# They Told the People in Charge. Then They Left. > Former Georgia prison officers, sergeants and supervisors say the same thing on the record: they warned the people in charge, the answer was paperwork, and the ones who wouldn't sign it left. A federal judge found false records. The state's own payroll shows the exodus. **Published**: 2026-11-05 **Source**: https://gps.press/they-told-the-people-in-charge-then-they-left/ **Author**: Leo Alexander --- **Former Georgia prison officers, sergeants, lieutenants and supervisors describe the same thing in their own public interviews: a system that knew how bad things were, dressed up the paperwork, and pushed out the people who would not sign it. The state's own payroll shows how many walked out.** By his own account, in his last years at Ware State Prison, Christopher Hickox ran four buildings alone on some nights. Each building held two dorms, each dorm about fifty men. "That's 400 inmates by myself," he said in a two-hour interview this summer. No officer was in the control room, the radios barely worked, and he carried no pepper spray and no baton. [Christopher Hickox, interview with Tyler Ryals, Tyler Ryals's YouTube channel, June 2026, at 0:34:23 and 0:34:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDOX7A-sinw&t=2063s) He said he passed along what he was seeing to the people above him, a new footpath from a nearby airport to the back of the prison among it. "I brought this up to my deputy wardens. I brought this up to the unit managers and even the warden. They said, oh, we know about it." Did anything come of it, he was asked. "Nothing." [Same interview, at 0:12:39 and 0:13:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDOX7A-sinw&t=759s) A second former officer at Ware, a woman who served there as Officer Mondragon, said she and others went to the administration "for months and years" with a warning: if nothing changed, the prison would riot. "And we always just got brushed off and they're like, you don't know what you're talking about. Shut up." [Interview on the Big Miz ftz YouTube channel, April 24, 2026, at 0:40:41 and 0:40:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qoX4s0dBv8&t=2441s) Ware rioted on the night of August 1, 2020. The Georgia Department of Corrections issued a news release the next day under the line "No Serious Injuries Reported." In that release the agency called the riot "a disturbance caused by inmates," and reported that two staff members had "minor non life-threatening injuries" and that three incarcerated men had "non life-threatening injuries." According to the release, officers "deployed non-lethal ammunition." A golf cart was set on fire, several windows were broken, "but no major damage to the facility has been reported." [Georgia Department of Corrections, "Disturbance at Ware State Prison," August 2, 2020](https://gdc.georgia.gov/press-releases/2020-08-02/disturbance-ware-state-prison) At 11:36 p.m., less than an hour after the time the department gives for the riot's start, someone inside the prison began sending text messages, and those messages told a different story while the riot was still going on: "We got a real situation here. inmates have taken over the prison." "100+ on the walk, rioting." "Tied up the captain, and got keys." ((Text messages sent from inside Ware State Prison, August 1, 2020, 11:36 to 11:37 p.m.; screenshots held by GPS )) Whether a captain was among the supervisors who were attacked, GPS could not confirm. The men inside filmed it too. In a video streamed to Facebook from a cell, two men lie on the floor in blood-soaked clothes, shirts tied around their wounds, blood smeared on the concrete around them. "Our brothers are shot," a man says. "They need medical assistance." Another voice: "Two people just got shot. Two people just got shot. By the police." Then: "They got bullets inside the prison. That is illegal." And: "Y'all know they ain't supposed to shoot us unless we on that gate, man. We inside the prison. Ain't supposed to do no live, no live bullet, man." One of the wounded, they say, was shot in the side and has internal bleeding; another was "hit in the forehead." There were only "three officers on the whole compound," one says. ((Video streamed to Facebook from inside Ware State Prison, August 2, 2020, at 0:01:06 to 0:01:10, 0:04:32 to 0:05:02 and 0:06:25 to 0:06:28; copy held by GPS )) A second video went up the same day, from a darkened cell. A man is asked where he was shot. "I don't know where it's at," he says. "Yeah, but it's still in me." ((Second video from inside Ware State Prison, posted August 2, 2020, at 0:01:22 to 0:01:32; copy held by GPS )) What struck them, neither video shows. ![Two men lie on a concrete cell floor in blood-stained white clothes, shirts tied around their wounds, with blood on the floor around them.](https://gps.press/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/mcp-pathimport-4d42e96e7b0b.jpg) *Ware State Prison, the night of August 1-2, 2020: a still from a video streamed to Facebook from inside a cell. The department's release that day was headed "No Serious Injuries Reported."* The next day, two officers who had left Ware in the weeks before the riot gave an unedited video interview near the prison. Lamar Eason said he'd worked there ten years and left two weeks earlier. Quinn Kicklighter said he started in July 2012 and left a month before. For about eighteen months, Eason said, they had been fighting "upper management making us bend and break policy." A shift needed about thirty officers, Kicklighter said, and "we were lucky to have 10 people show up for briefing in the mornings." Six officers came in on the night of the riot, they said. The control rooms had been closed since the previous November, so supervisors carried keys into the dorms, which policy forbids. When three supervisors were jumped, their keys opened seven buildings. GDC said two staff members were hurt. They said at least four were, and one was flown out by helicopter. They took their complaints to the warden's office, they said, and were told, in effect, to get with the program or find another job, and that "no one's holding a gun to your head making you work here." [Lamar Eason and Quinn Kicklighter, interview on the Tier Talk YouTube channel, August 3, 2020, at 0:01:01, 0:02:03, 0:04:56, 0:05:18 and 0:06:42 to 0:06:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WkYF7A8M6c&t=61s) On August 6, in a longer interview, he gave his name as John Eason. The control rooms, he said, had lost their standard operating procedure books. Officers had started citing those books back to management, and "they didn't like how we was quoting them on their own book," so the books were collected. When officers asked for new radios, he said, they were told the roughly $7,000 cost was "not in the budget." A couple of weeks later, he said, the warden had a new car, a "$40,000 Impala." [John Eason, interview on the Awkward Fist Bump Productions YouTube channel, August 6, 2020, at 0:24:08 to 0:24:14 and 0:26:12 to 0:26:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r85qJIrI3FY&t=1448s) In that same interview he said the department "tried to downplay it" by calling it a disturbance, and that