Brief written October 6, 2026 from GPS Intelligence System data.(DS)

Solitary Confinement in Georgia Prisons: The Tier System, the Special Management Unit, and the Population GDC Does Not Publish

Georgia operates one of the largest and least documented isolation systems in the United States. It is built from four overlapping policies — Tier I (short-term segregation), Tier II (long-term administrative segregation), Tier III (the Special Management Unit at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison), and a juvenile program modelled on Tier II — plus a separate disciplinary-isolation regime capped at 30 days. The state publishes a population figure for exactly one of those units, and only because the Special Management Unit happens to carry its own facility code. For everything else, the number of people held in isolation in Georgia on any given day is not merely unpublished; it is arithmetically unrecoverable from the data GDC releases.

This analysis draws on GDC's own Standard Operating Procedures, the 273 PREA facility audit reports GDC publishes, the federal litigation record in Gumm v. Ford, the U.S. Department of Justice's October 2024 findings letter, the 2024 Georgia Senate Study Committee report, peer-reviewed research on isolation harm, and GPS's mortality registry.

The Policy Floor: 23.3 Hours a Day, Five Hours a Week

The arithmetic is straightforward and comes entirely from GDC's own policy text. SOP 209.07, governing Tier I, sets an exercise entitlement of "a minimum of five (5) hours per week, with at least one (1) hour per day on five days." SOP 209.08, governing Tier II, sets "a minimum of five (5) hours per week of exercise" with no daily distribution specified at all. Five hours out of a 168-hour week leaves 163 hours in cell — 23.3 hours per day. That exceeds the 22-hour threshold in Rule 44 of the Nelson Mandela Rules, the UN Standard Minimum Rules adopted December 17, 2015, which define solitary confinement as "the confinement of prisoners for 22 hours or more a day without meaningful human contact."

Rule 43 prohibits prolonged solitary confinement, defined as more than 15 consecutive days, and Rule 45 prohibits indefinite solitary confinement under all circumstances. GDC's Tier II policy contains no maximum duration whatsoever. Where Tier I is capped at 30 days and Tier III is capped at 24 months subject to enumerated exceptions, Tier II has no outer limit written into policy. A person who "cannot return to general population because they pose a serious threat to the safety and security of the institutional operation" is retained in Phase 3 indefinitely, subject only to a 90-day review that may confirm retention. The Macon State Prison Cycle 2 audit describes Tier II as running "from nine months to indefinite"; the Cycle 4 audit says "from 270 days to an indefinite date." The Hays State Prison Cycle 2 audit describes Tier II as "long-term segregation/270 days" — a figure that appears nowhere in the SOP.

The second element of the Mandela Rules definition — absence of meaningful human contact — turns on cell occupancy, and GDC's policy does not specify it for Tier II. SOP 209.09 requires that "all cells are single occupancy" in Tier III. SOP 209.55 requires the same in Tier III STEP. SOP 209.45 permits Tier II STEP cells to be "single or double occupancy." SOP 209.08 says nothing at all. SOP 209.06, the generic administrative segregation policy, treats single-celling as an enumerated exception requiring assignment by medical, mental-health or classification staff plus evaluation within 24 or 48 hours — the necessary implication being that multiple occupancy is the ordinary condition. Two conditions of confinement are therefore being run inside the same programme under the same rules: 23 hours a day alone in a cell, and 23 hours a day locked in a cell with another person. GDC's Tier II policy distinguishes neither, guarantees neither, and reports neither.

What the Litigation Reformed, and What It Left Untouched

The central scope finding in the record is that Gumm v. Ford reached the Special Management Unit and nothing else. Timothy Gumm filed a handwritten pro se complaint in February 2015, after five years in isolation following a failed escape attempt in 2010. Sarah Geraghty of the Southern Center for Human Rights was appointed counsel in October 2016, and Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton joined as co-class counsel. The class arose from conditions in the SMU at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison — a single facility.

