Author: Anonymous5555
I came into the Georgia prison system in January 2015. They sent me to Jackson — GDCP, Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison. That’s where everyone enters. They put me in an open dorm with 100 men.
It was chaos. People running everywhere. Mostly very young people. A lot of them were gang members — tattoos, some yelling, others climbing on anything they could climb up on. I wasn’t really scared. Just overwhelmed.
I wasn’t there but a week before I saw a man killed.
I had gone to bed. It was probably 2am when I heard screaming and people hitting against my bunk. I got up to see about 20 men — boys, mostly — chasing a big middle-aged man around the aisles. They had broken broomsticks, canes, pieces of metal they’d been sharpening.
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. A few minutes later, after the commotion was over, they opened the door and dragged this man’s body out of the dorm.
Most just went to bed. What could you do against these gangs?
The gangs grew in numbers. They were actively recruiting new members. In the two months I was there, I probably witnessed 50 people get beat into gangs. They beat you when you enter a gang. All the gangs would have to say is that you need to join to stay safe. That murder wasn’t the only violence — there was something happening every day. The young and scrawny kids flocked to join. They were scared.
There was nothing to do. No activities at all. We were just all there together. I found a couple people my age to talk to. One guy found a little cardboard and made cards and we would play card games. There were no tables so we sat on someone’s bunk or the floor. You understood that prison was going to be dangerous and that you might not live through it. One of those I was friends with died shortly after I left there.
Another thing about Jackson is that there is no glass in the windows. We were always freezing. No heat either. This was January, February. Just cold all the time.
I was there two months before they transferred me to another prison.