Reginald Jacobs Jr., 24, died of dehydration in a solitary cell at Calhoun State Prison after a lawsuit says staff shut off his water and left him for nine days. The state recorded it as a natural death — then quietly settled.
James Byrd, 30, died in an Effingham County Prison isolation cell in January 2022 — three weeks after a toothache, days after staff acknowledged his infection to his family. The state’s records listed no cause. Records obtained by GPS reveal a $10 million negligence claim still unresolved four years later.
Georgia’s public-health agency confirmed Legionella in a South Georgia prison’s water. Thirty days later, the corrections department told the men living there — in writing — that no outbreak existed. The contamination, and the antibiotics, followed them to the next prison.
Christian Krauch was tortured for three weeks under a bunk at Macon State Prison while GDC filed 168 paper counts saying he was accounted for. He survived. Part 2 of the GPS series Who Are the Victims documents what Georgia does to the people who enter its prisons as victims first — and the federal record now in place.
Georgia spends $1.60 a day to feed 53,000 incarcerated adults — about 13,000 of them over fifty, some on these trays for decades. The bodies arrive at the morgue marked cardiac arrest, organ failure, natural causes. The medical literature, going back eighty years, calls it starvation.
GPS investigates Pulaski State Prison under Warden Wendy Jackson, tracing how an untested leader inherited a facility scarred by decades of lethal medical neglect, gang violence, sexual assault, and federal findings of unconstitutional conditions — and what families are reporting now.
Georgia doesn’t treat dental disease in prison.
It removes teeth.
Extraction replaces fillings. Waiting lists replace care. Commissary replaces basic supplies. And the damage follows people home long after their sentence ends.
This is healthcare as punishment.