Brief written October 25, 2026 from GPS Intelligence System data.(DS)

Violence and Safety in Georgia's Prisons

Georgia's prison system does not have a violence problem at its edges. It has one at its center. The U.S. Department of Justice's October 1, 2024 findings report — the product of an investigation opened in 2016 on the protection of LGBTI incarcerated people and expanded in 2021 to cover violence against everyone held in the state's medium- and close-security prisons — concluded that Georgia "fails to protect incarcerated people from violence and harm by other incarcerated people in violation of the Eighth Amendment." Investigators described "near-constant, life-threatening violence" functioning "as the norm," and found that "violence, including sexual assaults, stabbings, beatings, and other brutal violence, is a systemic problem in prisons across the state."

What follows traces that finding through its parts: the homicide curve the Department's own numbers describe; the staffing collapse that DOJ, state-hired consultants, and Georgia's own Senate study committee each identified as its engine; the gangs that filled the vacuum; the specific deaths that give the statistics names; and the accountability record, in which criminal charges against officers and incarcerated people alike have been rare, slow, and uneven. GPS has independently tracked 1,927 deaths in GDC custody since 2020 — a floor, not a ceiling, because the Department reports deaths roughly two months late.

The Homicide Curve, 2018 to 2024

The numbers DOJ compiled from GDC's own mortality reports describe a system coming apart. In 2018 there were 7 homicides systemwide. In 2019, 13. Then 28 in 2020, 28 in 2021, 31 in 2022, and a record 35 in 2023 — 142 homicides over six years, 48 in the first three and 94 in the last three, a 95.8 percent increase. DOJ stated that this rate significantly exceeds the most recent available national data on homicide rates in correctional facilities; its report put Georgia's 2019 rate at 34 per 100,000 people against a national state-prison average of 12.

The curve did not bend. In the first five months of 2024 there were 18 confirmed or suspected homicides in GDC custody, and by mid-October 2024 at least 44 people had been killed. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which has built the most complete independent count, reported that GDC told the paper it investigated 66 prisoner deaths statewide deemed to be homicides in that year, while the AJC itself identified 62 people who died from suspected or confirmed homicides. The gap between those two figures is itself a finding: DOJ reported 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," and identified seven deaths from 2022 that the Department categorized as undetermined or natural until eventually reclassifying them as homicides in 2024, although other official records made clear much earlier that the deaths were homicides.

The concentration mattered as much as the total. In 2020, eight homicides occurred at Macon State Prison, more than any other Georgia prison that year. In 2021 the highest number at any one prison occurred at Smith State Prison. In 2022 Phillips State Prison had the most, with five, and Macon had four. In 2023, seven incarcerated people and one correctional officer were killed in homicides at Smith. The AJC later found Macon State Prison the deadliest facility in Georgia with at least nine homicides in a single year, with two more confirmed in January of the following year.

Staffing Collapse, Gang Control, and the Mechanism of Violence

The through-line in nearly every account is the disappearance of the officer. DOJ found correctional officer vacancy rates around 50 percent systemwide and over 70 percent at ten of the largest facilities; by the end of 2023 the Department still had over 2,800 unfilled officer positions and a systemwide vacancy rate above 50 percent. The trajectory was steep: from almost 11 percent in 2014 to over 18 percent by 2018, then a fall to a 60 percent systemwide vacancy rate in April 2023.

The consequences were documented in specifics. Staff at several GDC prisons adopted a practice of assigning one officer to supervise two buildings at a time, each comprising multiple housing units and hundreds of incarcerated people, for an entire 12-hour shift. At one large close-security men's prison, staffing rosters from mid-2023 confirmed officers single-handedly responsible for nearly 400 beds. On a weekend day shift in August 2023, one officer was assigned to three separate buildings; a victim was stabbed 32 times in his back, head, and stomach, and the logbook from the building where the stabbing took place has no entries after 8:54 a.m. that day. In 2022, at a close-security men's prison, an incarcerated man was killed after being assaulted while handcuffed; the officer on duty was single-handedly supervising a control center as well as both sides of the housing unit building where the homicide took place.