Dr. Craig Haney inspected the unit in 2017 and described it as "one of the harshest and most draconian" facilities he had seen "in decades of conducting evaluations," with residents "among the most psychologically traumatized persons [he] ha[d] ever assessed in this context." He concluded that "some of the inmates' psychological harm … may be irreversible and even fatal." The court adopted findings that SMU residents were confined in cells "smaller than the average parking space," with as little as five hours per week out of cell, no outside light, no congregate religious or educational programming, and frequently locked food-port flaps. At the 2017 inspection the unit held approximately 180 people, of whom 70 were designated mentally ill. Gumm himself was held continuously for seven and a half years despite fourteen transfer recommendations over four years.

The January 2019 settlement agreement required minimum out-of-cell time, programming, tablets, mental health evaluations, and a general 24-month limit on SMU confinement. The May 7, 2019 order found the relief "necessary to prevent violations of the inmates' constitutional rights." GDC codified the settlement into SOP 209.09 alone — the Tier III SOP, revised effective April 23, 2025, which now carries the 24-month ceiling, the mental-health exclusion, the 60-day and 90-day evaluations, a quarterly panel of the Director of Field Operations, the Statewide Mental Health Director, the Statewide Medical Director and a member of the Office of Legal Services, and the requirement of personal approval by the Commissioner or Assistant Commissioner for Facilities to hold anyone past 24 months.

SOP 209.08, governing Tier II, has none of it, and has not been revised since April 11, 2016 — nearly three years before the settlement. No duration cap. No mental-health exclusion. No panel. No mental-health evaluation requirement at placement. The programme with the least protection is the larger one.

The compliance record since is its own story. On April 19, 2024, Chief Judge Marc T. Treadwell found that GDC had "no desire or intention" to comply with the settlement, describing the agency as running "a four-corner offense." He appointed an independent monitor at GDC's expense, imposed fines of $2,500 per day — $75,000 every 30 days for six months — and extended the settlement past its initial three-year term. The order found that GDC compliance documents were "not only insufficient but also unreliable," and documented that officials falsified therapy records, including recording that a man attended treatment sessions after he was already dead. Six prisoners testified in the contempt proceedings about being denied showers, out-of-cell time, programming, cell cleanout, and access to kiosks and book carts. One described a cell where the toilet was broken and filled with feces and urine from prior occupants; he was forced to urinate in a cup and pour it in the sink, or defecate on toilet paper and dispose of it on his food tray. He had no mattress, no clothing, and was held in freezing temperatures. The GDC attorney did not refute the testimony. The order also documented that GDC officials placed people in "strip cells" upon arrival at the SMU, taking their clothing and leaving them naked or near-naked for hours or days.

The Tier II Admission Rule and the Mental Health Routing

Tier II's broadest admission criterion requires no adjudication. Criterion 1 of SOP 209.08 permits placement where "the offender is noted as a threat to the safe and secure operation of the Facility," a category that "may include, but is not limited to, offenders who have documented STG activities/involvement, notoriety of crimes, high level of supervision requirements, and offenders who have either been threatened with bodily harm or threatened others with bodily harm." The criterion is open-ended on its face, carries no evidentiary standard, and expressly covers a person who has been threatened — a victim rather than an aggressor. Criteria 1, 5 ("Failure in the Tier I program or refusal to participate") and 10 ("Offenders with assaultive histories") can each be satisfied without any disciplinary conviction.

The mental-health routing is written into policy and runs the wrong way. SOP 209.09 excludes both MH Level III and Level IV from Tier III, routing them to a Specialized Mental Health Treatment Unit. SOP 209.08 excludes only Level IV and admits Level III on mental-health recommendation. The effect is that prisoners with the higher mental-health classifications are routed away from the unit whose conditions were reformed under litigation and which guarantees four hours out of cell, and remain eligible for Tier II, whose policy floor is five hours per week. GDC's own mental-health policy, SOP 508.01, places "Specialized Mental Health Treatment Units (SMHTUs/TIER II, etc.)" in the highest-need tier of its staffing hierarchy alongside death row, the SMU and acute care, and assigns them a 1:20 counselor ratio — the second-richest in the system.

