WARE STATE PRISON

Analysis written on August 16, 2026.

Ware State Prison in Waycross is a close-security men’s prison opened in 1990 and now rated for 1,546 beds; Georgia Prisoners’ Speak (GPS) facility records put its population at 1,438, against an original design capacity of about 500. GPS has independently tracked 1,861 deaths in GDC custody system-wide since 2020; 85 of them occurred at Ware, including 21 homicides and 12 suicides. The threads below trace the 2020 mass disturbance, the gang-control and staffing collapse that followed, deaths that went undiscovered, and a sharp contradiction between Ware’s food-safety inspection record and the food complaints GPS continues to receive.

Eighty-Five Deaths and the Homicide Impunity Gap

GPS’s mortality database runs from January 2020 and is explicitly a floor, because GDC reports deaths roughly two months late. At Ware it records 85 deaths through the most recent data: 37 natural or medical, 21 homicide, 12 suicide, eight overdose, four unknown or pending, two accident, and one other. The yearly all-cause toll was eight in 2020, 11 in 2021, 12 in 2022, 16 in 2023, 15 in 2024, and 15 in 2025. The homicide count alone is stark. GPS’s own investigative reporting, published under the title “At Least Nineteen: The Murders the State Didn’t Prosecute,” documented at least nineteen men killed by other prisoners inside Ware since 2020; Georgia’s own autopsies name a suspect in eleven of those deaths, and GPS could find no record that anyone was prosecuted in connection with them.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporting supplied names and mechanics behind many of those deaths. The July 17, 2020 death of Robert Lee Wilson III, 31, resulted from multiple stab wounds in an incident involving 16 other prisoners, seven of whom were injured. Christopher Arnett Rawls, 32, was strangled September 5, 2020. Christopher Eli Gresham, 39, died September 30, 2021 of stab wounds to his back and lower extremities; three other prisoners were reportedly involved. More recently, Samuel Keith Ellis, 31, died August 1, 2024 from multiple sharp force injuries, with GDC incident data describing a homicide involving three prisoners. The AJC summarized that ten inmates were killed at Ware between July 2020 and August 2024, with multiple inmates involved in several of the homicides according to GDC incident reports.

The pattern remained visible in 2026: GPS’s mortality records list Christopher Henry, 48, died by homicide February 12, 2026; Anthony Terrell Grover, 25, on May 11; Justin Dean Pulley, 48, on May 20; Johnathan Cleo Hardman-Simmons, 36, died by suicide the same day; and Kojack Thomas Jr., 27, died by homicide May 31.

A Mass Disturbance, Broken Doors, and a Punitive Aftermath

On August 1, 2020, Ware came apart. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that malfunctioning doors allowed prisoners to walk out of their rooms; those men took two guards hostage, beating and stabbing one, and ultimately hundreds of incarcerated people ransacked the prison. GDC records, as cited by the AJC, show that 33 homemade weapons were used, 55 security staff were directly involved, and a mass employee exodus followed. The newspaper also reported that GDC publicly described the event merely as a “disturbance,” while internal records describe it as involving hostage-taking, escape attempts, assaults, and use of force.

GPS’s systemic infrastructure findings place the Ware door failure inside a statewide pattern: audits and consultant work have documented broken cell-door locks, inoperative surveillance systems, and deferred maintenance across GDC facilities, with roughly 42 percent of locks at one facility found non-functional in a 2012 audit and the pattern reconfirmed in the 2024 Guidehouse assessment. GPS has received recurring accounts describing the lockdown that followed the 2020 riot as punitive.

Gang Control, Housing Displacement, and the Thin Staff Line

GPS treats staffing collapse and gang assumption of facility control as the integrated structural finding behind the violence. Officer vacancies systemwide have run between 49.3% and 60% against a 10% national standard; the DOJ’s October 2024 findings concluded that GDC leadership “has lost control of its facilities” and faulted the agency for blaming gangs while underemphasizing understaffing. Former GDC sergeant Tyler Ryals told GPS he had been the only security person on the entire Telfair compound of roughly 1,250 maximum-security inmates.

