Violence & Safety

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

A System Under Siege: The Homicide Surge

In its October 2024 investigation, the U.S. Department of Justice documented 142 homicides in Georgia’s prisons between 2018 and 2023—a number that rose sharply as the years progressed, with a 95.8% increase from the first three-year period to the second. The state set a record with 35 homicides in 2023; by October of the following year, the toll had already reached 51 confirmed homicides, with the year closing out as the deadliest in Georgia history. GPS’s own independent tracking placed the 2024 homicide figure at 100—a stark 34-death discrepancy that Federal Judge Marc Treadwell seized on when he held the Georgia Department of Corrections in contempt for “falsified reporting.” The total number of deaths in GDC custody that year reached 333. The in-prison homicide rate soared to nearly eight times the national average, and GPS’s mortality database has now recorded 1,816 deaths in the system since 2020.

This wave of killing is not incidental; it is the product of a system where core security functions have collapsed. The DOJ documented over 1,400 violent incidents in just sixteen months, with 423 of those requiring hospitalization. At Washington State Prison in January 2026, a gang war killed four men—among them Jimmy Trammell, who had 72 hours left on his sentence—and the facility has remained on continuous lockdown since. Three months later, a factional Bloods war between ROLACC and G-Shine sets erupted in coordinated attacks across the state, prompting a system-wide lockdown of thirteen prisons; at Hays State Prison alone, a high-ranking ROLACC leader was stabbed repeatedly in the neck during an official inspection, requiring CPR. GPS’s intelligence records show that at the system level, 133 distinct sources across eighteen facilities reported inmate-on-inmate assaults in the past twelve months, with Dooly, Ware, and Washington State Prisons bearing the heaviest concentrations. Family members at six prisons have contacted GPS in fear for their loved one’s life.

Gangs, Phones, and the Contraband Economy

Cellular phones are the nervous system of gang control inside Georgia prisons. GDC’s own data reveals that by the end of 2016, over 22,326 contraband cell phones had been seized, and federal drug-prosecution records reviewed by GPS’s research team show inmates running large-scale drug trafficking networks from within their cells: Alfonso Roman Brito shipped more than 100 kilograms of methamphetamine to North Carolina while incarcerated; Chad Ashley Allen, a lifer at Georgia State Prison, coordinated a meth-and-fentanyl ring tied to the Ghostface Gangsters; and Daniel Roger Alo—known as “Marco Polo”—used contraband phones and drone-dropped packages to distribute meth across the Southeast, earning a 29-year federal sentence. Correctional officers have repeatedly been the conduit. Operation Ghost Guard in 2016 alone netted 46 current and former GDC employees, including five members of the elite COBRA squad whose job was to intercept drug deals; Operation Skyhawk in 2024 produced 150 arrests, eight of them GDC staff, and seized nearly 90 drones alongside 67 pounds of marijuana and 12 pounds of methamphetamine.

The DOJ’s 93-page findings report called the flow of contraband “constant” and noted 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—all while inside Georgia prisons.” Standard GDC drug tests cannot detect most synthetic cannabinoids, rendering a major substance category invisible to official data. When, in early January 2026, GDC abruptly disabled a widespread WiFi workaround that inmates had been using to circumvent the Managed Access System’s cell-phone blocking, the immediate loss of communication triggered gang power struggles that, according to GPS’s reporting, fed directly into the lethal riot at Washington State Prison. The connection is not speculative: an analysis piece published by Georgia Prisoners’ Speak notes that the facility was operating at roughly 72% officer vacancy when the killings occurred—meaning there was almost no staff present to intervene.

The Department of Justice Verdict: Constitutional Failure

The DOJ’s investigation cut through any ambiguity. After inspecting seventeen GDC facilities during 2022 and 2023, federal authorities concluded that Georgia operates its prisons in “a pattern or practice” of constitutional violations, singling out “rampant violence,” “routine sexual abuse,” and “staff indifference” as endemic. The conditions were described bluntly as “horrific and inhumane.” Incarcerated people face an unlawful risk of serious harm every day: staffing is “grossly inadequate” to protect them, required population counts often don’t happen, and when deaths occur, the department “inaccurately reports these deaths both internally and externally, and in a manner that underreports the extent of violence and homicide in its prisons.”

The DOJ findings laid bare the relationship between violence and official neglect, noting that gangs effectively control housing units because there are not enough officers to challenge them. At Calhoun State Prison, a man in restrictive housing was found dead—wrapped in mattress padding, with his cell door flap locked shut, water turned off, and no meals delivered for two days. Cause of death: dehydration with renal failure. The same report documented widespread sexual abuse of incarcerated people that the department failed to properly investigate.