if not for the cell phones the men had inside, "this incident probably would have got swept under the rug like they were trying to do." Four officers were badly hurt, he said. One supervisor had a crushed skull and a punctured lung, and was held hostage for hours. Another was stabbed and beaten. An officer was stabbed under the eye. [Same interview, at 0:04:22 to 0:04:46 and 0:13:51 to 0:14:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r85qJIrI3FY&t=262s) Within hours of the riot, Eason had made the radio complaint in public. "Can't afford 7k for new radios in the buildings but bought a new car for the warden. GDC," he wrote on his Facebook page. He named the warden in another post. He and other former officers, he wrote, were "willing to testify in court over the safety and procedures Warden Coleman has continously ignored and frankly put his staff in harm's way." [Lamar Eason, public Facebook posts, August 2, 2020, screenshots held by GPS; the second post was quoted by Daily Kos, "Left to die: Ignored reports of inhumane treatment at Georgia prison end in riot," August 2, 2020](https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/8/2/1965904/-Left-to-die-Ignored-reports-of-inhumane-treatment-at-Georgia-prison-end-in-riot) The department had named Jeff Coleman warden of Ware State Prison effective October 1, 2018. It named his successor in June 2021. [Georgia Department of Corrections, "New Warden at Ware State Prison," September 27, 2018](https://gdc.georgia.gov/press-releases/2018-09-27/new-warden-ware-state-prison) ![Screenshot of public Facebook posts by former Ware officer Lamar Eason about $7,000 radios and a new car for the warden, and offering to testify about Warden Coleman.](https://gps.press/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/mcp-pathimport-dbe27bcda662.jpg) *Former Ware officer Lamar Eason's public Facebook posts, written within hours of the riot.* The release the department put out that weekend is still on its website, still under the line "No Serious Injuries Reported." Among the department's 2020 news releases, it is the only statement about the riot. [Georgia Department of Corrections, 2020 press releases](https://gdc.georgia.gov/organization/about-gdc/divisions-and-org-chart/office-public-affairs/2020-press-releases) That line was not true. The department never corrected it. Its own former officers described a supervisor with a crushed skull, held hostage for hours. Others were stabbed and beaten. One officer was flown out by helicopter. The men inside filmed themselves on a cell floor in their own blood, saying they had been shot with live bullets. What the department tells the public and what its own people and its own records show are two different accounts, again and again in this story. Two federal judges have since said as much from the bench, and their words come later in this article. Both officers left Ware, and so did everyone else in this story. Over several months, GPS went through hours of public interviews and recordings, transcribing them line by line. The people who spoke had worked inside the Georgia Department of Corrections. Among them: a commander of the prisons' emergency response teams, a supervisor who says he served as a deputy warden of security, a captain, a lieutenant with about twenty-one years in the system, sergeants and line officers. They worked at different prisons, in different years. Most never worked together. On four points, their accounts line up. The people running Georgia's prisons knew what was happening. From the top, the answer was to make the paperwork look right. Officers who wouldn't sign it were pushed aside, or pushed out. The state's own payroll records the result: by 2024, the uniformed force guarding Georgia's prisons was a little over half the size it had been in 2015. ## The paperwork prison The counts, the rounds, the searches, the checks on men locked in cells: when a prison can't staff its posts, that work stops. The former staff GPS heard from describe what replaced it. The forms still got filled in. Mondragon said a team of officers from other prisons was sent to Valdosta State Prison in late 2018 or early 2019, and that she spent about two weeks there on a temporary detail. "They were forging documents saying they were doing count when they weren't and wanted me to sign paperwork," she said. She refused. [Big Miz ftz interview, April 24, 2026, at 0:00:54 and 0:01:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qoX4s0dBv8&t=54s) Back at Ware, she said, the checks that are supposed to happen every thirty minutes were for show. "We were so short staffed. We honestly, we didn't have the people to do the checks. So we were just honestly making it look good for the cameras. The inmates knew it. We knew it. Everybody knew it." [Same interview, at 0:34:34 and 0:34:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qoX4s0dBv8&t=2074s) Desiree Adamkiewicz began at Telfair State Prison in June 2016. She was eighteen then, and she rose to sergeant over the prison's lockdown buildings. Tyler Ryals interviewed her in October, and she described men in lockdown filling out the door-check sheets themselves, "to make it appear as if an officer is going and checking on these inmates and they're not." [Interview with Desiree Adamkiewicz, Tyler Ryals's YouTube channel, October 25, 2026, at 0:09:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsqlul9Ppjc&t=581s) She also described what happened when the commissioner was due to walk through Telfair. "We had to make it look like we were on our A game," she said. "We were coming in on weekends. We were painting, we were doing haircuts." On one weekend, she said, she came in only to cut hair. What it was for, in her words: "just to make it appear as if we offered haircuts all the time." And she added: "You know, that's not the case. You know, we were covering it up basically and trying to make it look good." [Same interview, at 0:10:04 to 0:10:32](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsqlul9Ppjc&t=604s) Stacy Bowen, a former lieutenant, drew the same line between what a visitor sees and what sits behind the gate. She recorded a video statement and posted it in October. "Now, it looks great on the outside, it looks great in admin, in administration area. You get past that, it is sickening," she said. The counts in the lockdown units, she said, "occur rarely, if occurring at all, because again we do not have the manpower for that." Then she added: "I do not know how they continuously pass their so-called inspections." [Stacy Bowen, self-recorded video statement posted in the Georgia Prison Reform Coalition Facebook group, October 28, 2026, at 05:18, 19:46 and 04:06](https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1648832773484555) On August 1, 2024, Tyler Ryals filed a sworn statement on a GDC form. Ryals had risen to commander of the emergency response teams at Telfair, Valdosta and Johnson state prisons before he became an instructor at Washington State Prison. In the filing, he warned leadership that the system was in a "downward spiral." Describing it later, he said he refused to take part in the accreditation paperwork "because the ACA documentation in and of itself