Two prisoners at Hancock State Prison died and another was seriously injured Thursday after an altercation among inmates, the Georgia Department of Corrections has confirmed.
One of the prisoners was killed in the altercation. The other prisoner who died had no visible signs of injury and his death appears to be medically related, said Joan Heath, the GDC’s spokesperson.
The third prisoner was sent to a local hospital for treatment, she said.
No staff were injured in the incident, which the GDC said appeared to be gang-related.
“The altercation is being investigated, therefore we have no additional details to provide at this time,” Heath told the AJC in an email.
The incident at Hancock comes as prison issues are front and center at the Legislature after another record year for homicides inside GDC facilities.
The AJC has identified 62 people who died from suspected homicides last year throughout the Georgia prison system. The GDC says it investigated 66 prisoner deaths deemed to be homicides in 2024 but has not released the names. The tallies far surpass 2023′s record of at least 38 killings.
Consultants hired last year by Gov. Brian Kemp found that staffing vacancies for correctional officers at 20 of Georgia’s 34 prisons have reached “emergency levels,” making it impossible to keep up with even basic protocols, according to a copy of the consultants’ draft report obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Compounding the risks, the consultants reported that cell locks at many prisons are broken, allowing prisoners to roam and gang members to intimidate other inmates. Among the gang-related incidents at Hancock last year was a September assault where seven prisoners were disciplined for attacking an inmate.
Citing the report’s findings, Kemp has proposed allocating an additional $600 million over the next 18 months to address staffing, emergency repairs and infrastructure improvements for the state’s prisons. Legislators reviewing the proposal at budget hearings at the Capitol view the prison problems as urgent and appear ready to approve the massive spending increase, although GDC officials say just fixing the locks could take years.
The AJC verified only one homicide at Hancock in 2024, the Oct. 13 killing of 29-year-old Travon Walthour. Four other prisoners were involved in his death, incident report data from the GDC shows. In 2023, two prisoners were killed there: Roland Phillips died of multiple sharp-force injuries in June of that year, and Francisco Melgar-Saldivar was strangled to death in August, according to death certificate data.
The prison had three homicides in 2022, including the stabbing death of Charles Tristen McKee. Earlier this week, a Hancock County jury convicted another prisoner, Cleveland Gary, in the slaying. According to an announcement from the office of District Attorney T. Wright Barksdale, a fight broke out between several inmates, and both McKee and Gary were stabbed. “The altercation ended, but Gary was not finished. He walked over to McKee and struck him six times in the head with a 17-inch homemade machete,” Barksdale said in the announcement.
McKee’s case was among those described in the U.S. Department of Justice report released last year that found stunning violence, rampant sexual assaults and other dangerous conditions in the state’s prisons.
Hancock is a close security prison that houses more than 1,100 prisoners. Of that number, more than 350 are serving life sentences and more than 650 have been identified by the GDC as gang members. But Hancock has struggled with one of the GDC’s highest correctional officer vacancy rates. In October, the agency reported that 73.5% of officer positions were vacant, with only 49 correctional officers on staff.
The short-staffing, safety problems and corruption inside Georgia’s prisons have also allowed prisoners to operate large criminal enterprises from their cells. From 2015 to 2024, the AJC found that prosecutors filed 28 major cases involving drug-trafficking operations run from inside Georgia state prisons.
On Wednesday, federal prosecutors announced the latest: Dozens of people were charged with conspiring to distribute cocaine, methamphetamine, oxycodone and marijuana. Among those indicted were inmates at Wilcox, Telfair and Macon state prisons; the Georgia Diagnostic and Correctional Prison; and the privately operated Wheeler and Jenkins correctional facilities. Dacia Gaskins, who had worked as a correctional officer at Coffee Correctional Facility until 2020 and worked for the Irwin County Sheriff’s Office until March 2024, also was among those indicted.
As described in the indictment, the defendants were importing large amounts of the illegal drugs in the Douglas community and surrounding counties.
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