Solitary Confinement
Solitary confinement in Georgia's prison system functions as a site of documented lethal violence, psychological harm, and institutional concealment — not a safety tool. GPS investigations reveal that people are being murdered in segregation cells after warning staff they are in danger, double-bunking in 'the hole' continues despite documented homicides, and GDC has never publicly accounted for how many people are held in isolation or under what conditions. The system's 2010 origins of using lockdown as punishment, its current practice of mass lifer transfers into close-security facilities, and a federal judge's 2026 characterization of prison medical care as a 'Soviet Gulag' together form a coherent portrait of a department that uses isolation and restriction as instruments of control rather than safety.
Key Facts
By the Numbers
Homicides in Segregation: Killing in the State's Most Controlled Spaces
The most disturbing pattern GPS has documented in Georgia's use of solitary confinement is not the isolation itself — it is the killing. People are being murdered inside segregation units, protective custody cells, and disciplinary lockdown — spaces GDC presents to the public as sites of heightened control. In case after case tracked by GPS, an individual is placed in a lockdown cell with another prisoner, a conflict erupts beyond the reach of any officer, and the next human contact is a body check. The violence is structurally enabled by GDC's continued practice of double-bunking in segregation.
GPS independently tracks all deaths inside Georgia's prison system — the GDC does not publicly release cause-of-death information and has never published a breakdown of where in a facility a death occurs. Based on GPS's database, Georgia prisons recorded 333 deaths in 2024, 301 in 2025, and 78 in the first four months of 2026 alone (27 of those confirmed homicides). Many deaths remain classified as unknown or pending as GPS continues independent investigation; the true homicide count is significantly higher than confirmed figures. GPS has documented multiple cases in which individuals placed in segregation — including protective custody — were killed by a cellmate after warning staff they were in danger.
As GPS reported in November 2025, the GDC was on pace to exceed the prior year's homicide total by September of that year, a trajectory the Atlanta Journal-Constitution corroborated. The U.S. Department of Justice's 2024 findings — that Georgia's prisons violate the Constitution and that the state is 'deliberately indifferent' to lethal violence — apply with particular force to segregation units, where the absence of witnesses, cameras, and independent oversight makes violence both more likely and easier to conceal. GPS has called for an immediate end to double-bunking in all segregation, Tier, SMU, and protective custody cells statewide, mandatory 24/7 recorded camera coverage at cell fronts, digitally time-stamped 15-minute welfare checks, and automatic external review of any serious incident in a segregation unit.
Solitary as Punishment: The David Cassady Case
The case of David Cassady illustrates how Georgia's use of solitary confinement operates not as a security measure but as a compounding mechanism of harm — one that the GDC itself has never been required to justify publicly. Cassady, 58 years old, has been in GDC custody for approximately 40 years. During that time, court filings document repeated civil rights violations, sexual assault at the hands of a corrections officer, a civil suit against that officer, and months-long stints in solitary confinement.
Cassady's trajectory — from a man with grievances against the prison system to a man who built and mailed bombs to government offices from inside a Tattnall County prison — is a documented case study in what GPS and researchers have long argued: prolonged solitary confinement does not rehabilitate or neutralize threat. It intensifies it. Court filings in the Cassady case describe a man whose every attempt to raise documented abuses through legitimate channels failed, and who concluded that extreme action was the only way to compel any institutional response. He was subsequently federally sentenced in a way that ensures he will never be released. His case received coverage in The Georgia Virtue in February 2026, but GDC has offered no public accounting of its own role in his radicalization through extended isolation and unaddressed abuse.
The Cassady case is not an outlier in the literature on solitary confinement — it is precisely the pattern that psychiatric and penological research has documented for decades: prolonged isolation produces deteriorating mental health, heightened reactivity to perceived threats, and reduced capacity for the kind of social reintegration that would make communities safer. Georgia's response has been to expand its isolation infrastructure, committing over $1.6 billion to new construction that includes additional isolation and close-security capacity, rather than investing in the rehabilitative programming that evidence suggests reduces violence.
Mass Lifer Transfers: Close Security as Structural Isolation
Between February and April 2026, GPS documented an unprecedented operation at Calhoun State Prison: Warden Kendric Jackson transferred 87 people serving life sentences out of the medium-security facility, with 79.3% sent to close-security (Level 5) prisons — the most restrictive general-population facilities in Georgia's system. Calhoun accounted for 67% of all medium-to-close-security lifer transfers system-wide during this period. No other medium-security facility in Georgia came close; the next-highest, Dooly State Prison, transferred 32 lifers, only a fraction of whom went to close security.
Close security is not formally classified as solitary confinement, but for people who have spent decades in medium-security settings — often older, with established routines, programming access, and health needs — transfer to a Level 5 facility functions as a form of structural isolation. GPS documented one case in particular: John Morgan Coleman, 82 years old, was transferred from Calhoun to Hancock State Prison, a close-security facility, in late March 2026. Coleman was among 36 lifers moved in a single week. GDC has offered no public explanation for the operation, no announced policy change, and no justification for why an 82-year-old man with decades of medium-security placement requires close-security housing.
The pattern GPS documented suggests that what is being created is a de facto population swap: lifers, who tend to be older, longer-serving, and statistically among the lowest-recidivism populations in any prison system, are being moved into maximum-restriction environments while younger, shorter-sentence individuals fill the medium-security spaces they vacated. The human consequences — loss of programming, increased restriction, health deterioration in aging incarcerated people, and placement in facilities with documented violence — are invisible in any GDC public reporting. GPS's Offender Database, tracking 302,343 offender records and 88,180 change records, is the only source documenting the scope of this operation.