is a lie," and because it is "impossible to run a facility to ACA standards when you have a tenth of the officers there that you need to run it." [Tyler Ryals, interview with Ian Bick, September 24, 2026, at 2:30:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1CSs5lt360&t=9035s) What the audits check, he said, is the paperwork, not the prison. "They come in, they look at this paperwork and they say, oh, all the boxes are checked, A-plus." [Same interview, at 2:30:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1CSs5lt360&t=9056s) A federal judge has reached the same conclusion, on paper. GDC settled a lawsuit in 2019 over the Special Management Unit at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson, the state's most restrictive solitary-confinement unit, and agreed to reform it. Chief U.S. District Judge Marc Treadwell held the department's leaders in contempt in April 2024. His order runs 100 pages. It found that "door sheets" for men in two wings "falsely documented that programming was provided by television," when the men in those wings "still did not have television access." [Daughtry v. Emmons (formerly Gumm v. Jacobs), No. 5:15-cv-41 (MTT), U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia, Contempt Order, April 19, 2024, p. 29](https://cases.justia.com/federal/district-courts/georgia/gamdce/5:2015cv00041/94916/484/0.pdf) The order records "considerable evidence that the defendants were falsifying documentation of review hearings." A counselor testified that she stopped signing the review forms, and the order quotes her reason: "Because the offenders were not there." Men held in that unit testified they were told "to sign but not date review forms, apparently to allow backdating so it would appear that a review hearing was timely held." [Same order, pp. 33-34](https://cases.justia.com/federal/district-courts/georgia/gamdce/5:2015cv00041/94916/484/0.pdf) Under the heading "Absence of Documentation and False Documentation," the judge wrote of "the defendants' repeated failure to comply with the injunction's documentation requirements and their falsification of documents." He found that GDC's administration, Assistant Commissioner Ahmed Holt among it, "knew much earlier of the SMU's contemptuous conduct because, fittingly enough, GDC auditors were documenting the SMU's failure to document." [Same order, pp. 36-37](https://cases.justia.com/federal/district-courts/georgia/gamdce/5:2015cv00041/94916/484/0.pdf) The department was fined $2,500 a day, and an independent monitor was ordered; the judge noted that the defendants "have made clear that they cannot monitor compliance internally." ((Same order, pp. 99-100; GPS reported the case in "Above the Law: GDC Defies Courts, DOJ, and Legislators," [https://gps.press/above-the-law-gdc-defies-courts-doj-and-legislators/](https://gps.press/above-the-law-gdc-defies-courts-doj-and-legislators/) )) GDC's mortality records list Ricardo Daughtry's death in the unit on June 10, 2024. The case now carries his name. His lawyers notified the court two days later. [GDC mortality records; Daughtry v. Emmons, Plaintiffs' Notice Regarding Death of Class Representative, Doc. 512, June 12, 2024](https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/5355038/) After the contempt order, the prisoners' lawyers looked into his death. The unit's records, they found, show him attending "table time," the out-of-cell sessions the settlement requires, at a time when he had already been pronounced dead. They wrote in a court filing: "To state the obvious: there is no way R.D. could have participated in out-of-cell time after his death." [Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "Georgia prison officials have repeatedly presented false or misleading information to federal investigators, state lawmakers and even a federal judge," December 12, 2024](https://www.ajc.com/news/investigations/georgia-prison-officials-have-repeatedly-presented-false-or-misleading-information-to-federal-investigators-state-lawmakers-and-a-federal-judge/H76M74I6L5F5DKXEYSSZEQSLGY/) In May 2025 the court ruled the department had substantially complied with the settlement. It also found the department had purged its contempt, and the case ended there. [Daughtry v. Emmons, order of October 15, 2025, Doc. 738, p. 1](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-gamd-5_15-cv-00041/pdf/USCOURTS-gamd-5_15-cv-00041-22.pdf) ## The numbers that hide the gap Former staff say the staffing numbers the department reports go through the same treatment. State payroll records put Russell Zirkle at Valdosta State Prison as an officer in 2015 and show him rising to captain by 2021. He says he served as deputy warden of security before leaving for a corrections job in Florida. [Open Georgia salary data, Russell Zirkle, 2015-2024](https://open.ga.gov/) In a public interview, Zirkle laid out how a system-wide vacancy figure can look survivable while the prisons that matter most are hollowed out. The department's numbers, he said, are "skewed" because they fold in "the transitional centers, the halfway houses, the probation detention centers, the smaller satellite facilities," which "might be fully staffed." Go to Telfair, Hancock, Smith, Valdosta, Macon, Autry or Calhoun state prisons, he said, and you might see vacancy rates of "70 to 80%." [Russell Zirkle, interview on Christian White's YouTube channel, 2026, at 02:36 to 02:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIuwLOUA_8o&t=156s) Zirkle's figure is an estimate from inside the system. The U.S. Department of Justice ran its own three-year investigation of Georgia's prisons and published figures on October 1, 2024. Its findings put correctional officer vacancy rates at "around 50% systemwide and over 70% at ten of the largest facilities," and recorded that 18 prisons stood above 60 percent in December 2023. The same findings describe what Zirkle described: "Most of the GDC facilities with much lower CO vacancy rates were less violent, lower-security facilities such as transitional centers." [U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Investigation of Georgia Prisons, October 1, 2024, pp. 4, 5 and 24](https://www.justice.gov/d9/2024-09/findings_report_-_investigation_of_georgia_prisons.pdf) The system-wide figure is real. It's also an average, and an average blends places that are not in crisis with places that are. Zirkle has described the Justice Department's report as "spot on." He once worked under Ryals at Valdosta. Of him, Zirkle said: "Everything he says is completely true." [Christian White interview, at 33:01 and 61:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIuwLOUA_8o&t=1981s) ## Told, and told again The former staff describe warnings that went up the chain and came back down as nothing. Hickox said in the June interview that officers were told to stop searching cells by 2018 and 2019. "We were told no cell searches, no random searches on the walk. No, none of that. We don't have the manpower." [Hickox interview with Tyler Ryals, June 2026, at 1:08:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDOX7A-sinw&t=4120s) He had given the staffing numbers months earlier, in an April interview: a prison that should have had