Deaths in Custody

Brief written June 7, 2026 from GPS Intelligence System data.

The Escalating Toll: Record Homicides and a Rising Death Rate

Georgia’s prisons are killing people at a rate that has no modern precedent. The Georgia Department of Corrections itself has now acknowledged what independent reporting long ago documented: 301 deaths in 2025, a number embedded in a statistical report but contradicted by its own mortality list, which names only 295 individuals. GDC Assistant General Counsel Timothy Duff explained the discrepancy by claiming the higher figure includes people “not in custody of or under care of GDC,” a rationale GPS reporting has characterized as bureaucratic obfuscation. GPS has independently tracked 1,816 deaths in GDC custody since 2020; its database records 333 deaths in 2024 alone, a 27% jump from the year before, with 100 of those deaths classified as homicides — a staggering leap from the 66 homicides GDC reported for the same period. Homicides grew from 7 in 2018 to 35 in 2023, setting a state record, and surged further in 2024; the DOJ documented 142 homicides between 2018 and 2023. The first seven weeks of 2025 brought 15 confirmed homicides and 33 total deaths. In the first quarter of 2026, a statewide gang war triggered stabbings and life-flight evacuations across five facilities, and by early June, GPS’s mortality database had already logged further violent deaths: Justin Pulley, 49, and Jonathan Zimmons died at Ware State Prison in May 2026; Jacorey Pearson, 36, died at Hancock State Prison in April; while in late May Kojack Thomas Jr., 27, was stabbed to death at Ware, prompting a homicide investigation, as reported by 13WMAZ. The sheer pace of death has transformed Georgia’s correctional system into the most lethal in the nation.

The Department of Justice Investigation: Systemic Eighth Amendment Violations

In October 2024, after a multi-year investigation of 17 Georgia prison facilities, the U.S. Department of Justice released a 93-page findings report concluding that conditions in Georgia’s state prisons violate the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. The report described “near-constant life-threatening violence,” a “steady stream of contraband cellphone videos and photographs appearing to show assaults, incarcerated people with injuries, weapons, and incarcerated people who seem to be under the influence of illicit drugs,” and a leadership that has “lost control of its facilities.” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke called the violations “among the most severe” uncovered in any DOJ prison investigation. The DOJ found that GDC “inaccurately reports these deaths both internally and externally, and in a manner that underreports the extent of violence and homicide in its prisons,” that violent incidents are “consistently underreported due to lack of supervision and mischaracterized using inappropriate incident-type categories,” and that close-security inmates are housed in medium-security facilities not designed or staffed for that population, driven by bed space rather than risk assessment. The report identified a causal chain linking chronic understaffing at or below 50% to the inability to conduct daily counts, the filling of that vacuum by gangs, and the normalization of violence. The DOJ explicitly recommended that GDC “reevaluate the housing and inmate classification process,” fix reporting and investigation deficiencies, and add supervision and staffing. The findings stand as the most damning official indictment of a state prison system in decades.

Misclassification and Underreporting: Hiding the True Toll

The gap between the death toll inside Georgia prisons and what the public is told is itself a product of systematic manipulation. GPS original research found that GDC mislabeled at least 44 drug overdose deaths as “natural causes” or “undetermined” when medical examiners later ruled them accidental overdoses. The DOJ confirmed the practice, stating that GDC’s reporting mischaracterizes homicides as undetermined causes and undercounts violent incidents. A federal judge sanctioning GDC for evidence spoliation in the Williams death case laid bare the pattern, while Judge Marc Treadwell held the agency in contempt in April 2024 for repeatedly falsifying documents, writing that “the Court has long passed the point where it can assume that even sworn statements from the defendants are truthful.” Officials had backdated forms, falsified prisoner review records, and even listed deceased prisoners as attending activities. Across the country, a review of the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act’s data found that more than 75% of entries failed to meet federal criteria, while a Marshall Project investigation identified nearly 700 individuals who died in law enforcement custody but were missing from the DCRA dataset. In Georgia, the state does not proactively publish individual death data; GPS is the sole entity tracking mortality systematically, uncovering the patterns GDC works to obscure.