The American Psychiatric Association's December 2012 position statement (retained December 2017) holds that "prolonged segregation of adult inmates with serious mental illness, with rare exceptions, should be avoided due to the potential harm to such inmates," defining prolonged as longer than three to four weeks. The National Commission on Correctional Health Care recommended in April 2016 that solitary be prohibited for seriously mentally ill, juvenile and pregnant individuals and limited to less than 15 days for all others.

Scale: 3,401 Segregation Cells and No Tier Population Count

GDC has published one system-wide quantification of the Tier system in its history. The FY2014 Annual Fiscal Report states: "Developed and implemented the Tier Segregation Management System at all Level V facilities. As part of this system, 2,721 beds were converted to Tier beds." That is a bed count from 2014, not a population count, and it describes beds converted at implementation.

The best current per-facility dataset is the PREA audit corpus. Across 273 GDC-published audit reports, the segregation cell counts sum to 3,401 — a figure that counts all segregation, administrative and disciplinary, at every facility type. Tier units are a subset. The largest single counts are Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison at 409, Smith at 336, Telfair at 280, Hays at 252, Hancock at 223, Calhoun at 197, Macon at 192, Coffee Correctional at 170, Wilcox at 168, Baldwin at 167, Valdosta at 161, and Ware at 125.

The Tier label itself marks where GDC concentrates long-term administrative segregation programming, not where segregation cells exist. All nine facilities with named Tier programme housing in the corpus are close-security prisons, without exception. But segregation housing is documented at medium-security prisons throughout the system, sometimes at larger scale: Calhoun State Prison, whose Cycle 2 audit gives its security level as "4/Medium," reports 197 segregation cells — more than close-security Baldwin, Ware or Phillips. Wilcox State Prison, described in its own audits as "housing medium security, general population inmates," reports 168 segregation cells in Cycle 3, up from 24 double-bunked in Cycle 1. Dooly State Prison's Cycle 4 audit describes housing unit J2 as "designated housing of Administrative Segregation, Isolation and Mental Health Observations … 96 inmates in double bunks in a cell setting."

The only Tier population figure GDC publishes is the Special Management Unit's, and only because the SMU is carried as a standalone facility row in the monthly Inmate Statistical Profile. As of September 1, 2026 it held 154 people. Across 75 monthly snapshots from July 2020 to September 2026 the SMU population ranged from 149 to 195, against a stated capacity of 192 single-bunked cells.

For Tier I and Tier II, no count exists in any published document. A systematic review of 110 non-monthly GDC reports and all 34 distribution sections of the monthly Inmate Statistical Profile series found no published count of the Tier or restrictive-housing population. The monthly profile's only housing-adjacent field is "supervision," which reports Close, Medium and Minimum. Because SOP 209.09 classifies all Tier III offenders as Close Security, and SOP 209.45 and SOP 209.55 classify both STEP populations the same way, the Tier population is contained within GDC's published Close Security count but cannot be isolated from it. GDC publishes security classification, not housing status.

The reason no figure is published is not that the data does not exist. GDC's FY2019 Annual Fiscal Report states that a "TIER 2 SCRIBE module went live March 2019 to effectively track offenders in Extended Restrictive Housing." The FY2020 report adds that the SCRIBE Warden's Dashboard was expanded to display, for Tier II offenders, "number of days an offender has spent in restrictive housing Tier II." The data exists in an electronic system of record. What does not exist is any policy instrument requiring anyone to compile it into a report. A review of the 209 series found no SOP naming any Tier roster, periodic report, or Central Office aggregate submission. Every approval travels as a single case.