more than thirty officers on a shift had about fourteen when he worked there, he said, and fewer than ten on the night of the riot. By the time he left, he said, "we actually stopped doing cell searches altogether." [Christopher Hickox, interview on the Big Miz ftz YouTube channel, April 11, 2026, at 1:01:22 and 1:05:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aG4cTWh8MmU&t=3682s) Bowen, a former lieutenant, said deaths followed the same pattern. She said she had been through about three death cases in Georgia's prisons. "Each time the warden took over and the protocol that was in our standard operating procedure manuals were not followed," she said in her video. "We were told to step back, let them have it." She said she did her part: "I've made my reports, I've done what I needed to do on my end." [Bowen video statement, at 22:12 to 22:41 and 24:02](https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1648832773484555) After Ryals made his August 2024 statement, his warning reached the top of the department. He and Ahmed Holt, GDC's assistant commissioner over facilities, spoke on a video call. Ryals recorded the call and later posted it publicly. The recording doesn't show who set it up. ((Recording of the call, posted by Tyler Ryals as "Zoom Call 8-7-24," [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdEyzvM8AE4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdEyzvM8AE4) )) Ryals told Holt: "We don't have enough men in the prisons to even deal with, just say for example, one violent inmate at some of the prisons." He asked when the department would call it an emergency and ask for outside help, such as the National Guard. [Recording, at 03:26 and 10:49 to 11:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdEyzvM8AE4&t=206s) Holt didn't argue with the shortage itself. "I don't disagree with you," he said, and he said it more than once. What he pushed back on was how Ryals framed it: "I think you're making a pretty blanket statement to say that there are no men and nothing's being done about it." He wanted to know whether Ryals was "venting or are you trying to come up with a solution for the problem." As for outside help, Holt said the department couldn't "go say, hey, I need an outside agency to come in." Then he widened the frame: "it's not just the GDC issue, it is a system-wide issue, it is a nationwide issue, the applicant pool is shriveling up." [Recording, at 04:11, 06:43, 07:34, 07:54, 12:05 and 13:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdEyzvM8AE4&t=251s) Near the end of the call, Holt told Ryals: "We'd love to have you back inside the prison." [Recording, at 18:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdEyzvM8AE4&t=1122s) Zirkle said he had a comparable exchange of his own on the way out. The department's facilities director, he said, gave him what he called an informal exit interview and told him the grass is not always greener. Zirkle said his reply was that the department could not plead poverty: "You have 170 vacancies at this prison I'm working at." [Christian White interview, at 62:01 and 63:17; Zirkle interview with Tyler Ryals, August 19, 2026, at 1:08:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9-wRhxJFWU&t=4125s) Not everyone who reported a problem was an officer. Darby Beggarly told GPS she taught GED classes in the evenings at Montgomery State Prison, in Mount Vernon, from May to November 2021. Her classroom sat at the back of the prison, she wrote, with no correctional officers posted there. "Due to low staff numbers the guards taught me how to rig the front security building in order to let myself out at night." When she reported a teacher's aide's behavior toward her to security, she wrote, "it was turned against me and I was told that it was my fault." The accusations stopped, she said, once she told them to pull the camera footage. She left after six months. "I was mistreated, persecuted and lied about while working there," she wrote. ((Darby Beggarly, email to GPS, November 4, 2026 )) ## The ones who would not sign > "They told me I would never get it because I wouldn't falsify documents." Christopher Hickox, former Ware State Prison officer Each of the former staff describes leaving. The details of why differ from one account to the next. The shape of it doesn't. After the call, Ryals said, he had a few hours to take back his statement. "That's what they wanted me to do, was just say I was venting and recant," he said. "I refused to do that." Then came two choices, resign or be terminated. He refused to resign. [Ian Bick interview, at 2:33:30 to 2:35:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1CSs5lt360&t=9210s) Twelve days after his statement, on August 13, 2024, a Georgia Department of Labor separation notice signed by a GDC human resources analyst gives the reason for his departure as "Employee resigned." No resignation letter was ever written by him. [GPS, "The Georgia Prison Commander Who Warned the State," July 11, 2026](https://gps.press/the-georgia-prison-commander-who-warned-the-state/) Hickox said his honesty cost him a promotion. "They told me I would never get it because I wouldn't falsify documents." [Hickox interview with Tyler Ryals, June 2026, at 1:36:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDOX7A-sinw&t=5772s) In that April interview, he also traced his repeated rejections for sergeant to not being "part of the Boys Club." [Hickox interview, April 11, 2026, at 1:01:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aG4cTWh8MmU&t=3669s) Zirkle gave his reason for leaving: he expected that staying would get him "jammed up in something that really wasn't my fault." On the department's leadership, his words were "They don't want good people to continue being employed with their agency. They want to run those kind of people off." Those who stay, he said, are the ones who will "sign on the dotted line." [Zirkle interview with Tyler Ryals, at 1:51:51 to 1:52:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9-wRhxJFWU&t=6711s) Richard Blevins spent years as a correctional captain and chief of security. In a public Facebook comment in July, he wrote much the same thing. "The honest and hard working men and women of GDC don't last because they are targeted," he wrote. Promotions, he said, "are about who you know and your ability to say YES to whatever you're told," and staff complaints "are ignored, silenced or punished." He described prisons with "two factions trying to run the facilities": in his words, "the gangs and the administration." [Richard Blevins, comment on a post in the Georgia Prisons Exposed Facebook page, July 2026](https://www.facebook.com/share/p/18UeYemWvo/) Kerri-Ann Crumbley is a line officer, and she made her case straight to the department in a Facebook Live video she recorded herself. A prison should hold on to the officers who come in and do the job they were trained for, she said, the ones who do it without doing "anything illegal"; those officers, she said, "become your trainers." Then she turned to what former officers and families have been saying about the prisons: "What everybody's saying cannot be wrong, cannot be lies." [Kerri-Ann Crumbley, Facebook Live video, excerpt shared by