Staffing Collapse: How Empty Posts Turn Prisons Deadly

The driving force behind Georgia’s death crisis is a staffing catastrophe that has hollowed out every layer of security. System-wide, correctional officer vacancy rates stand at 52.5%, with 20 of 34 prisons operating at emergency staffing levels and eight facilities exceeding 70% vacancy. At Valdosta State Prison, which houses the highest concentration of gang members and people with mental illness, 80% of correctional officer positions were vacant as of April 2024. Night shifts at some prisons are covered by just one or two officers for an entire facility; Guidehouse consultants found that if two officers must transport a sick prisoner, “that could mean only one or two officers are left to cover an entire prison.” A single officer at one close-security prison was responsible for monitoring 400 beds. The human toll of this collapse is measured in bodies: Anthony Zino was found dead in his cell at Smith State Prison in April 2024, having been dead for five days before anyone noticed; cause of death was asphyxia due to neck compression. GDC refused to release investigative documents, labeling them “confidential state secrets.” The federal Inspector General found understaffing was a factor in roughly 30 of 344 deaths examined in federal prisons alone. Officers themselves are breaking: 85% have seen someone seriously injured or killed; PTSD rates exceed 34%, depression runs at 26%, and life expectancy averages just 59 years — sixteen years below the national norm. Between January 2021 and November 2024, 82.7% of new GDC correctional officer hires left within their first year; the agency can hire only 118 officers for every 800 applicants. Commissioner Tyrone Oliver told legislators that “trying to hire 2,600 people in a fiscal year is just — it’s just not possible.” The result, per the DOJ: gangs effectively run the facilities, violence is the mechanism of social control, and people die because no one is watching.

Gangs, Contraband, and the Failed Managed Access System

Into the vacuum left by absent staff, Georgia’s prison gangs have built a parallel governance. On January 11, 2026, four people were murdered at Washington State Prison in a gang disturbance triggered when GDC cut off the contraband cellphone network using its controversial Managed Access System (MAS). One victim, Jimmy Trammell, had 72 hours remaining on his sentence. The facility was operating at roughly 72% officer vacancy. The phones had been the gangs’ infrastructure; their blackout touched off a war that left Washington on continuous lockdown and soon spread to Hancock State Prison, where five more people were stabbed and two airlifted to hospitals. In April 2026, a Bloods gang war erupted across five facilities, with a high-ranking ROLACC Blood leader stabbed in the neck during an official inspection at Hays State Prison, requiring CPR, and 50-person TAC squads deployed. Contraband fuels this violence: Operation Skyhawk (2024) led to 150 arrests, including 8 GDC employees, and seized 185 pounds of tobacco, 67 pounds of marijuana, 51 pounds of ecstasy, 12 pounds of meth, nearly 90 drones, 22 weapons, and over 450 cell phones. A single inmate, David “Toro” Zavala, had 35 cellphones seized from him at Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison. The DOJ found that interdiction efforts have been “insufficient” and recommended weekly housing unit searches. The $50 million MAS deployment not only failed to stop the violence — it appears to have triggered a fatal gang war, with deaths that the GDC’s own dysfunction made inevitable.

