchen and food-service areas, and food waste storage exposed to pests. The fact that the facility passed a remediation inspection within a week does not erase the conditions that earned the F.

The Population, the Capacity, and What It Means

Pulaski holds 1,184 women against a stated capacity of 1,223 — 96.8% — but more importantly against an original design capacity of 500. The facility is operating at more than double the population it was designed for. That overbuilt density is the structural context within which the staff-absence patterns described in Tell My Story, the staff-failure patterns documented by the AJC, and the lockdown-condition reports gathered by GPS all play out. Programming at Pulaski is described in GDC's own facility record as limited — GED, basic education, and limited vocational and treatment programs — for a population of 1,200 women, many serving long sentences, in a facility GDC's own description acknowledges has been at the center of investigations into lethal medical neglect.

Source Protection

A note on sourcing: GPS treats every account from inside Pulaski and from family members of women incarcerated there as protected under GPS Source Protection Policy — Tier 1. The detail in this analysis reflects what is on the public record through court filings, news reporting, official inspection records, and accounts that contributors have themselves chosen to publish under their own bylines. Sensitive-source material informs the editorial framing here but does not appear in identifiable form.

Sources

This analysis draws on Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporting on the deaths of Bonnie Rocheleau and Mollianne Fischer, on the arrests of Deputy Warden Alonzo L. McMillian and supervisor Clark, on the July 2023 disturbance, and on the staff failure to detect a serious inmate assault; on GPS's own published investigations into the medical-neglect record under Dr. Yvon Nazaire and into conditions under Warden Wendy Jackson; on Georgia Department of Public Health food-safety inspection reports from 2023 through February 2026; on GDC personnel and facility records; on GPS's mortality database; on the U.S. Department of Justice's civil rights findings regarding Pulaski State Prison; and on a firsthand narrative published in GPS's Tell My Story project by an author writing as Trigger Cat. Additional accounts gathered by GPS staff inform the editorial framing but are protected under GPS Source Protection Policy — Tier 1.