the Human and Civil Rights Coalition of Georgia, at 00:22 and 00:53](https://www.facebook.com/hcrcga/videos/she-spoke-out-4-days-ago-about-the-shady-ethical-dumpster-fire-georgia-departmen/3223907994430297/) Mondragon said two men tried to throw her over a railing on a top tier. Two other officers froze. She quit after that, and her reason is in her own words: "I'm making sure I go home to my babies." She works in emergency medical services now. [Big Miz ftz interview, April 24, 2026, at 0:33:44 to 0:36:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qoX4s0dBv8&t=2024s) ## What they say about the people at the top The sharpest words about the department's leadership come from a federal judge. Judge Treadwell held Ahmed Holt in contempt in the Special Management Unit case. Holt was one of the officials held in contempt, and all of them were sued in their official capacities. Holt is the assistant commissioner Ryals spoke with on the recorded call. In February 2023 the judge asked him directly whether staffing problems were keeping the department from complying. "They are not," Holt answered. The judge later found the unit had a "practice" of cancelling out-of-cell time because of staffing. He wrote that he had "long suspected that the defendants', particularly Holts', assurances of adequate staff were based not on fact" but on the knowledge that admitting a shortage meant admitting a violation of the court's order. On one point, the judge wrote, "his testimony was false." On another: "Even if Holt were a credible witness, and he is not," his excuses would not excuse the failure. [Daughtry v. Emmons, Contempt Order, April 19, 2024, pp. 2, 53, 70-71, 85 and 89](https://cases.justia.com/federal/district-courts/georgia/gamdce/5:2015cv00041/94916/484/0.pdf) Eighteen months after he told the court that staffing was not the problem, Holt said this to Ryals, on a call that was recorded: "I don't disagree with you." Ryals says Holt was "lying to me all the time during our conversation." [The Dai Room interview, January 2026, at 1:06:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kK_pdzX2JbQ&t=4016s) What he passed on in his September interview was what people inside had told him. Holt and the department's head of special operations had met by video with gang leaders from several prisons, he said, and the gang members were told, as it was relayed to him, "as long as you don't stab them or kill them, then it's okay." Within a day of that meeting, he said, a gang member was stabbed to death. GPS has not confirmed that the meeting took place or what was said in it. [Ian Bick interview, at 1:37:45 to 1:39:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1CSs5lt360&t=5865s) Zirkle was asked in his own interview who should have been in line to run the department. Of Holt, he said: "I don't think he's a very ethical individual." [Zirkle interview with Tyler Ryals, at 1:32:24](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9-wRhxJFWU&t=5544s) Hickox names the warden he says was the worst smuggler he saw. "The biggest fish that I ever saw was the warden at the time," he said. Hickox said the warden skipped the front-entry search. "He had a black book bag full of stuff whenever he would enter," and it was empty when he left. Hickox said he "had to sit in front of GBI because of it," and later gave the name: "Warden Gramiak was the one that I went in front of GBI on." He also said the warden was having an affair with a female sergeant and overrode the shift roster to keep the officers she had called in, and that the whole shift called out in protest. Hickox said he heard the warden was taken away and allowed to retire, and "they never charged him." [Hickox interview, April 11, 2026, at 0:13:54 to 0:20:38 and 1:11:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aG4cTWh8MmU&t=834s) GDC named Tom Gramiak warden of Ware State Prison effective January 1, 2014, and named a new warden there, James Deal, effective August 21, 2017, three years before the 2020 riot. ((GDC, "New Warden Named for Ware State Prison," [https://gdc.georgia.gov/node/12876](https://gdc.georgia.gov/node/12876); GDC, "New Warden Named at Ware State Prison," August 18, 2017, [https://gdc.georgia.gov/node/6751](https://gdc.georgia.gov/node/6751) )) State payroll shows Gramiak paid as a warden into 2018 and not after. [Open Georgia salary data, Thomas Brendan Gramiak, 2015-2019](https://open.ga.gov/) GPS found no record of any charge against him. Hickox repeated the same account in both interviews. A female officer gave it to him, he said, and he tied it to the August 2020 riot videos: the two men "on the floor, both of them bleeding," he said, "were shot." By that account, the warden or the deputy warden, he wasn't sure which, took the sidearm from the officer driving the perimeter vehicle, walked into the prison and fired. "You're not going to find any reports," he said, of the warden taking a firearm into the prison and shooting two men. He doesn't name the officer or the official, and he says he had left Ware before the riot. On the June tape, Ryals noted that the department's version was that K-9 officers and other first responders fired rubber buckshot, and that at close range it can break the skin. ((Hickox interview, April 11, 2026, at 0:51:52 to 0:52:49; Hickox interview with Tyler Ryals, June 2026, at 1:31:37 to 1:33:55 )) Less-lethal rounds were almost certainly fired that night. The department says so, and in the video one of the men says officers came in to "shoot us with shotguns." ((Video streamed to Facebook from inside Ware State Prison, August 2, 2020, at 0:05:23 )) But the men in the videos said, while it was happening, that live bullets were fired inside the prison, and Hickox's account says a real gun was. GPS cannot establish which wounds came from what. The department has never said in public whether a firearm was carried inside Ware that night or a live round fired, and GPS has asked it. Mondragon remembered a Ware captain she knew as "Captain Adam," who "wound up going to Smith State Prison, becoming the warden out there." "It shocked the hell out of me when they said that he got busted for inmate dealings over at Smith State Prison," she said. [Big Miz ftz interview, April 24, 2026, at 0:22:14 to 0:22:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qoX4s0dBv8&t=1334s) The Georgia Bureau of Investigation arrested Brian Dennis Adams in February 2023. He was the former warden of Smith State Prison, and the charges were conspiracy to violate Georgia's racketeering law, bribery, false statements and violation of oath by a public officer. GDC had fired him before the arrest. (([https://gbi.georgia.gov/press-releases/2023-02-08/gbi-arrests-georgia-department-corrections-warden-rico-charges](https://gbi.georgia.gov/press-releases/2023-02-08/gbi-arrests-georgia-department-corrections-warden-rico-charges) )) State payroll lists a Brian Dennis Adams as a captain in 2016, a deputy warden in 2018 and 2019, and a warden from 2020. [Open Georgia salary data, Brian Dennis Adams](https://open.ga.gov/) Asked about the case, Ryals said "what was said was that he was involved with YSL," a gang, and added: "I'm not saying that he did do it because I don't know if