The disclosure history is instructive. GDC reported reducing its extended restrictive housing population in four consecutive reporting years and then stopped. The FY2018 report states that "since January 2017, the number of offenders in extended restrictive housing has decreased by 41 percent (671)." The FY2019 report states the reduction was "40% (675) since January 2017." The two statements are not reconcilable to a single baseline, and neither states the population before or after. From FY2021 onward the subject disappears as a programme narrative.

Deaths in Segregation

The mortality record inside Georgia's isolation units is documented in GPS's registry and in the federal findings.

Reginald Jerome Jacobs Jr. died February 6, 2023, at Calhoun State Prison; GPS's registry lists the cause as Deliberate Indifference. He was 24. In February 2023 an incarcerated person was found dead in his restrictive-housing cell at Calhoun, leaning against the door and wrapped in mattress padding. The body was rigid; the coroner believed the person had been dead seven to eight hours before discovery. No one had entered his cell for two days. The flap in the door had been locked shut. Staff had shut off the water supply to his room, closed the flap, and did not deliver meals to him. Cause of death: dehydration with renal failure.

Arthur Wimbush died April 2, 2023, at Phillips State Prison; GPS's registry lists the cause as Homicide. He was 46 and thirty days from release. GPS reporting describes an account in which the facility's Chief of Security attempted to move him to safety and found every segregation bed full.

Sherry Elaine Joyce died April 27, 2024, at Arrendale State Prison; GPS's registry lists the cause as Homicide. She was 61. Hallie Marie Reed died May 5, 2024, at Arrendale State Prison; GPS's registry lists the cause as Homicide. She was 23. GPS reporting describes an account in which Reed had asked in writing for protective custody eight days after Joyce's death, citing fear after reporting the killing, and her request was denied.

Stephen Prochaska died January 21, 2025, at Augusta State Medical Prison; GPS's registry lists the cause as Suicide. He was 70. Justin Waymon Hollingsworth died June 26, 2025, at Rogers State Prison; GPS's registry lists the cause as Suicide. He was 43. Sheqweetta Vaughan died July 9, 2025, at Arrendale State Prison; GPS's registry lists the cause as Unknown/Pending. She was 32. GPS reporting describes an account in which Vaughan, a postpartum mother with documented postpartum depression on psychotropic medication, was found decomposing in segregation cell H-19; the cell was in the 90s Fahrenheit with minimal ventilation, and a neighboring prisoner reported hearing her call for medical help more than 28 hours before discovery. Calvin Earl Noble died August 26, 2025, at Macon State Prison; GPS's registry lists the cause as Suicide. He was 25. Marcus Walker died January 10, 2026, at Wilcox State Prison; GPS's registry lists the cause as Homicide. He was 20. Christopher Lee died January 31, 2026, at Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison; GPS's registry lists the cause as Natural/Medical. He was 19. Miguel Angel Duran died March 1, 2026, at Central State Prison; GPS's registry lists the cause as Suicide. He was 44. Denecia Nichelle Randall died March 30, 2026, at Pulaski State Prison; GPS's registry lists the cause as Suicide. She was 28.

James Merritt Byrd died January 23, 2022, at Effingham County Prison; GPS's registry lists the cause as Medical Neglect. He was 30.

The DOJ's October 1, 2024 findings letter documented the Calhoun death directly and found that "GDC fails to control violence even in its segregated housing units and exposes incarcerated persons to an unreasonable risk of harm due to its inappropriate use of segregated housing." The letter also found that queer and transgender prisoners reported being placed in solitary confinement after reporting sexual assault or other violence, or because they were experiencing mental health crises. It recounts that a transgender woman placed in isolation after filing PREA complaints was denied a request to be moved and died by suicide in the isolation unit the very next day.