DOJ identified the causal chain explicitly: chronic understaffing at 50 percent or below, inability to conduct basic daily counts or maintain supervision, gangs filling the vacuum and controlling housing units, incarcerated people able to unlock their own cells and wander at will, classification becoming meaningless when no staff enforce security boundaries, and violence becoming the norm. "With housing units left unsupervised for sustained periods of time," the report found, "incarcerated persons can engage in illicit activities, including exchanging contraband, abusing drugs, making homemade weapons, fetching contraband via drone drops, and engaging in violent assaults… Gangs and other threat groups tend to step in to fill the void in leadership, telling people where they can or can't sleep and exerting control over prison life." State-hired consultants reached the same conclusion, finding gangs "effectively running the facilities." DOJ faulted GDC for placing "too much blame on gangs and insufficient emphasis on understaffing," and concluded that "the leadership of the Georgia Department of Corrections has lost control of its facilities."

The Department's own commissioner has acknowledged the mechanism in part. At a Georgia Senate Department of Corrections Facilities Study Committee hearing, Commissioner Tyrone Oliver said there is evidence of less violent conflict among incarcerated people living in single-bed cells, and referenced fewer incidents reported at Smith State Prison since more of the population moved to single-occupancy cells. "When you look at our violence and most of our homicides we have it is occurring in double-man cells," Oliver said. GDC leadership has told state legislators that while they are making progress toward adequate staffing, they are not there yet.

The staffing picture has been corroborated on the record by the people who worked inside it. A former Smith State Prison officer described the underlying problem as "Chronic understaffing. There just weren't enough people to go around." Former officer Douglas Bare, who walked off the job after nine years, said he had grown weary of working in such a dangerous environment as well as being repeatedly pulled from his post to make hospital runs. Former Ware State Prison officer John Eason, who resigned two weeks before the August 2020 disturbance there, said "We have been breaking policy -- very short staff," and that because the facility could not afford to place an officer in the control rooms, officers were simply handed the keys to the buildings. Danyelle Campos, a guard of nine months who was not on duty during the riot, wrote in her resignation letter: "The reason for my resignation is we are too short staffed to safely run the prison. Too many officers are being put in unnecessary risk and nothing is being done." Andrew Phillips, a former Smith officer, said he and colleagues often worked 16-hour days, five days a week, and that mandatory overtime combined with constant violence against both staff and incarcerated people led officers to quit: "The place was too brutal, too disgusting." At Smith, as of August, 44 correctional officers covered all shifts at a facility housing 1,400 men in 17 housing units, against 162 authorized. At Hancock, a high-security prison housing more than 1,100 men in 16 housing units, there were 49 officers on staff.

The Southern Center for Human Rights' litigation has put the ratio in its starkest form. In a letter concerning Valdosta State Prison, SCHR described a weekend roster showing seven individuals charged with supervising more than 1,000 incarcerated people across 114 staff posts — an incarcerated-person-to-security-staff ratio of 144:1 and a security staff vacancy rate of more than 93 percent. A GDC record from January 27, 2026 indicated only two officers on duty for the entire prison compound. SCHR's head of litigation, Christina Remlin, has said many Georgia facilities run vacancy rates close to 70 percent, so there is only one officer where three are needed.

What the Violence Looks Like Inside

Of more than 1,400 reported incidents of violence across the close-security prisons and most of the medium-security prisons between January 2022 and April 2023 — fights, assaults, hostage incidents, and homicides — 19.7 percent involved a weapon, 45.1 percent resulted in serious injury, and 30.5 percent resulted in offsite medical treatment. DOJ emphasized that this was a severe undercount: violent incidents are consistently underreported due to a lack of staff supervision, some incidents are never reported at all, and others are mischaracterized using inappropriate incident-type categories.

In interviews at 16 of the 17 GDC prisons DOJ visited in 2022 and 2023, incarcerated people consistently reported that they have witnessed life-threatening violence, including stabbings, and that weapons are widespread. Contraband weapons, illicit drugs, and cellphones are commonplace across the system, and a steady stream of contraband cellphone videos and photographs showing assaults, injuries, weapons, and drug use have been shared to social media.