he's been convicted of the crime." [Butler interview, November 2025, at 2:32:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D55R4maKRpA&t=9165s) The state attorney general announced in May 2026 that a Tattnall County grand jury had indicted Adams over a contraband operation tied to a prison gang, YSL Squad. Adams has not been convicted. [Office of the Attorney General of Georgia, "Carr Indicts Former Prison Warden in Contraband Smuggling Operation," May 13, 2026](https://law.georgia.gov/press-releases/2026-05-13/carr-indicts-former-prison-warden-contraband-smuggling-operation) Mondragon did not hold back on the gangs. "Honestly, in my experience, the worst ones that I ever had to deal with was the Muslim gangs in there," she said. Religion, she said, was not something she opposed for anyone, "but you knew 90% of those fools were not practicing Muslims," and men were using religious gatherings as cover to meet. [Big Miz ftz interview, at 0:43:04 to 0:43:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qoX4s0dBv8&t=2584s) Ryals has said Shawn Emmons should be removed. He describes Emmons as one of the department's regional directors. His reason, in his words: "just because of how unprofessional he's been and how much he's brought the staff morale down at the prisons that he's worked at." [The Dai Room interview, at 1:04:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kK_pdzX2JbQ&t=3860s) Emmons was the warden of the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison, where the Special Management Unit is housed, and his name is among those listed in the contempt order. [Daughtry v. Emmons, Contempt Order, April 19, 2024, p. 2](https://cases.justia.com/federal/district-courts/georgia/gamdce/5:2015cv00041/94916/484/0.pdf) Ryals said he was told, before a protest outside Telfair in August 2026, that the prison's deputy warden, whom he named as Tonya Keith, had warned people planning to come that they would be arrested. In Ryals's words, she was "essentially trying to intimidate people into not coming to the protest." He said he was not arrested. [Tyler Ryals, YouTube live, September 1, 2026, at 0:04:29 to 0:04:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5x_G6-E_fpc&t=269s) State payroll lists a Tonja T. Keith as a deputy warden. Zirkle placed the responsibility even higher. "Brian Kemp is complicit in this too," he said. "The governor, he's complicit in this too." [Christian White interview, at 57:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIuwLOUA_8o&t=3436s) Hickox said a reporter told him the governor's office had sent a letter saying he was "terminated due to excessive use of force," though he says he resigned and has "nothing on my record." About the governor and the department's leaders, he said: "they're corrupt. They're corrupt for power." [Hickox interview with Tyler Ryals, June 2026, at 0:54:04 to 0:54:17 and 1:42:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDOX7A-sinw&t=3244s) ## The exodus, in the state's own numbers The accounts, taken one by one, describe a pattern. Its size shows up in Georgia's own salary records. GPS went through Open Georgia, the state's public salary database, and pulled every person paid as a correctional officer, sergeant, lieutenant or captain in GDC across the state's fiscal years 2015 through 2025. Those years run July to June. In fiscal 2015, 9,138 people held those jobs and were paid for them. By fiscal 2024 the count was 4,957. In fiscal 2025 it was 5,081. [GPS analysis of Open Georgia salary data](https://open.ga.gov/) Adamkiewicz gave the warnings their setting. She started at Telfair in 2016, she said, and at that point the prison had several officers on the perimeter and several in each building. "It got to the point where it was three officers per building, one in the control room, one on each side. And it got to the point where one officer was having to work three or four buildings." By the time she left, she said, "it would be three people working the whole compound, working a whole prison." The reasons people quit, in her account: the pay was not enough, the conditions were more than they could handle, other staff treated them badly, and "it was unsafe." [Adamkiewicz interview, at 0:05:46, 0:06:31, 0:06:08 and 0:16:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsqlul9Ppjc&t=346s) She said the risk was worse for a woman on those posts. She is five-foot-two, and she was in charge of three buildings at a time. "I'm escorting all these grown men, six feet and higher, you know, to showers by myself," she said. "That is so out of policy." When she started, she said, "you never even would have heard of a woman stepping foot" in the lockdown tiers. "There should have been somebody with me at all times." [Adamkiewicz interview, at 0:16:43 to 0:16:58 and 0:19:15 to 0:19:24](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsqlul9Ppjc&t=1003s) Bowen, a former lieutenant, said she was sometimes the only officer on a compound that held 1,200 women. The locks there had been "picked," "broken" and "tampered with." "It's not secure or safe for anybody in there," she said, "not the other offenders that are around them, not myself or the other staff members, and not the public." [Bowen video statement, at 06:04 to 06:46](https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1648832773484555) ## The ones who stayed A prison that can't hold on to its honest officers holds on to the rest, and some of the officers it holds on to are bought. GDC publishes its own contraband arrest reports. GPS has compiled them from 2010 to the present, and they list 271 officers and 74 other GDC employees arrested for bringing contraband into prisons between May 2010 and July 2026. Food service workers, nurses and maintenance staff are among them, plus 12 contract staff. Those are arrests, not convictions. They are also only the cases GDC chose to publish. ((GDC contraband arrest reports, compiled by GPS at [https://gps.press/contraband-data/](https://gps.press/contraband-data/) )) The arrests don't stop at the officers on the floor. The GBI's 2023 racketeering and bribery case against Brian Adams, the former warden of Smith State Prison, is described above. Adamkiewicz is one of them, and she says so. She said her breaking point came when she was stabbed in the lockdown unit in May 2021. "I couldn't handle it anymore." She agreed with Ryals that her case is public record, and said: "I ended up being corrupt." [Adamkiewicz interview, at 0:02:49 and 0:02:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsqlul9Ppjc&t=169s) In an April 2023 news release, the U.S. Attorney's Office said she pleaded guilty, under the name Desiree M. Briley, to a federal methamphetamine conspiracy charge. The charge was for helping smuggle drugs into Telfair for an incarcerated man, part of a federal and state investigation called Operation Ghost Busted. Federal prosecutors said she was a sergeant when she was arrested in January 2023. She was sentenced to 18 months. [U.S. Attorney's Office, Southern District of Georgia, "Prison guard who smuggled contraband to prison inmate pleads guilty to federal drug charge," April 2023](https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdga/pr/prison-guard-who-smuggled-contraband-prison-inmate-pleads-guilty-federal-drug-charge) Her account of when she left the department doesn't match the federal record. She remembers leaving soon after the stabbing. Federal prosecutors said she was still a sergeant when she was arrested nearly two years later. Her account matters here for what she describes before that, and for what she says about herself: that a prison running on three officers for a whole compound broke her, and that she then became part of the problem she had been hired to stop. ## What the people in charge say The leadership of the department has told the public a different story. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported on undisclosed homicides and record deaths in the state's prisons. Commissioner Tyrone Oliver told legislative committees that this coverage was "propaganda." [GPS, "The Crisis Georgia's Prison Leaders Call 'Propaganda'," July 12, 2026](https://gps.press/the-crisis-georgias-prison-leaders-call-propaganda/) When the Justice Department issued its findings, Zirkle said, "Corrections actually came out and denied it." [Christian White interview, at 33:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIuwLOUA_8o&t=1992s) In November 2024, U.S. District Judge Tilman E. "Tripp" Self III ruled from the same courthouse that GDC's limit of 12 email contacts on a man at Augusta State Medical Prison broke the First Amendment, and he ordered the department to stop enforcing the rule. [Benning v. Oliver, No. 5:18-cv-00087-TES-CHW, U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia, order of November 18, 2024](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-gamd-5_18-cv-00087/pdf/USCOURTS-gamd-5_18-cv-00087-6.pdf) That was a second federal judge to read the department as a whole the same way. More than a year on, the department was still enforcing it. In February 2026, Self put Commissioner Oliver on the witness stand, so that Oliver would hear "from my mouth … how little credibility the Department of Corrections has." The department's own lawyer told the court there was "little or no excuse for failing to comply with the court order." Self said of the commissioner: "If this was a child support case, if I were back in Superior Court, he'd be in jail." Oliver testified that he learned of the order shortly after Christmas 2025. Self told him: "If the Eleventh Circuit tells me to do something, I just don't get the luxury of not doing it. I don't understand how you do." Of the contempt finding in the Special Management Unit case, he said: "Heads should hang in shame over that." And: "It's just like the Department thinks that they can do anything they want to do. It is not going to happen." He ended his remarks to Oliver with a message for the state's elected leaders: "I hope the Speaker and the Lieutenant Governor and the Governor hear about it because they need to understand that there is a real problem, a true problem in the Department." [Benning v. Oliver, No. 5:18-cv-87-TES, U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia, transcript of show-cause hearing, February 10, 2026, Doc. 205, pp. 5-8, 14 and 22; Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "Georgia prison boss and GDC chided for acting 'above the law'," February 10, 2026](https://www.ajc.com/news/2026/02/federal-judge-chides-georgia-prison-boss-and-gdc-for-acting-above-the-law/) GPS has asked the Department of Corrections to respond to the accounts and findings in this article and will add its response here. None of the former staff claims to know every prison, and they don't agree on everything. What they share is narrower, and harder to dismiss. Each describes telling someone above them what was happening. Each describes a response that dealt with how things looked rather than how things were. Each of them is gone. "They're sweeping it under the rug," Zirkle said of the officers still inside. "They're putting a muzzle on the people that want to speak out about the things going on. They can't say anything or, you know, they'll get fired, disciplined." [Christian White interview, at 08:47 and 08:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIuwLOUA_8o&t=527s) ## How we reported this The public videos quoted here were transcribed by GPS. The speakers posted them, or their hosts did, on YouTube or Facebook. Each speaker is a former GDC employee using their own name, and what they say is their account. Where the public record differs, GPS has noted it. Where a speaker accuses a named official, GPS reports the accusation as that speaker's account, states whether it is first-hand or second-hand, and sets out what public records show, or states that GPS found none. Open Georgia, the state's public salary database, is where the staffing figures come from. GPS counted everyone paid as a correctional officer, sergeant, lieutenant or captain in the Department of Corrections within each state fiscal year, which runs July through June. Anyone paid in one year who held no department job the next year was counted as gone. A year of pay means the person worked at least part of that year. Someone who left early still counts for it. GDC publishes its own contraband arrest reports. GPS compiled them, and each incident links back to GDC's page. --- ## Call to Action: What You Can Do Awareness without action changes nothing. Here's how you can help push for accountability and real reform: **Join the GPS Advocacy Network**: Sign up at [https://gps.press/become-an-advocate/](https://gps.press/become-an-advocate/) and we'll advocate on your behalf every week. GPS identifies your state legislators, crafts personalized letters on the most pressing prison issues, and sends them directly to the representatives who represent you. You receive a copy of every letter. It takes two minutes to sign up, and we handle the rest. **Send a 60-Second Message**: Pick an issue, get a ready-to-edit message with the verified facts already in it, and email your state House representative and senator directly from your own inbox at [https://gps.press/send-a-message/](https://gps.press/send-a-message/). No signup, nothing stored. It takes about a minute. **Tell My Story**: Are you or a loved one affected by Georgia's prison system? Have you worked inside it? GPS publishes first-person accounts from incarcerated people, their families and former staff. Submit your story at [https://gps.press/tellmystory](https://gps.press/tellmystory) and help the world understand what's really happening behind the walls. **Contact Your Representatives**: Your state legislators control GDC's budget, oversight, and the laws that created these failures. Find your Georgia legislators at [https://gps.press/find-your-legislator/](https://gps.press/find-your-legislator/) or call Governor Kemp at (404) 656-1776 or the GDC Commissioner at (478) 992-5246. **Demand Media Coverage**: Contact newsrooms at the AJC, local TV stations, and national criminal justice outlets. More coverage means more pressure. **Amplify on Social Media**: Share this article and tag @GovKemp, @GDC_Georgia, and your local representatives. Use #GAPrisons, #PrisonReform, #GeorgiaPrisonerSpeak. **Message the Board of Corrections**: The citizen board that oversees