The research literature on isolation harm is unusually consistent. A 2025 meta-analysis published in PLOS One synthesized data from 171,300 inmates and found significantly greater psychological distress, more psychiatric symptoms including self-harm and thought disorders, and greater need for mental health services among prisoners in disciplinary confinement. A systematic review identified 13 studies with a total sample of 382,440 inmates, 23% having been exposed to solitary confinement, and found that higher-quality evidence associated solitary with increases in adverse psychological effects, self-harm, and mortality. Dr. Stuart Grassian's 1983 work identified a "major, clinically distinguishable psychiatric syndrome" among prisoners in long-term solitary. Dr. Craig Haney's 2003 study documented that 91% of prisoners in solitary reported anxiety, 86% oversensitivity to stimuli, 83% social withdrawal, 77% chronic depression, 70% an impending nervous breakdown, and 68% heart palpitations.

The Records That Would End the Invisibility

The single most load-bearing missing document is the current GDC designation of facilities as Tier I, Tier II, Tier II STEP, Tier III and Tier III STEP sites. No SOP in the corpus contains an applicability list. SOP 209.08 refers to "Level 5 facilit[ies]" without defining the term; SOP 508.01 refers to "designated SMHTU/TIER II facilities" without naming them. GPS holds the 2018 and 2019 editions of the GDC Tier Segregation System Fact Sheet, which designate Hancock, Hays, Macon, Smith, Telfair, Valdosta and Ware as Tier I and II facilities — but material changes have occurred since, including the closure of Georgia State Prison on February 19, 2022, and the 2025 revision of SOP 209.09.

The records that would answer the population question are named in GDC's own policy. The Accountability Log required by SOP 209.06, SOP 209.07 and SOP 209.09 records "cell number, bed number, offender name, offender number, race, in or out time, assignment of offender, and destination of offender," and is "printed daily after 1800 hours." It is a same-day, cell-by-cell, bed-by-bed census of each Tier unit. The segregation admissions and releases register records name, GDC number, housing location, date and time of action, reason for admission and tentative release date, and authorizing official. The Restrictive Housing Rounds Log, form M40-01-01, is required weekly at every facility by SOP 508.20. Board of Corrections Rule 125-3-2-.10(f) requires Division Director approval for any isolation confinement beyond 30 days: "No confinement to an isolation cell of greater than thirty (30) days shall be imposed without the review and approval of a Division Director of the Department of Corrections." Counting those approvals for a year would give a floor on long-stay isolation independent of any Tier population figure.

GDC has demonstrated it will run and produce per-facility housing count queries. GPS open-records request R024615-101925, filed October 19, 2025 and completed, requested a current count of inmates by security designation at each state prison, and GDC produced per-facility count tables. Of 43 GDC requests in GPS's registry, none has yet asked for Tier or segregation population data.

The DOJ's restrictive-housing findings are the pending external route. In April 2024 the Department expanded its Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act investigation of Georgia prisons to include restrictive housing, disciplinary practices and special education services. The findings report issued October 1, 2024 addressed only the violence and sexual-abuse prongs. The restrictive-housing findings have not been released.

What GPS Records at Scale

GPS records show 59 due-process-violation signals across 12 facilities between December 2025 and September 2026, drawn from 29 distinct cases, with severity ranging from low to critical. The facilities contributing most are Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison, Augusta State Medical Prison, Johnson State Prison, Calhoun State Prison and Rogers State Prison. Eleven of those signals involved external complaints filed to oversight bodies including the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, the DOJ Civil Rights Division, the State Board of Pardons and Paroles, and state and federal courts.

GPS records additionally show 11 mental-health-crisis-unattended signals across three facilities — Georgia Diagnostic and Classification, Johnson and Augusta State Medical Prison — between December 2025 and July 2026, all at critical or high severity.

