by Matt Clarke

"People are assaulted, stabbed, raped and killed or left to languish inside facilities that are woefully understaffed,” lockups where “[i]nmates are maimed, tortured, relegated to an existence of fear, filth and not-so-benign neglect.”

So began a scathing 93-page report published by the Civil Rights Division (CRD) of the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) on October 21, 2024. But it wasn’t about prison conditions in some third-world country. Rather it summarized a three-year investigation into lockups run by the Georgia Department of Corrections (DOC).

As PLN reported, the DOJ launched its inquiry at the request of the Southern Center for Human Rights (SCHR) in September 2021, near the end of a particularly deadly two-year period in which 57 state prisoners were murdered. [See: PLN, Sep. 2022, p.1.]

“It’s hard to capture the level of death and suffering that has plagued Georgia’s prisons since we asked for DOJ intervention in 2020,” said SCHR Deputy Director Ateeyah Hollie. “Death should not be a routine feature of any prison system, but it has become one in Georgia.” She added that her group feared conditions would get much worse and deaths would rise—which they did. As the situation went from bad to worse, the total number of prisoner homicides between 2018 and 2023 hit 142.

When the Atlanta Journal-Constitution determined that at least 38 DOC prisoners were murdered in 2023, it was a record for the agency and more than any other prison system in the South—even more than Texas and Florida, which hold more prisoners. The DOC runs the country’s fourth-largest state prison system, with some 50,000 state prisoners housed in 34 state prisons and four private prisons, supported with a $1.2 billion annual budget.

In a statement accompanying the recently released DOJ report, Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said that conditions in DOC lockups fell far short of even the minimal standards that courts have set to pass constitutional muster.

“Our findings report lays bare the horrific and inhumane conditions that people are confined to inside Georgia’s state prison system,” Clarke said. “Our statewide investigation exposes long-standing, systemic violations stemming from complete indifference and disregard to the safety and security of people Georgia holds in its prisons.”

Worse, as the report noted, “[t]hese dangerous conditions not only harm the people Georgia incarcerates—it places prison employees and the broader community at risk.”

DOC officials responded to the report with denial and defiance. But they also blocked access to government documents and generally hindered the investigation, the DOJ said. So it is unlikely that there will be any internal pressure at the DOC for reform, which will instead have to come from the outside.

Funny Business With Deadly Serious Numbers

The DOJ report took exception to a common DOC practice that prisoner advocates have long found especially cruel: Murdered prisoners not infrequently have their deaths attributed to other causes. The DOC’s “mortality data categorizes many deaths that obviously were homicides as having an unknown reason or unknown verified cause of death.”

Even when there is an incident report that unequivocally says a prisoner was murdered, his death is misclassified in official data releases. Those deaths for which an autopsy remains pending are chalked up to “unknown causes,” and it sometimes takes months or years after the mortality review is completed for the data to be updated.

“In the meantime,” the DOJ noted, the prison system “inaccurately reports these deaths both internally and externally, and in a manner that underreports the extent of violence and homicide in [its] prisons.” When the DOC said that six prisoners were murdered in June 2024 that, it also had a report—which the DOJ reviewed—counting at least 18 prisoner homicides during the month.

Yet “[e]ven when incidents are accurately reported,” the DOJ report continued, DOC “systems for investigating violent incidents, and for reviewing incidents to identify the factors that contribute to violence, are inadequate to protect incarcerated persons from harm.”

Understaffing, the Root of All Evil

The report found that years of running severely short-staffed prisons means that the a “loss of control over the prisons has set in” for the DOC, “with near-constant life-threatening violence as the norm.” While prison systems throughout the U.S. struggle with staffing levels, the DOC mines new lows: Current statewide guard staffing levels are below 50%, and 30% or lower at 10 of the state’s largest prisons—meaning seven of every 10 positions is vacant.

Guard understaffing in the DOC is not a new problem, but attempts to rectify it have borne little fruit: The guard vacancy rate was 49.3% in 2021, 56.3% in 2022, and 52.5% in 2023. Furthermore, the staffing shortage has created a negative feedback loop as it worsens and more guards—who already complain of too much work for too little pay—quit rather than take on the work of two or three positions.

Such a shortage of guards leaves all sorts of prison work undone. The DOC ranks guard positions on three levels, and the most critical positions, such as manning the front gate or patrolling the perimeter, are considered mandatory. The next level includes guards who rove housing units or escort prisoners to outside medical care. In the least critical positions, guards supervise recreation, religious or educational programs. The DOJ found that sometimes none of these lower-level positions was staffed in a prison, and even the most critical positions sometimes were unfilled. As the report noted, the DOC “does not have staff, even including supervisory staff, to cover its [critical] posts at many of the prisons [the DOJ] visited.”

However, every level is vital. When housing units go hours at a time without seeing a guard, gangs step in. The DOJ blamed “breakdowns” in “basic security procedures” for opening “a path for gang control over much of the prison system.” But gangs do not limit their activities to smuggling contraband into the prisons and violence against rival gangs; left unchecked, they also engage in assault, rape, extortion and murder of non-gang-members. They dictate where prisoners who are not gang members may sleep, regardless of the housing unit that prison classification officers assign them to. Outnumbered guards play along, counting the prisoner as if he were in the proper location. As a result, “[g]ang-related criminal activity exists across the [DOC] system, with some of the larger gangs operating sophisticated networks across several facilities and in the free world.”

Gangs assault prisoners to extort them. They film the assaults on a contraband cellphone, sending the video to friends or family of prisoners with a demand for money from them to prevent repeat assaults. “Over the past several years,” the DOJ report noted, “a steady stream of contraband cellphone videos and photographs” have popped up on social media, “appearing to show assaults, incarcerated people with injuries, weapons, and incarcerated people who appear to be under the influence of drugs—all while inside Georgia prisons.” The result paints “a picture of lawlessness and disorder.” One video even showed a prisoner being led on a leash into a cell, apparently to be raped.

Of course, without enough guards to fill critical positions, even fewer are available to escort prisoners to outside medical services. That leaves victims of gang violence caused by chronic understaffing to become victims again as they bleed out from a treatable stab wound, waiting for a guard escort to emergency medical treatment. See: Investigation of Georgia Prisons, DOJ Civil Rights Div. (Oct. 2024).

Over more than three decades, PLN has run close to 150 articles on declining conditions in DOC lockups. So long as Georgia continues to cede control of its prisons to gangs, and show such little fealty to truth in reporting prisoner murders, little improvement can be expected.  

Additional sources: The Appeal, Atlanta Constitution

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