# The Staff Supply Chain: What GDC's Own Contraband Reports Show > GDC's own contraband arrest reports, 2010 to 2026, name 374 of its own staff, officers and contract staff as a recurring supply route for contraband into Georgia prisons. GPS assembled all 599 reports and 1,615 incidents, including 265 reports recovered from the Internet Archive. **Published**: 2026-09-08 **Source**: https://gps.press/intelligence/issue/contraband-staff-supply-chain/ **Author**: Georgia Prisoners' Speak --- ## The Record GDC Published About Itself Since July 2010, the Georgia Department of Corrections has published contraband arrest reports on its own website, each one framed as an enforcement success. GPS has assembled every report GDC published from July 2010 to July 2026: 599 reports containing 1,615 separately described incidents. Of those, 265 reports no longer exist on GDC's site and were recovered from the Internet Archive: all 214 of the 2010 to 2015 reports and 51 later ones, 40 of them from 2017, the year GDC's 2023 site migration dropped. Read as a series rather than as individual press releases, the reports document something GDC has never presented as a pattern: the department's own staff, officers and contract employees are a recurring supply route for contraband into Georgia prisons. Across the 1,615 incidents, GDC's own text describes 2,369 people or groups. Of those, 374 were identified by GDC as its own staff, correctional officers or contract staff. Another 514 were described as visitors and 926 as civilians, typically perimeter drops or vehicle stops. ## Sixteen Years, Counted by Year The number of GDC staff, officers and contract staff named in the department's contraband reports by year of incident tells a story with a clear shape. GDC named 21 of its own people in 2011, 32 in 2012, 42 in 2013, 26 in 2014, 30 in 2015, 27 in 2016, 20 in 2017, 36 in 2018, and then 46 in 2019, the peak year, when GDC's reports named 46 of its own staff, officers or contract staff across 137 incidents. The numbers fall after 2019: 36 in 2020, 24 in 2021, and then zero in 2022. In 2022 GDC published 40 contraband reports describing 80 incidents, and not one of them described the arrest of a GDC employee, officer or contractor. It is the only year since 2010 with no reported staff arrest. The reports for 2023 through mid-2026 name 31 staff-class people in total: 4 in 2023, 8 in 2024, 11 in 2025, and 8 in the first seven months of 2026. That decline cannot be read as a decline in staff involvement. GDC's reporting cadence changed over the same period. The department published roughly weekly reports through 2022, with 40 to 49 reports a year from 2016 to 2022. Then the pace dropped: 29 reports in 2023, 15 in 2024, 16 in 2025, and roughly monthly in 2026. A fall in reported incidents is at least partly a fall in reporting, not a fall in contraband. ## Who GDC Says Brought It In The staff-class people GDC named were overwhelmingly custody staff. Of the 374 staff, officers and contract staff in the reports, about 277 were described by GDC as officers, correctional officers, sergeants or lieutenants. About 44 were food-service staff, 10 were nurses or medical staff, 4 were counselors, and 14 were explicitly described as contract staff. Correctional officers are the majority of GDC's workforce, so a majority share of staff arrests among officers is expected from headcount alone. The reports give no workforce denominator, so the role counts can be reported only as printed. The same caution applies to the food-service and medical staff figures: the reports describe arrests, not rates. The reports themselves are specific. On July 20, 2026, at Augusta State Medical Prison, GDC reported that security staff observed Officer Jebkely on camera warming up food, placing it in a plastic bag along with other food items, placing it inside a milk crate, and handing it to an offender. The Columbia County Sheriff's Office arrested her with pending charges, according to GDC's report (GDC contraband report, August 3, 2026, https://gdc.georgia.gov/contraband-report/2026-08-03/contraband-arrests-multiple-state-prisons). On May 19, 2026, at Valdosta State Prison, GDC reported that CERT Officer Jahleel Horton entered the front entry when an item was found hidden inside his vest containing two cellphones, each with a phone case wrapped in black electrical tape. The Lowndes County Sheriff's Office arrested him, according to GDC's report (GDC contraband report, June 1, 2026, https://gdc.georgia.gov/contraband-report/2026-06-01/contraband-arrests-multiple-state-prisons). The reports also name contract staff. On March 17, 2026, at Rogers State Prison, GDC reported that security staff recovered a Styrofoam tray from a closet