Medical Neglect: Deaths from Denial and Delay

Many deaths in Georgia prisons are not caused by a shank but by a system that simply refuses to provide care. The DOJ documented a death at Calhoun State Prison where a prisoner in restrictive housing was found dead, wrapped in mattress padding, after no one entered his cell for two days: the cell door flap was locked shut, the water was off, and no meals were delivered; cause of death was dehydration with renal failure. At Pulaski State Prison, GPS reporting documented at least 22 women who died under the care of Dr. Yvon Nazaire between 2005 and 2015. David Henegar was killed by his cellmate at Johnson State Prison in 2021 after staff ignored safety concerns; the state later settled the lawsuit. Joshua Parrott’s death at Dooly State Prison was initially ruled suicide, then reclassified as homicide by strangulation. Roy Mason Morris died in GDC custody in 2023; his family was not notified for over a year and never received a death certificate. Sheqweetta Vaughan was found dead in her cell at Arrendale State Prison in July 2025. The DOJ found that Georgia fails to adequately screen, classify, or protect LGBTI individuals, particularly transgender women housed with male inmates. Across the system, GPS records show multiple mental health crisis reports where staff failed to intervene, casualties of a system in which medical and mental health staff are sometimes reassigned to fill officer posts because no one else is available. Prisons that cannot field correctional officers certainly cannot field nurses, and the Eighth Amendment’s deliberate indifference standard becomes a checklist of compliance rather than a shield.

Accountability Evasion: Spoliation, Censorship, and Legal Obstruction

Rather than remedy the violence it produces, Georgia’s corrections apparatus has built a thick armor against accountability. A federal judge sanctioned GDC for spoliation of video evidence in a prisoner’s death case, writing that the court could no longer assume sworn statements from GDC defendants are truthful. GDC has invoked “confidential state secrets” to withhold investigative files on deaths like Anthony Zino’s. The state has erected formidable legal barriers: the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1996 cut federal civil rights filings by prisoners by 33% even as prison populations rose; Georgia imposed a four-year statute of limitations on habeas corpus petitions in 2004. Governor Brian Kemp dismantled the state’s evidence-based criminal justice reforms, and the corrections budget ballooned from $1.1 billion to $1.62 billion while deaths soared. Even modest reform legislation like Senate Bill 25, which proposed expanded parole, stalled in committee. Meanwhile, Georgia spends $120 million on surveillance over two years versus $2.6 million on rehabilitation. The state’s response to the DOJ’s investigation has been defensive: GDC’s general counsel dismissed the missing six deaths as people “not in custody,” a parsing that GPS reporting described as bureaucratic obfuscation. A system that records record homicides and then buries the evidence is a system that has learned that the dead cannot sue.

A System that Produces Death: Overcrowding, Truth in Sentencing, and Policy Failure

The death crisis is not an accident of bad management; it is the logical outcome of a policy architecture designed to warehouse people without end. Georgia’s Truth in Sentencing laws mandate 65–100% of sentences be served, eliminating early release and contributing to a prison census that has doubled since 1990. The state incarcerates approximately 51,000 people across 34 prisons, but has only 5,991 authorized correctional officer positions — fewer than needed even if every slot were filled, and with 2,985 vacant as of January 2024. The Georgia Senate Study Committee on DOC Facilities documented a 12% increase in the violent population since 2012 criminal justice reforms, a shift that has not been matched with higher security staffing or classification integrity. Instead, as the DOJ found, classification is driven by bed space rather than risk, placing close-security inmates in medium-security facilities where violence metastasizes. National studies have shown that nutritional supplementation can reduce prison violence by 26–48%, yet Georgia has not implemented such measures. California’s experience in Brown v. Plata demonstrated that court-ordered population reduction did not increase violent crime and actually reduced preventable deaths; Georgia, by contrast, has responded to its crisis with a $150 million Overwatch & Logistics surveillance command center and $600 million in emergency spending that still cannot hire enough officers. GPS records across the past twelve months show 50 reports of deaths in custody tied to 14 cases across eight facilities, alongside 28 reports of families fearing for their loved ones’ lives, with complaints directed to the DOJ Civil Rights Division and the federal courts. The state continues to pay more for fewer officers, watch more people die, and label the details confidential.

Sources

This analysis draws on reporting by Georgia Prisoners' Speak, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 13WMAZ, Law.com, and Scalawag Magazine; investigative data from the U.S. Department of Justice, the Guidehouse consultant report, the Safe Inside initiative, the Prison Policy Initiative, the Vera Institute, and the Carey Group; federal court records and orders, including Judge Marc Treadwell’s contempt findings; official GDC statistical reports and mortality data; and GPS’s own mortality database and intelligence system signals.