The incidents DOJ documented read as a catalogue of what happens when no one is watching. At Ware State Prison on May 23, 2022, an incarcerated person was stabbed multiple times; there was no security staff in the dorm, so other incarcerated people beat on the window to draw attention, and it took half an hour for someone to respond. The victim was diagnosed with a collapsed lung and spent five days in the hospital; he was never interviewed about the incident. On June 27, 2022 — the second day of DOJ's own site visit to Ware — an incarcerated person was blindfolded, tied up, beaten, and burned by other incarcerated people, diagnosed with first- and second-degree burns, and reported the assault to staff, who did nothing. At Smith State Prison on March 27, 2023, the facility went into lockdown immediately before a DOJ site inspection because of a fight with weapons following a Ramadan breakfast inside the D-2 dorm; seven individuals required hospitalization, two by air evacuation, and the melee began when members of various gangs retaliated while there were no officers in the dorm. At Macon State Prison in March 2023, four Bloods gang members moved past an officer collecting dinner trays, ran to the kitchen, and stabbed an incarcerated person working there, who later died; eleven incarcerated people were stabbed, six needed hospital transport, and the first ambulance was called just over an hour after fighting began. At Pulaski State Prison in August 2022, staff received a call from outside the prison advising that an incarcerated person was being stabbed; they toured the dorm and reported all was secure, then heard a faint cry for help and found a woman locked in her cell, slumped over the toilet, bleeding profusely, with a bruise in the shape of a footprint. She reported being assaulted hours earlier by more than 10 people, stomped, hit, and kicked, then forced into the shower to wash off the blood.

The gang war of autumn 2022 showed how quickly a single killing could travel. In September 2022, following the homicide at Phillips State Prison of a young Bloods member, a gang war erupted at multiple GDC prisons. With Bloods attacking Crips in the days that followed, twenty incarcerated people were hospitalized — 13 from Macon State Prison on October 2, 5 from Ware on October 1, and 2 from Coffee on October 1. A year later, in December 2023, GDC experienced five homicides at four different prisons — Central, Macon, Coastal, and Telfair — along with serious incidents at other facilities.

Classification Failure and the Cellmate

A large proportion of homicides in GDC facilities are between roommates, and DOJ's report returns repeatedly to the moment a cell assignment goes wrong. At Calhoun State Prison, a 21-year-old man was killed by his cellmate in May 2022 following multiple failures in GDC's classification and housing systems: staff moved the assailant out of segregation, to general population, and then back to segregation without following procedures; the assailant requested a particular cell and staff housed him there; the next day both cellmates told an orderly they wanted to be separated, which was communicated to an officer; one day later an orderly saw the man being beaten. He died of blunt force trauma injuries and a stab wound to the neck. GDC closed its criminal investigation without a thorough administrative review, and no discipline or counseling appeared in the personnel files of three employees whose errors contributed to the death.

At the same prison, DOJ documented a third killing in which an officer had previously reported that two men should not share a cell because of the STG status of both and because the assailant was seven feet tall and 340 pounds. A supervisor failed to verify the room status, and an officer failed to respond to an orderly's report that the men wanted to be separated. A day later, another orderly saw the assailant beating the victim with a fan motor in a net bag. In a segregation unit at Calhoun, an incarcerated person was killed by his cellmate, a known gang member, after the assailant requested that staff place him in the victim's cell; a lieutenant approved the placement, which was not reviewed by a Unit Manager as required by procedure.

At Baldwin State Prison, DOJ described a person assaulted in his housing unit by members of the Gangster Disciples gang with a lock in a sock — and then placed in segregation in a cell with an individual from the same gang that had attacked him. At Macon State Prison, an incarcerated person died after an altercation with his cellmate on December 10, 2023. At Dooly State Prison, a Sexual Abuse Response Team investigation concluded that an individual's allegation that his cellmate sexually assaulted him must be false because the two men were assigned to different cells, apparently failing to consider the possibility that the cellmate was not in his assigned cell.

The pattern extends to the physical plant. DOJ reported receiving consistent reports at Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison that staff frequently fail to lock cell doors in segregation, and that even when doors are locked they are reportedly not secure; one incarcerated individual there admitted to "popping" out of his cell one morning because he did not receive a breakfast tray. At Hays State Prison, a lawsuit over the death of Damion MacClain alleged that prison officials knew 40 percent of the cell door locks were broken but did not fix the problem until three prisoners had been killed; GDC agreed to pay $350,000 to settle the estate's federal civil rights suit. The Southern Center for Human Rights said it received daily calls and letters reporting that cell doors at Hays remained broken, did not lock, or could be manipulated with a card or a finger, allowing prisoners to roam hallways and enter other cells or buildings.