the GDC publishes no contact details for its members. GPS built the missing front door: pick a board member and a policy message and send it from your own email at [https://gps.press/write-the-board/](https://gps.press/write-the-board/). **File Public Records Requests**: Georgia's Open Records Act gives every citizen the right to request incident reports, death records, staffing data, medical logs, and financial documents. Start with the GPS Action Toolkits at [https://gps.press/toolkits/](https://gps.press/toolkits/). The Open Records Toolkit walks you through what to ask for, gives you ready-to-file request templates, and tells you what to do when the state says no. File directly with GDC at [https://georgiadcor.govqa.us/WEBAPP/_rs/SupportHome.aspx](https://georgiadcor.govqa.us/WEBAPP/_rs/SupportHome.aspx). **Attend Public Meetings**: The Georgia Board of Corrections and legislative committees hold public meetings. Your presence is noticed. **Contact the Department of Justice**: File civil rights complaints at [https://civilrights.justice.gov](https://civilrights.justice.gov). Federal oversight has forced abusive systems to change before. **Support Organizations Doing This Work**: Donate to or volunteer with Georgia-based prison reform groups fighting for change on the ground. **Vote**: Research candidates' positions on criminal justice. Primary elections often determine outcomes in Georgia. **Contact GPS**: If you worked inside Georgia's prisons, or have information about conditions inside them, reach us securely at GPS.press. --- ## Part of Something Bigger This article is part of the [GPS Reform Agenda](/our-vision/), two active campaigns to transform Georgia's criminal justice system. **[End the Warehouse](/end-the-warehouse/)** THIS SERIES Transform Georgia's prisons from punishment to rehabilitation. Two tracks: litigation to reduce overcrowding + evidence-based programs that work. **[Vision 2027](/vision2027/)** Three model bills for the 2027 Georgia legislature. The legislature doesn't need new laws. It needs to [enforce two dormant statutes](/the-sleeping-giants/) it already passed. [Read the full GPS Reform Agenda →](/our-vision/) --- ## Further Reading **[The Georgia Prison Commander Who Warned the State](https://gps.press/the-georgia-prison-commander-who-warned-the-state/)** *Tyler Ryals put his warning in writing on August 1, 2024; twelve days later the state recorded him as resigned.* **[Two Commanders Say Georgia Hides Its Prison Staffing Crisis](https://gps.press/two-commanders-say-georgia-hides-its-prison-staffing-crisis/)** *Ryals and Russell Zirkle, independently, on how the staffing numbers the state reports hide the gap.* **[The Crisis Georgia's Prison Leaders Call 'Propaganda'](https://gps.press/the-crisis-georgias-prison-leaders-call-propaganda/)** *What the department's leadership has told lawmakers and the public while the deaths and the vacancies mounted.* **[Above the Law: GDC Defies Courts, DOJ, and Legislators](https://gps.press/above-the-law-gdc-defies-courts-doj-and-legislators/)** *Two federal judges, the Justice Department and the legislature, and a department that treats their orders as optional.* **[Nowhere to Put Him: How Georgia's Bed Math Killed a Man Thirty Days From Home](https://gps.press/nowhere-to-put-him-how-georgias-bed-math-killed-a-man-thirty-days-from-home/)** *A former chief of security's account of the warning he gave before Arthur Wimbush was killed.* **[At Least Nineteen: The Murders the State Didn't Prosecute](https://gps.press/at-least-nineteen-the-murders-the-state-didnt-prosecute/)** *The killings at Ware State Prison, the prison at the center of the 2020 riot described here.* --- ## GPS Intelligence System The GPS Intelligence System maintains living research profiles that aggregate data, news, settlements, and analysis on Georgia's prisons and the issues defining them. The profiles below provide deeper context for the issues raised in this article: **[Staffing Crisis](https://gps.press/intelligence/issue/staffing-crisis/)** *The vacancy figures, the DOJ findings and the payroll data behind the exodus these former officers describe.* **[Staff Misconduct](https://gps.press/intelligence/issue/staff-misconduct/)** *Staff arrests, contraband cases and the court findings on falsified records, collected in one place.* --- ## Explore the Data GPS makes GDC statistics accessible to the public through several resources: - **[GPS Statistics Portal](https://gps.press/gdc-statistics/)**: Interactive dashboards translating complex GDC reports into accessible formats, updated within days of official releases. - **[GPS Lighthouse AI](https://gps.press/ask-ai/)**: Ask questions about Georgia's prison system and get answers drawn from GPS's investigative archive and data analysis. - **[GPS llms.txt](https://gps.press/llms.txt)**: A single machine-readable index of every GPS data resource, published using the open llms.txt standard. Point any AI tool (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity) at this URL and the model can navigate to facility profiles, intelligence briefs, mortality records, statistics, and the full investigative archive, with no other configuration needed. It is the fastest way to ground an AI conversation in verified GPS data. - **[GPS Public MCP Server](https://data.gps.press/mcp)**: For AI tools that support the Model Context Protocol (Claude, ChatGPT, and others), connect directly to GPS's data: read-only tools covering population, facilities, mortality, parole, the Georgia Code, settlements, and more. Every answer arrives with its source link and citation built in. For a walkthrough of how to put these resources to work with AI, see **[How to Use GPS Data with AI Tools](https://gps.press/how-to-use-gps-data-with-ai-tools/)**: a step-by-step guide for researchers, advocates, families, and journalists analyzing Georgia prison conditions, statistics, and policy with tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Contact GPS at media@gps.press for access to underlying datasets used in this analysis. --- ## About Georgia Prisoners' Speak (GPS) Georgia Prisoners' Speak (GPS) is a nonprofit investigative newsroom built in partnership with incarcerated reporters, families, advocates, and data analysts. Operating independently from the Georgia Department of Corrections, GPS documents the truth the state refuses to acknowledge: extreme violence, fatal medical neglect, gang-controlled dorms, collapsed staffing, fraudulent reporting practices, and unconstitutional conditions across Georgia's prisons. Through confidential reporting channels, secure communication, evidence verification, public-records requests, legislative research, and professional investigative standards, GPS provides the transparency the system lacks. Our mission is to expose abuses, protect incarcerated people, support families, and push Georgia toward meaningful reform based on human rights, evidence, and public accountability. Every article is part of a larger fight: to end the silence, reveal the truth, and demand justice. ![Georgia Prisoners' Speak: Accountability. Dignity. Reform.](https://gps.press/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/mcp-pathimport-e8aeb81a03c8.jpg) ---