Official Responses: Surveillance, Hardened Bunks, and Budgets That Do Not Match the Crisis

Rather than reorient the system toward safety and rehabilitation, the state’s response has overwhelmingly doubled down on physical containment and surveillance. Governor Kemp’s budget for fiscal year 2025 grew to $1.48 billion, supplemented by an additional $372 million in recommendations that pushed the total near $1.9 billion—up from $1.1 billion a few years earlier. A $600 million prison spending surge announced in early 2025 included construction of four 126-bed “hardened” modules, with the first pilot under way at Hays State Prison. The Georgia legislature approved $436 million to build a 3,000-bed mega-facility in Davisboro, Washington County. Kemp also commissioned a third-party investigation by Guidehouse Consulting, which delivered its report in December 2024. Meanwhile, Georgia is now activating a centralized OWL (Overwatch & Logistics) surveillance command center in Forsyth—a $150 million facility where analysts will monitor live feeds from every state prison.

Yet GPS’s own budget analysis shows that over two fiscal years, the state allocated only $2.6 million toward rehabilitation programs while spending $120 million on surveillance. Per-person rehabilitation spending works out to about $52 annually. Twelve Residential Substance Abuse Treatment programs exist across the state system—a GPS research brief notes they produce measurable declines in recidivism—but there is no public data on waitlists or unmet treatment demand. As GPS’s investigative series “The Only Family Left” documented, the vacuum left by minimal programming and severed family ties is what gang affiliation fills. In 2025, the Brennan Center for Justice named Georgia as one of only two states in the nation refusing to participate in prison reform efforts, and a parole reform bill, SB25, died in committee. For all the capital construction, the legislature and governor have done nothing to address the root cause identified by the DOJ: the collapse of basic custody staffing that leaves men without protection.

The Long Tail of the Superpredator

The architecture of Georgia’s prisons was built on a false premise. In the 1990s, the “superpredator” panic—fueled by predictions that a wave of remorseless juvenile killers would soon engulf America—led 24 states and the federal government to enact three-strikes laws, 41 states to expand the transfer of children into adult court, and Georgia to adopt an 85% Truth in Sentencing framework in 1994 that functionally dismantled parole and eliminated incentives for rehabilitation. GPS’s own long-form research on the origins of crime demonstrates that the superpredator theory was catastrophically wrong and that the true driver of the mid-century crime wave was environmental lead poisoning, which damaged impulse control and cognition across a generation of children—especially Black children, who bore the highest exposure—with a lagged effect that mapped onto violent crime with extraordinary precision. The punitive laws that followed, however, were not unwound even after the science invalidated their premise.

The consequences are now embedded in Georgia’s prison crisis. The system prioritizes long-term incapacitation over any form of normalization, GPS reporting notes, and the result is overcrowded facilities where a man can write, “I am a man who, at this moment, has no purpose to his existence on this earth.” Without work, school, or meaningful family contact, the environment itself becomes an engine of violence. The state’s own data confirms the racial dimensions: Black children were sentenced to life without parole at ten times the rate of white children, and today Black people in Georgia still face stark disparities in drug-related prison admissions—77.71% of marijuana-flagged entries in 2025 were Black, while cocaine admissions logged an 84.44% Black share.

The Machinery of Concealment

The state has regularly worked to obscure the real toll. Federal Judge Marc Treadwell’s April 2024 contempt order found that GDC officials had “repeatedly falsified documents and made false statements,” including backdating prisoner review forms and showing deceased individuals as attending activities after their deaths. The judge stated bluntly, “The Court has long passed the point where it can assume that even sworn statements from the defendants are truthful.” The DOJ separately documented that GDC systematically misclassifies homicides as “unknown” or “undetermined” causes, and in late 2024 the department stopped including preliminary causes of death in its monthly mortality reports altogether—just as the death count was reaching historic highs.

Adding another layer of opacity, GPS’s drug-policy research brief identifies multiple systemic data gaps: Georgia releases no aggregate figures on drug seizures by facility, no naloxone administration data, no positive drug-test rates for the incarcerated population, and no public track of drug-related disciplinary actions. The 1996 Prison Litigation Reform Act further reduced judicial oversight by creating procedural hurdles that caused federal civil rights filings by prisoners to drop by a third even as the prison population grew.

Against this backdrop of concealment and denial, GPS continues to independently count every death, verify every homicide, and publish firsthand accounts. This page draws on reporting by Georgia Prisoners’ Speak from dozens of investigative articles; federal court contempt orders and the U.S. Department of Justice findings; data from GPS’s own mortality database and policy research library; and aggregated intelligence signals from family and facility-level sources that document a crisis unlikely to resolve without meaningful structural change.