PULASKI STATE PRISON

Analysis written on June 7, 2026.

A Doctor, 22 Deaths, and a State That Knew

Between 2005 and 2015, at least 22 women died under the care of Dr. Yvon Nazaire, the physician contracted to serve Pulaski State Prison. An investigation by Georgia Prisoners' Speak (GPS) documented that Nazaire had a known history of malpractice deaths in New York before Georgia hired him—and that the state gave him the job despite that record. Once at Pulaski, he was reportedly praised for cutting medical costs by denying women care, a practice GPS's reporting found "resulted in deaths." Even after the toll became clear, the state gave Nazaire a raise. Two federal court cases later confirmed the lethal consequences: Mollianne Fischer was left in a vegetative state in May 2014 after failing to receive adequate medical treatment, and Bonnie Rocheleau, a woman with COPD, died of pneumonia in March 2015 because she did not get the care she needed.

GPS's own mortality tracking records 26 total deaths at the facility since 2020, including a 41-year-old woman who died by homicide in June 2025, a 50-year-old woman who died of COVID-19 in December 2025, and a 28-year-old woman who died by suicide in March 2026. GPS has also received reports of an alleged overdose death cover-up at the prison. The legacy of medical indifference, woven into the facility’s very contract structures, set the stage for the broader crisis that federal investigators would later uncover.

Federal Findings, Constitutional Violations, and Rampant Sexual Assault

In October 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice released a sweeping civil rights investigation that found constitutional violations throughout Georgia’s prison system—and Pulaski State Prison was among the facilities specifically cited. The DOJ concluded that sexual assault is “rampant,” that the Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC) fails to protect incarcerated people, and that gangs effectively control housing units, phones, showers, and food. The findings letter specifically described at‑knifepoint sexual assaults at Pulaski, where women reported being sexually abused by other incarcerated individuals while staff were absent or unresponsive.

The systemic nature of this violence is corroborated by GPS’s own findings. The state’s PREA enforcement is a shell: of 456 sexual-abuse allegations recorded in 2022, only 35 were substantiated, and a 2022 review by PREA Auditors of America found that not a single one of the 388 PREA investigation files met the law’s standards. Georgia has never submitted a PREA certification of full compliance. The DOJ investigation, launched in part after the Ashley Diamond litigation established the constitutional baseline, put Pulaski at the center of a national reckoning over sexual violence in women’s prisons.

Deputy Warden Arrested: Sexual Misconduct at the Top

Staff accountability at Pulaski has been starkly personal. In May 2024, Deputy Warden Alonzo L. McMillian and another supervisor, identified as Clark, were arrested and immediately terminated for sexual contact with a prisoner. Arrest warrants stated that McMillian had a “sexual relationship” with an incarcerated woman and engaged in improper sexual contact with her on February 24 and 25 of that year. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported at the time that the arrests came as the prison system was already under a federal civil rights investigation, and that the alleged misconduct of two prison supervisors could signal a larger systemic problem within the GDC.

The McMillian case sits inside a larger pattern documented by GPS: staff‑on‑inmate sexual abuse at Georgia’s women’s prisons, including at least four staff arrests for sexual assault at Lee Arrendale State Prison since 2020, and a hire‑fire‑rehire case that GPS treats as a direct artifact of the state’s staffing and hiring-standards collapse. At Pulaski, where staff vacancy rates systemwide run between 49% and 60%, the line between perpetrator and protector has blurred dangerously.

The Empty Bubble: No Officers, No Safety, No Response

What life inside Pulaski actually felt like is captured vividly in a firsthand narrative published by GPS’s Tell My Story project. “I expected order. Stability,” wrote a woman who spent two years there, from 2023 through July 2025. “Instead I saw inmates walking around with no officers present. I saw violence. I saw neglect.” She described the facility’s “security bubble”—a central observation post—as empty, and entire dorms left unsupervised for hours. When medical emergencies, fights, or drug overdoses happened, other incarcerated women had to call their own families and ask them to call the facility to send help. “That’s how we got help. We called our mothers.”

The same narrative documented “multiple fights at one time,” with blood, urine, and other fluids left on the floor, and some fights lasting more than 30 minutes. Block movement—the scheduled times women were supposed to be escorted to medical, dental, educational, and mental health appointments—often never happened. “Ninety percent of the time, no one came to get us,” she wrote, cataloging specific missed movement dates in May 2024. When movement did occur, women reported being left outside in extreme cold or rain for hours without access to a bathroom.

This empty‑officer reality is exactly the context in which the facility’s documented acts of violence occurred. On July 15, 2023, eleven incarcerated women at Pulaski used broomsticks, a crowbar, metal spray, shanks, and locks to destroy facility property; only nine security staff responded, and chemical spray was used to quell the disturbance. The Atlanta Journal‑Constitution later reported that, in a separate case, officers and staff did not notice a woman being stabbed until someone from outside the prison called to report it; the victim later stated she had been assaulted hours earlier by ten people who stomped, hit, and kicked her.