At Ware, GPS has received recurring reports from incarcerated people and family members that gang-affiliated residents control housing assignments and block others from certain housing areas, monopolize single-occupancy cells, and displace non-affiliated men onto dayroom floors or into overcrowded small cells. Accounts describe widespread possession of large knives and violence that clusters on weekends and during periods of reduced staffing. Inmate accounts collected by GPS also describe physical assaults that are not formally recorded by staff and are sometimes written off as horseplay.

Aggregate GPS records across the 12 months to the most recent data show assault-by-inmate signals drawn from 20 distinct sources, clustered across five months, with eight sources at critical or high severity in May 2026 and eight at high or moderate severity in April 2026. External complaints to the GBI and the GDC Ombudsman, family-safety concerns, and unnamed staff-misconduct allegations also appear in the same period. Those signals, taken with the documented deaths, point to a facility whose day-to-day custody failures are chronic rather than episodic.

A Body Undiscovered for Days, and Deaths Arriving Without Answers

Georgia Public Broadcasting reported in October 2024 that DonTavis Mintz died at Ware State Prison and his body was not discovered for days. His mother, Narissa Wright, alleges that no counts or welfare checks were conducted, and that when his remains were returned she could identify him only by a single tooth. The lack of clear answers extends into 2026: Kojack Thomas Jr., 27, was pronounced dead May 31, 2026, and GDC’s Office of Professional Standards said it was investigating the death as a potential homicide, with the body sent to the GBI crime lab.

GPS has received recurring family reports alleging that deaths at Ware have been wrongly classified as suicides. The facility’s mortality database classifies 12 deaths since 2020 as suicide. The same facility’s homicide record, documented in GPS’s “At Least Nineteen” investigation, includes eleven deaths in which Georgia’s own autopsies named a suspect and GPS found no record of prosecution.

The Kitchen Contradiction: High Scores and Persistent Complaints

The Georgia Department of Public Health has scored Ware’s food service at 94 or better in every available routine inspection since April 2023: 95 in April 2023, 95 in November 2023, 94 in May 2024, 94 in November 2024, 98 in March 2025, 97 in August 2025, and 98 in March 2026. Recorded violations were generally administrative or physical-plant issues—cleanable surfaces, ventilation, lighting, and the certified food protection manager.

Yet GPS’s systemic findings document how DPH scores systematically fail to capture food-service sanitation failures, and The Marshall Project independently reported in May 2026 on rats in kitchens, insects in food, moldy trays, and visible malnutrition across Georgia facilities. GPS has additionally received recurring family reports specific to Ware describing undercooked or raw food, meal portions below state guidelines, and food-safety concerns filed with the GDC Ombudsman and GDC administration in 2026. The state’s food spend remains strikingly low: GPS’s systemic findings put it at about $1.69 per person per day in 2024, with a proposed $1.60 per day in FY27, against a rough FDA Thrifty Food Plan estimate of $10 per day for a nutritionally adequate adult male diet.

State Liability Payouts Tied to Ware

Open-records settlement ledgers from the Georgia Department of Administrative Services show at least five state liability payouts tied to Ware State Prison between 2015 and 2023: $2,500 for David Michael Slaughter (2015), $50,578 for Christopher Stewart (2016), $10,000 for Denard Brown (2019, linked in the ledger to a documented death record), $2,500 for Bennie James Johnson (2021), and $20,000 for Jimmy Mack Rice (2023). The ledger entries are terse and do not describe the underlying incidents in detail, but their existence shows that Ware has been a recurring source of liability for the state since at least 2015.

Sources

This analysis draws on reporting from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Georgia Public Broadcasting, and The Marshall Project; Georgia Department of Public Health food-safety inspection reports; Georgia Department of Administrative Services open-records settlement ledgers; GDC statements; GPS’s own mortality records and investigative reporting, including “At Least Nineteen: The Murders the State Didn’t Prosecute”; and aggregated family and incarcerated-person accounts collected by GPS staff. Where systemic findings are attributed to GPS, they reflect GPS’s documented editorial analyses of GDC budget, staffing, food-service, infrastructure, and mortality data.