The Structural Gap in the Law

The Eleventh Circuit, which governs Georgia, Alabama and Florida, has not issued a published opinion squarely holding prolonged solitary confinement unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment. In Marbury v. Warden, 936 F.3d 1227 (11th Cir. 2019), the court found deliberate indifference shown by "pervasive staffing and logistical issues rendering prison officials unable to address near-constant violence." In Hope v. Harris (2021), the Fifth Circuit held that solitary confinement does not violate the Eighth Amendment "no matter how long it is imposed for." The Supreme Court denied certiorari in 2023 in a case involving Dennis Wayne Hope, who had been held in continuous solitary for 27 years in a 54-square-foot cell.

Other circuits have moved. In Porter v. Clarke, 923 F.3d 348 (4th Cir. 2019), the Fourth Circuit became the first federal court of appeals to hold that long-term solitary on Virginia's death row violated the Eighth Amendment. In Williams v. Secretary Pennsylvania DOC, 117 F.4th 503 (3d Cir. 2024), the Third Circuit held that "it was clearly established that someone with a known preexisting serious mental illness has a constitutional right not to be held in prolonged solitary confinement without penological justification," and rejected qualified immunity. The Supreme Court denied certiorari in 2025.

Wilkinson v. Austin, 545 U.S. 209 (2005), held that Ohio's supermax conditions — near-total solitary, indefinite duration, and parole disqualification — created an "atypical and significant hardship" giving rise to a Fourteenth Amendment liberty interest. The factor the Court identified as central, indefinite duration, is present in Georgia's Tier II and absent from Tier III. No court has applied Wilkinson to Georgia's Tier II programme.

The comparative record shows what is possible. California's Ashker settlement moved more than 1,512 people out of solitary and cut Pelican Bay's long-term isolation population from 513 to 2, a 99.6% reduction, with no reported violence surge. North Dakota achieved a 74.28% reduction in solitary use between 2016 and 2020. Colorado reduced its administrative segregation population from approximately 1,500 in 2011 to under 200 by 2017. Oregon's Behavioral Health Unit saw staff use-of-force drop nearly 86% from 2016 to 2021. New York's HALT Solitary Confinement Act, effective April 2022, limits solitary to 15 consecutive days and bans it for vulnerable populations. Connecticut and Nevada enacted 15-day maximums in June 2023.

Georgia has moved in the other direction. The state has announced a $1.6 billion investment in new prison construction. The 2024 Georgia Senate Study Committee on the Department of Corrections recommended converting all existing facilities and constructing all new facilities to single-person, single-cell housing — a recommendation that, if implemented, would change the physical architecture of isolation in Georgia without changing a single line of the policy that governs how long a person stays there.

Sources

This analysis draws on GDC Standard Operating Procedures in the 209 series (Tier I, Tier II, Tier III, the STEP programs, administrative segregation, stripped cells, offender discipline, and the juvenile restrictive housing program), SOP 507.04.33 on health evaluation of offenders in restrictive housing, SOP 508.01 on mental health organization and administration, SOP 227.02 on the statewide grievance procedure, and SOP 204.10 on GOAL device use; the 273 GDC-published PREA facility audit reports across Cycles 1 through 5; GDC Annual Fiscal Reports FY2014 through FY2025; the monthly Inmate Statistical Profile series; the federal court record in Gumm v. Ford, No. 5:15-cv-00041-MTT-CHW (M.D. Ga.), including the April 19, 2024 contempt order and the May 7, 2019 approval order; the U.S. Department of Justice's October 1, 2024 findings letter on Georgia's prison system; the Southern Center for Human Rights' July 31, 2017 letter to GDC Commissioner Greg Dozier and its September 2021 class action complaint concerning Georgia State Prison; the 2024 Georgia Senate Study Committee on the Department of Corrections final report (SR 570); the expert reports of Dr. Craig Haney and the published research of Dr. Stuart Grassian, Dr. Terry Kupers, and peer-reviewed studies in PLOS One, Crime and Justice, and Epidemiologic Reviews; the Nelson Mandela Rules (UN General Assembly Resolution 70/175); and GPS's own mortality registry, open-records archive, and intelligence records.