Ware State Prison: the public record, 2015 to 2026

The Georgia Department of Corrections told the AJC it investigated 66 prisoner deaths deemed to be homicides in Georgia's state prison system last year. The agency did not name those killed or reveal the prisons where they died; the AJC independently identified 62 people who died from suspected or confirmed homicides that year.

A tally of all prisoner deaths in Georgia prisons last year reached a record 332, up about 27% from the prior year's toll and well above the total deaths within Georgia's prisons during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the AJC.

An annual GDC report for 2019 showed 78 percent of the people GDC hired that year were corrections officers, but 71 percent of those officers quit the same year, according to WSAV-TV.

According to unconfirmed reports by family members with loved ones inside Ware State Prison, at least four people had been stabbed since the February 2022 uprising, and the facility remained on lockdown for some, per The Georgia Virtue.

Former Ware State Prison corrections officer John Eason told WSAV-TV that officers usually worked at least 33 per shift at the prison, but that the number had lately been below 10, after he left the job for safety reasons two weeks earlier.

DOJ's findings report says an incarcerated person at Ware State Prison reported that he had gone almost a year without a mattress.

DOJ's findings report says that during the riot at Ware State prison, incarcerated persons obtained facility keys and let scores of other incarcerated persons out of their housing units, including in restrictive housing units, held officers hostage and stabbed officers, set fires inside a housing unit office and burned a GDC transport cart, and broke into an office and obtained officers' weapons and defensive gear.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported Ware State Prison's correctional officer vacancy rate at 68.62 percent, with the prison classified as high security and holding 1,441 inmates.

John Eason, a former Georgia Department of Corrections officer who worked at Ware State Prison for 10 years and resigned two weeks before the August 2020 disturbance, said "We have been breaking policy -- very short staff," and said he believes if Ware State Prison had more guards, the disturbance "absolutely would not have happened."

An incarcerated person at Ware State Prison who had been interviewed by DOJ died from a drug overdose four days after that interview, and incarcerated persons at Ware found him slumped over a second-floor cell block railing on July 3, 2022, where he was left for several hours because there were no officers in the control center, and his cause of death was acute methamphetamine toxicity, per the DOJ report.

The AJC's list of Georgia prison homicides attributes 10 homicides to Ware State Prison.

The AJC reported that Georgia prisons saw an unprecedented 38 homicides in 2023, topping the previous record of 31 the year before.

According to records collected by the Southern Center for Human Rights, Ware State Prison had a 68 percent job vacancy rate in January.

Ware State Prison in Waycross was locked down at around 1 a.m. Sunday after an incident that began around 10:45 Saturday night, during which officials said a golf cart was set on fire and several windows were broken.