Medical Care in Lockdown: 'A Soviet Gulag'
People held in solitary confinement and close-security environments face compounded medical neglect — the restricted movement and limited oversight that define these settings also function as barriers to healthcare access. While the most high-profile recent judicial language on this issue came from the federal Bureau of Prisons context, it describes a structural reality that GPS has documented extensively within GDC's own system. On April 9, 2026, U.S. District Judge Roy B. Dalton granted compassionate release to a woman whose urgent breast cancer referral was ignored by BOP officials for weeks, writing that 'outside medical referrals are like Solzhenitsyn's sick bay in the Soviet Gulag: a coveted but nearly inaccessible refuge for which only prisoners near death qualify for admission.'
Within Georgia's system, the intersection of isolation and medical neglect is a documented pattern. As of April 1, 2026, GDC's own population data identified 1,261 inmates with 'poorly controlled health' conditions, 47 in mental health crisis, and 6 with terminal illness system-wide — all within a population where close-security housing restricts movement and limits access to care. The GDC does not publish data on how many people with serious health conditions are held in segregation or close-security units. GPS's death database — which the GDC does not maintain or publish — recorded 6 suicides in 2025 and 6 confirmed natural deaths across 2025 and earlier years, with hundreds more deaths remaining unclassified pending independent GPS investigation.
The $307.6 million federal jury verdict in April 2026 against Corizon Health's corporate successor — for medical neglect of a colostomy patient — represents the scale of liability that prison healthcare failures generate. While that verdict arose from a federal case, Corizon and its successor entities contracted with multiple state systems including facilities that house people in restrictive settings. The verdict is a data point in the broader accountability landscape that Georgia's prison system continues to avoid through opacity rather than reform.
Historical Pattern: Lockdown as Institutional Control
Georgia's punitive use of lockdown did not emerge recently. In December 2010, thousands of incarcerated people across ten Georgia prisons conducted the largest prison work strike in U.S. history, demanding living wages, better conditions, and recognition of their labor. The prisoners' use of self-imposed lockdown — refusing to leave cells — was met by GDC with official lockdown, hot water shutoffs at Macon State Prison, heat shutoffs at Telfair State Prison during sub-freezing temperatures, and what prisoners and their families described as tactical officer rampages through at least one facility, with belongings destroyed and at least six people severely beaten. GDC characterized the action as a riot; prisoners described it as an organized, nonviolent labor action.
The 2010 strike exposed the foundational dynamic that GPS continues to document sixteen years later: GDC uses lockdown, isolation, and restriction as instruments of institutional control, not security tools applied with any clinical or constitutional precision. Prisoners' demands in 2010 — for adequate food, medical care, educational opportunities, and basic human recognition — mirror the conditions GPS documents in 2026. The systematic use of triple-bunking that GDC implemented in 2010 as a budget response created the density and tension that made violence more likely. Today's close-security expansion and mass lifer transfers represent the same logic applied at larger scale and higher cost.
The through-line from 2010 to 2026 is GDC's consistent preference for physical restriction over systemic reform. Where California has invested approximately $239 million to transform its oldest prison into a rehabilitation-focused facility with college programming, trades training, and staff trained as mentors, Georgia has committed over $1.6 billion to new walls and isolation units. The human costs of that choice are documented in GPS's mortality database — 1,778 deaths recorded since tracking began, the vast majority still unclassified because GDC releases no cause-of-death data and GPS must investigate each case independently.
Reform Failures and the Accountability Gap
No meaningful reform of Georgia's solitary confinement practices has occurred despite a federal DOJ finding in 2024 that Georgia's prisons violate the Constitution, a federal judge's 2026 ruling that the state's parole process for juvenile lifers may itself constitute cruel and unusual punishment, and GPS's years of documented evidence that people are being killed in isolation units. On March 17, 2026, U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg denied the State Board of Pardons and Paroles' motion to dismiss Buttrum v. Herring, finding that Janice Buttrum's attorneys had plausibly alleged that Georgia's parole process for people serving life sentences for juvenile offenses is so hollow it may violate the Eighth Amendment. The board, when asked for documents showing how it distinguishes between juvenile and adult offenders as the Supreme Court requires, responded that it has none.
The Buttrum case intersects directly with solitary confinement policy because people denied parole — including those who have had no disciplinary infraction in decades, as Buttrum's last was in 1999 — are funneled back into a system that uses restriction and isolation as its primary management tools. Buttrum, now 63 and using a walker, has been denied release five times with nearly identical form letters. The 87 lifers transferred from Calhoun to close-security facilities in early 2026 face a similar structural reality: the system has no articulated pathway out of its most restrictive settings.
GPS's specific reform recommendations on solitary confinement — published in November 2025 and grounded in GPS's own case tracking — include single-celling all segregation units with no exceptions, mandatory external review of any serious incident in isolation, 24/7 recorded camera coverage, and digitally time-stamped welfare checks. None of these recommendations require new legislation. None have been implemented. GDC has not publicly responded to them. The accountability gap is not a gap in knowledge — it is a gap in political will, one that GPS will continue to document until the killing in Georgia's isolation units stops.