The Named Dead

Behind the counts are people, and GPS's death registry records them by name. Maurice Antonio Brown died September 3, 2026, at Wilcox State Prison; the registry lists the cause as homicide. Walter Brown died August 3, 2026, at Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison at age 66; the cause is listed as unknown or pending. Timothy Wilson died June 7, 2026, at Telfair State Prison at 48; the cause is unknown or pending. Jerrod Johnson died February 18, 2026, at Hancock State Prison at 27, a homicide. Jaylin Bell died February 6, 2026, at Hancock at 32, a homicide. Melvin Gay Johnson died January 27, 2026, at Hays State Prison at 35, a homicide. Steven Monroe Wood died January 25, 2026, at Hancock at 54, a homicide. Jerry Wayne Merritt died January 20, 2026, at Augusta State Medical Prison at 59, a homicide. Jimmy Lee Trammell died January 11, 2026, at Washington State Prison at 42, a homicide. Preston C. Phelps died December 13, 2025, at Telfair at 28, a homicide. Marquis Young died October 22, 2025, at Macon State Prison at 37, a homicide. William Stacey Springer died September 16, 2025, at Valdosta State Prison at 36, a homicide. Andre Rashad Weems died September 9, 2025, at Hancock at 36, a homicide. Malindzo Eddy Hatcher died July 21, 2025, at Telfair at 42, a homicide. Corey Jose July died June 17, 2025, at Hancock at 33, a homicide. Dominique Cornelius Cole died June 8, 2025, at Wilcox State Prison at 37, a homicide. William Holeman died January 30, 2025, at Hancock State Prison; the registry lists the cause as homicide. Prince Porter died January 30, 2025, at Hancock State Prison; the registry lists the cause as homicide. Jonathan Mitchell died January 21, 2025, at Macon State Prison, a homicide. Sinjuan Harmon died January 12, 2025, at Valdosta State Prison; the registry lists the cause as homicide. Joshua Parrott died January 12, 2025, at Dooly State Prison at 45; the registry lists the cause as homicide. Lawrence L. Williams died October 24, 2024, at Hays State Prison at 30, a homicide. Willie Andrew Willis died October 21, 2024, at Calhoun State Prison at 27, a homicide. Travon Montrell Walthour died October 13, 2024, at Hancock at 29, a homicide. Brandon Lashaun Mincey died October 11, 2024, at Phillips State Prison at 37, a homicide.

These are the most recent entries in a registry that has recorded 1,918 deaths since January 1, 2020. The full list is maintained at https://gps.press/georgia-prison-deaths/.

Some of those deaths carry detail the registry cannot. Joseph Walter Brown, 36, died July 26, 2022, at Macon State Prison of multiple stab wounds; his parents' federal lawsuit alleges he was stabbed to death by cellmate Demarquis Glenn after Glenn smoked insecticide-soaked paper that made him psychotic, and that officer Latrice Hatcher failed to protect him — the complaint states it marks the third time Hatcher has been sued for ignoring an inmate's pleas not to be housed with a violent cellmate who went on to stab or kill them. Bobby Edward Lee Jr., 38, died July 13, 2020, at Macon State Prison of ligature strangulation; his family alleged in a federal lawsuit that he pleaded for protection after officials placed him in a cell with another prisoner who had previously killed a fellow parolee, and that no officers responded until after Lee was strangled to death. The state settled that claim for $1.375 million in 2023. Carrington Juwon Frye, 23, died March 20, 2020, at Macon State Prison of stab wounds to the neck and chest; his mother told Georgia lawmakers that he was stabbed and bled for more than half an hour before help arrived. Coty Silvers, 39, died May 23, 2020, at Macon State Prison of asphyxia; corrections officers, according to the law firm representing his family, were warned for days of multiple physical altercations between Silvers and his cellmate before Silvers was found tortured and murdered, and the cellmate had warned officers of what he would do to Coty if not moved out of the cell.

At Hancock State Prison, Charles "Tristen" James McKee, 24, died May 23, 2022; death data show he was stabbed 13 times in the back and head, with five other inmates directly involved, and the DOJ investigation found that McKee tried to escape gang members who were beating and stabbing him. His mother, Lisa Spradlin, filed a lawsuit against GDC and numerous prison officials alleging her son's civil rights were violated leading to his death; according to the complaint, McKee had a history of mental illness, suicidal thoughts, and gender dysphoria, and was placed in a dorm with known gang members hostile to LGBTQ inmates despite having reported threats to his safety. At Valdosta State Prison, William Springer was stabbed in his face and head inside the prison and later died at the hospital on September 16, 2025; his family said officials never contacted them and they learned about the attack from other inmates inside the prison.