New Warden, Deeper Crisis: Retaliation, Lockdowns, and Alleged Deprivation

When Wendy Jackson was appointed warden in April 2025, she inherited a facility already scarred by neglect and violence. Within ten months, GPS’s own investigative reporting—published in February 2026—documented a pattern of retaliation, intimidation, extended lockdowns, and a non‑functional grievance process that families and incarcerated women described as a crisis under the new warden.

Multiple witnesses, including incarcerated women and their family members, reported that during lockdowns water access to cells was cut off for multiple days, showers were denied for extended periods, people went nearly two weeks without clean clothing, and phone calls were reduced to a single opportunity over an entire lockdown. Personal property—including locks—was confiscated, in some cases with the stated intent that it would never be returned, leaving women vulnerable to theft of items their families had purchased. “The ones being punished were the innocent ones,” the Tell My Story author wrote, describing mass punishment for fights waged by others.

Warden Jackson herself was described by GPS sources as an “untested warden,” and families reported that when incarcerated women attempted to contact facility leadership directly, staff allegedly used intermediaries to discourage them. One incarcerated woman was allegedly ordered into lockdown in retaliation for contacting the warden. GPS has also received an allegation from a family member that leadership at Pulaski deliberately allowed conditions of drugs and violence to escalate in order to qualify the facility for a tier program designation—a charge that GPS is not in a position to verify but that appears in the broader picture of a prison where basic safety and grievance mechanisms have collapsed.

Failing Scores, Sewage, and a Sanitation System in Collapse

The Georgia Department of Public Health (DPH) performs routine food‑safety inspections at Pulaski State Prison, and the scores tell a story of erratic kitchen conditions that repeatedly dip into failure territory. In January 2026, a routine inspection yielded a score of 67—an F grade—citing violations that included hands not being properly washed and handwashing facilities not being supplied or accessible. GPS’s own analysis of DPH records found that the inspection documented a nonfunctional handwashing sink and sewage backups in the kitchen area. A follow‑up inspection one week later jumped to a 96, a common pattern across Georgia facilities where scheduled walkthroughs can mask the true state of equipment.

The broader record deepens the concern. In August 2025, the kitchen scored a 73 (C) with violations for cold‑holding temperatures and handwashing; in September 2025, a follow‑up remained a 78 (C) with handwashing and hot‑holding failures; in February 2025, a routine inspection scored an 83 (B) but cited food‑contact surface sanitization and cold‑holding; in June 2024, an 82 (B) flagged food storage and contamination prevention. Even the twice‑issued A grades—a 90 in October 2024 and a 91 in January 2024—came with violations like inadequate handwashing facilities and sewage disposal issues. GPS’s systemic investigation “Dunked, Stacked, and Served” has established that DPH scores systematically fail to capture broken tray‑sanitizing dishwashers, sustained roach and rodent infestation, and meals served on visibly contaminated trays, because inspections are scheduled and do not assess equipment under real load. At Pulaski, the pattern holds: high inspection scores coexist with reports of sewage, pests, and a kitchen that, for days at a time, could not provide a sanitary meal.

Overcrowded, Underfed, and Held in a System That Has Lost Control

Pulaski was designed for 500 people; it now holds 1,182—a 96.6% occupancy of its expanded 1,223‑bed capacity but still more than double its original architectural footprint. That overcrowding is the physical substrate for every other failure. The GDC spends approximately $1.69 per person per day on food, or about 60 cents per meal, against a nutritionally adequate diet that would cost roughly $10 daily. The state spends 14 times more on medical care for incarcerated people than on their food.

Infrastructure at the facility follows the systemic decay GPS has documented across GDC prisons: broken cell‑door locks (multiple inmate witnesses report non‑functioning locks on cells during lockdowns), deferred maintenance that produced the sewage and handwashing failures in the kitchen, and a staffing crisis so deep that the DOJ explicitly faulted GDC for placing “too much blame on gangs and insufficient emphasis on understaffing.” Georgia ranks last of all 50 states for correctional‑officer pay; 82.7% of new hires leave in their first year. At Pulaski, where a deputy warden could be arrested for sexual assault and where an incarcerated woman could be stabbed by ten people without a single officer noticing, the state’s loss of control is not theoretical—it is recorded in inspection reports, court documents, and the daily accounts of the women who live there.

Sources

This analysis draws on investigative reporting by Georgia Prisoners’ Speak (GPS), including its series “Pulaski State Prison Crisis: Untested Warden, Deadly History” and the firsthand narrative “The Fire Alarm Kept Ringing and No One Came”; reporting from the Atlanta Journal‑Constitution; federal court findings; the U.S. Department of Justice’s October 2024 civil rights investigation findings; Georgia Department of Public Health food‑safety inspection records; GDC personnel and mortality data; and firsthand accounts from incarcerated individuals, family members, and former staff collected by GPS.