containing two cellphones and two activation cards, and that after an investigation it was determined that contract staff Mental Health Counselor Kalvin Roberts entered the facility with the contraband. The Tattnall County Sheriff's Department arrested him for crossing the guard lines with prohibited items, according to GDC's report (GDC contraband report, April 3, 2026, https://gdc.georgia.gov/contraband-report/2026-04-03/contraband-arrests-multiple-state-prisons). On February 8, 2026, at Coastal State Prison, GDC reported that Aramark Contractor Olivia Peters attempted to enter the facility and security staff observed a bulge under her clothing; she emptied the contents, which contained one vacuum-sealed package of loose tobacco. The Chatham County Sheriff's Office arrested her, according to GDC's report (GDC contraband report, March 2, 2026, https://gdc.georgia.gov/contraband-report/2026-03-02/contraband-arrests-multiple-state-prisons). On April 30, 2026, at Dodge State Prison, GDC reported that during a routine search of vehicles, contraband consisting of one small bag of THC, one bag of a white crystal-like substance, and two cans of Michelob ULTRA were located in the vehicle of Contractor David Tootle and Contractor Daniel Brown. The Dodge County Sheriff's Department arrested both men and transported them to the Dodge County Jail, pending charges, according to GDC's report (GDC contraband report, June 1, 2026, https://gdc.georgia.gov/contraband-report/2026-06-01/contraband-arrests-multiple-state-prisons). ## Where the Staff Cases Appear The facilities whose contraband reports most often name GDC's own staff, by incidents involving a staff-class person as GDC categorised them, are Dooly State Prison with 29 staff-class people named in 77 incidents, Calhoun State Prison with 28 in 159 incidents, Wilcox State Prison with 26 in 131 incidents, Valdosta State Prison with 25 in 56 incidents, Telfair State Prison with 23 in 132 incidents, and Smith State Prison with 20 in 105 incidents. The contraband reports do not explain why these facilities appear most often, and the counts themselves are not rates. Whether the pattern reflects staffing levels, reporting practices, or something else is an open question the published record does not answer. ## What Was Being Brought In GDC's reports describe what was being brought in, by the number of incidents mentioning each item. Tobacco appears most often, in 805 incidents. Marijuana appears in 748. Cell phones appear in 501 incidents, with phone accessories and chargers in another 298. Methamphetamine appears in 138 incidents, other drugs in 216, and weapons in 130. Eighty-eight incidents describe a drone. The reports describe arrests and seizures; they do not explain why particular items appear at particular frequencies. The item counts stand as GDC printed them. ## What the Data Cannot Say GDC's reports describe an arrest in 1,549 of the 1,615 incidents. GDC has never published the disposition of any of them. No charge outcome, plea, conviction or dismissal appears in the corpus, so every figure GPS draws from it is an arrest as reported, not a conviction. A person named in a GDC contraband report was arrested, according to GDC's report. Nothing in the public record assembled here says what happened next. The cumulative tally line GDC printed on its reports is not a consistent series. The department's running figure, "As of 7/2010, we've made N contraband arrests," later "approximately N staff and civilians," was replaced in one week of August 2019 with a different, lower series. One hundred thirty-seven pages went down, with a median drop of 214. The tally can be quoted only as GDC's figure at the time, never as a trend. The incident rows themselves have been stable. Comparing 2,100 Internet Archive captures with GDC's live pages, GPS found the incident text essentially unchanged over ten years: four material edits in total, one of which removed an officer's name from a 2020 report in February 2026. The rest were cosmetic. GDC's 2023 site migration dropped the January through October 2017 reports and assigned wrong dates to 24 others. The pre-2010 years are simply absent. GDC began publishing these reports in July 2010, and whatever contraband arrests happened before that date were never part of the public series. The 374 staff-class people named since 2010 are a floor, not a total. ## Sources This analysis draws on GPS's assembled corpus of 599 contraband arrest reports published by the Georgia Department of Corrections from July 2010 to July 2026, including 265 reports recovered from the Internet Archive after GDC's 2023 site migration removed them. The underlying data is available through GPS's contraband data set and public API.