The Victims Who Were Not Incarcerated

The violence has not stayed inside the walls. On June 16, 2024, a Georgia state prison inmate shot and killed an Aramark food service employee at Smith State Prison in Glennville, then shot himself. GDC identified the inmate as Jaydrekus Hart, who shot the employee while working in the prison kitchen at 4:30 a.m.; the inmate then shot himself and was pronounced dead at a local hospital. The AJC's investigation lists food service worker Aureon Shavea Grace, 24, as dying of a gunshot wound to the head. DOJ's October 2024 report found that in June 2024 an incarcerated person at Smith used a contraband gun to kill a food-service worker and then take his own life.

A lawsuit filed by Deshonda Hagins, Grace's mother, alleges that GDC staff were warned there was a gun inside Smith State Prison but failed to act — that warnings came from inmates and were provided directly to multiple GDC officials, including during official investigations, and that no lockdown was initiated, no extensive search was conducted, and no protective measures were put in place. The Grace killing was the second killing of a staff member at Smith State Prison in less than a year; Correctional Officer Robert Clark, 42, died in October after being stabbed in the back by an inmate with a homemade weapon.

Officers have been killed and wounded across the system. Correctional Officer Robert Danford Clark, 42, died October 1, 2023, at Smith State Prison of multiple stab wounds after being attacked by an inmate; GDC said Clark was escorting two inmates from the dining hall when one attacked him from behind with a homemade weapon, and a second inmate who tried to help was also wounded. Correctional Officer Larry Stell, 46, who had been with the department since August 2001, was stabbed and killed at Telfair State Prison; GBI special agent Todd Lowery said the stabbing happened about 7:30 p.m. in a dormitory area where about 80 inmates were being held. In March 2024, Telfair's warden, Andrew McFarlane, was stabbed by an incarcerated person with a homemade weapon during a shakedown to remove contraband from a dorm; a department spokesperson said McFarlane was not seriously injured, and officers deployed tear gas to regain control. At Hays State Prison, two correctional officers were stabbed on a Saturday night and suffered non-life-threatening injuries; separately, court records describe two inmates forcing an officer into a cell, locking the door, handcuffing him to a bed frame with his own handcuffs, and beating him with a carabiner attached to a large chain before stabbing him with a sharpened piece of metal in the head, back and legs. David Omar Tyler and Roman Christian Higdon were charged with felony kidnapping, felony aggravated assault and felony obstruction of law officers.

Accountability: Charges, Settlements, and the Gaps Between

The record of accountability is real but thin. Federal prosecutors have charged officers. On August 5, 2025, a federal grand jury in the Southern District of Georgia returned a two-count indictment charging former Augusta State Medical Prison correctional officers Robert Roberson and Marcus Phillips with violating the constitutional rights of an inmate by showing deliberate indifference to a substantial risk of harm, resulting in his death; the indictment was unsealed August 7. According to the AJC's report on the indictment, Roberson and Phillips became aware of a smoldering fire in an inmate's cell on October 28, 2020, and instead of extinguishing the fire, trying to evacuate the inmate, or reporting the emergency over the radio, they allegedly left the inmate in his locked cell for several hours while he slowly died from smoke inhalation. Roberson was also charged with falsifying a logbook to cover up his misconduct. The state later agreed to a $5 million settlement over the death of Thomas Giles, who died of smoke inhalation after a fire was left unattended in his cell in 2020.

At Macon State Prison, eight current or former officers were charged with federal civil rights, conspiracy or obstruction offenses arising out of incidents in which inmates were allegedly assaulted by officers, including Deputy Warden James Hinton and seven former members of the Correctional Emergency Response Team. Four former CERT officers were later sentenced by U.S. District Judge Marc T. Treadwell: Darren Douglass-Griffin to 12 months, Kerry Bolden to nine months, Emmett McKenzie to six months, and Kadarius Thomas to six months. At Valdosta State Prison, four former supervisory and deputy correctional officers were sentenced in federal court in the Middle District of Georgia on September 21, 2022, for their roles in orchestrating, administering, and then seeking to conceal the beating of a handcuffed inmate in their custody; court documents and sentencing statements describe Sergeant Patrick Sharpe instructing subordinate officers Ford and Scott to assault the handcuffed inmate on December 29, 2018, in retaliation for an earlier altercation between that inmate and a female officer. At Hays State Prison, a lawsuit accusing a dozen prison guards of beating, kicking and knocking out several handcuffed inmates was dismissed after officers agreed to pay a $93,000 settlement; "We think this recognizes that there is a problem with excessive force at Hays State Prison," said Atteeyah Hollie of the Southern Center for Human Rights.

But the gaps are wide. No criminal charges had been filed against the guards over the killing of 19-year-old Quafabian McBride at Phillips State Prison, though the circumstances had attracted DOJ attention as part of its ongoing investigation. McBride was killed September 30, 2022, in the lockdown unit at Phillips, and he was there because officers arranged for it, according to the AJC's evidence; records obtained by the AJC show three officers were removed from their posts in the days after his death, and two of them were later linked to the fatal fight. Correctional officer Geramy Antonio Brown was fired three days after the McBride attack for violating employee standards of conduct, staff misconduct, and failure to comply with an investigation; another correctional officer, Javaris Jones, was suspended. As of the Prison Legal News report, no charges had been filed against any of the Phillips guards in the McBride case, despite Commissioner Oliver's statement that he has "zero tolerance for compromised staff or staff cutting corners to allow inmates to attack one another or kill one another."

The Gwinnett County District Attorney's Office reviewed a leaked video of a correctional officer at Phillips State Prison punching an inmate, examined all videos including full prison footage, conducted investigative interviews, and toured the facility. It determined there was insufficient evidence to criminally proceed and found the officer was within use-of-force guidelines, while calling the incident "profoundly regrettable" and stating that "as a community, it is critical that persons who are incarcerated are treated humanely." At Wilcox State Prison, a clandestine video captured a female correctional officer and another officer moving an inmate on a cart while an inmate orderly punched him; the two officers, Melissa Lawson, a unit manager, and Tanja O'Neal, a lieutenant, were fired and charged with battery, riot in a penal institution, and violation of their oaths as officers. DOJ's account adds that GDC records confirm multiple officers, including those in supervisory positions, brought an incarcerated person who served as a "warden's orderly" to the victim's housing unit to help move the victim, and that staff then allowed the assailant to strike the victim and to use a cart to drag the victim, who was lying limp, along an outdoor walkway, with one bare foot dragging on the pavement. Two Wilcox correctional officers were terminated from GDC employment shortly thereafter.

The AJC's investigation reported that some Georgia correctional officers used inmates as weapons against other inmates, as illustrated by arrest warrants describing officers Lawson and O'Neal "utilizing" Erlando "Big E" Horne, described as 6-2 and 260 pounds, to strike inmate Jammie Davis in the face, head, and torso while Davis's bare feet dragged on the ground. A Georgia prison inmate told the AJC in a written statement that he too was attacked in officer Lawson's presence at Wilcox, and that inmates labeled snitches or disowned by gangs become "de facto weapons for officers," rewarded with work details, freedom of movement and contraband.

The Record of the People Inside

The people held in these facilities have described the same conditions in their own words, published in Georgia Prisoners' Speak's Tell My Story series. In "The First Week," an anonymous writer describes arriving at Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in January 2015 and, within a week, watching about 20 men chase and beat a middle-aged man with broken broomsticks, canes, and sharpened pieces of metal: "There was nothing I could do but watch in horror as they beat and stabbed this man. They finally landed enough blows that he collapsed, bleeding all over the floor in front of the guard booth. The guards gathered in there watching. They did nothing until the man was dead." In "The Fire Alarm Kept Ringing and No One Came," a writer held at Pulaski State Prison from 2023 through July 2025 describes an empty security bubble: "There were no officers stationed in the dorms. We went for hours with no supervision. When something happened — a medical emergency, a fight, someone overdosing on K2 — other inmates had to call their families and have them call the facility to send help. That's how we got help. We called our mothers." In "Let Me Go or Just Execute Me," a 69-year-old man serving life writes: "These young gangsters are so prevalent in the GDC and lately they are killing older guys. Gang wars and stabbing is now common. There's been so many in just the past 12 months. Several times I've stood and looked at guys being assaulted. As older, infirm prisoners we exist under daily threat and anxiety."

A former GDC sergeant, Tyler Ryals, described the same dynamic to GPS in testimony covering 2014 to 2024. "I've been in it myself where everywhere you look, somebody's getting stabbed," he said. "You look this way on the sidewalk — somebody getting stabbed. You look over here — somebody getting stabbed. Officers calling on the radios — this building, that building, this building, that building. Everybody just stabbing everywhere." Of the contraband supply, he said: "At Telfair State Prison, I've done shakedowns in some of those dormitories where I found over a hundred shanks in an 80-man dorm. So there's over a weapon for every inmate that's in there." And of the delay that turns an assault into a death: "I would come up and get told, 'Hey, there's a guy down here in the building that got stabbed a couple hours ago.' And then you go down to the building and it's too late. There's no saving nobody after they've been stabbed up two hours ago." DOJ's report documents multiple instances of delayed response to violent incidents due to staffing failures, corroborating Ryals's accounts of finding stabbing victims hours after attacks.

GPS's own reporting has connected the violence to the conditions that produce it. Bernard Christian of Georgia Prisoners' Speak, quoted in The Marshall Project in May 2026, described chronic hunger and degraded food quality in Georgia prisons as producing a frustration that, sustained over years, drives the violence pattern DOJ documented. The Marshall Project's own reporting found that Georgia spends about 60 cents per meal for prisoners, and that incarcerated individuals reported food contaminated with rats, insects, and mold — one man describing it as "Being hungry all the time, and being fed slop." GPS has documented that GDC spends approximately $1.69 per person per day on food, against an FDA Thrifty Food Plan estimate of roughly $10 per day for an adult man's nutritionally adequate diet, and that the state spends approximately 14 times more on medical care for incarcerated people than on their food.

What GPS Records Show

GPS's intelligence system records the pattern at scale. Over the past twelve months, GPS records 330 reports of alleged assault by another incarcerated person across 22 facilities, concentrated most heavily at Washington State Prison, Dooly State Prison, Ware State Prison, Calhoun State Prison, and Hancock State Prison. In the same period, GPS records 64 reports of family fear for an incarcerated person's life across 13 facilities, 18 reports of alleged excessive force across five facilities, and 17 reports of alleged assault by staff across five facilities. External complaints tied to these reports have been directed to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the DOJ Civil Rights Division, the GBI, the Georgia Attorney General, and the U.S. Department of Justice. GPS has additionally received recurring reports of use-of-force incidents and of in-custody deaths attributed to violence at facilities across the state.

These are receipts, not findings. But they describe the same system DOJ described, and they arrive through the same channels — families on the phone, incarcerated people with contraband phones, staff who quit and write letters — that produced the record above.

The Structural Finding

The October 2024 findings report recommended 82 remedial measures for GDC to implement "at minimum," addressing staffing, supervision, incident response, investigations, contraband, facility conditions, classification and housing, and sexual safety. It concluded that "the State is deliberately indifferent to these unsafe conditions," and that "the constitutional violations are exacerbated by serious deficiencies in staffing and supervision… The State has known about the unsafe conditions for years and has failed to take reasonable measures to address them."

The record assembled here supports a narrower and more useful conclusion than a general indictment. Georgia's prison violence is not primarily a story about dangerous people doing dangerous things. It is a story about a system that stopped staffing its buildings, that let gangs assume control of housing units, that classified people into cells with the people who would kill them, that underreported the deaths that followed, and that has held almost no one accountable for any of it. The people named on this page died inside that system. The families who called the prison and got no answer, the officers who quit rather than work another shift alone, and the incarcerated people who watched a man bleed out in front of a guard booth are all describing the same failure from different sides of the same wall.

Sources

This analysis draws on the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division's October 1, 2024 findings report on Georgia prisons and the federal court filings and litigation records it cites; reporting by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Georgia Public Broadcasting, The Marshall Project, the Augusta Press, WGXA, WALB, 13WMAZ, WTOC, WSAV, the Valdosta Daily Times, the Union-Recorder, the Summerville News, the Chattanooga Times Free Press, News4Jax, and Prison Legal News; the Southern Center for Human Rights' litigation and correspondence, including its letter on Valdosta State Prison; the Georgia Department of Corrections' own mortality reports, press releases, and staffing records; the Bureau of Justice Statistics' Mortality in State and Federal Prisons series; GPS's death registry and intelligence records; GPS's own investigative reporting and its Tell My Story series; and the on-record testimony of former GDC sergeant Tyler Ryals and former officers John Eason, Douglas Bare, and Andrew Phillips.