A federal investigation has uncovered stunning violence, rampant sexual assaults, gang-run facilities and other startling conditions in an out-of-control Georgia state prison system, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Tuesday.
“The findings report we issue today lays bare the horrific and inhumane conditions that people are confined to inside Georgia’s state prison system...,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division during an afternoon news conference. “People are assaulted, stabbed, raped and killed or left to languish inside facilities that are woefully understaffed.”
Clarke said immediate action, including dramatically increasing staffing levels, was required by the state of Georgia to correct unconstitutional conditions that threaten public safety.
The DOJ announced its long-awaited findings at a news conference Tuesday afternoon in Atlanta and released a 94-page report detailing the conditions it uncovered. The report describes disturbing individual cases of torture, starvation, riots and stabbings that have become routine in the state’s prisons. “A loss of control over the prisons has set in, with near-constant life-threatening violence functioning as the norm,” the government’s report says.
“The constitutional violations are not isolated incidents but long-standing, systemic violations stemming from a culture of indifference to the safety and security of people Georgia holds in its prisons,” Clarke said as she unveiled the report.
Credit: Jenni Girtman
Credit: Jenni Girtman
She said the Justice Department would use its authority to require Georgia to address the problems so the prison system operates with modern standards of decency and respect for basic human dignity.
Georgia Department of Corrections officials responded to the announcement with defiance and denial, saying they were extremely disappointed to learn of the Justice Department’s decision to level a variety of accusations against the prison system.
“Contrary to DOJ’s allegations, the State of Georgia’s prison system operates in a manner exceeding the requirements of the United States Constitution,” spokesperson Joan Heath said in an email.
Tuesday’s announcement is the result of an investigation launched by the DOJ on Sept. 14, 2021. At that time, the government notified Gov. Brian Kemp, Georgia Attorney General Christopher Carr, the state prison commissioner and wardens of the state’s 34 prisons that it was expanding a 2016 inquiry into treatment of LGBTQ+ prisoners to determine whether the state had also failed to protect prisoners from violence by other inmates.
The DOJ’s action came after the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights called on the department to intervene in the prison system, citing what it called “deplorable conditions of confinement, escalating violence, and a recent series of uprisings.”
As the investigation unfolded, the government sought incident reports and autopsy findings for all homicides, referrals to law enforcement for criminal prosecution and emergency response to lockdowns, among other documents. The GDC fought the requests, saying it would produce documents only if the government signed a protective order not to disclose the information it was seeking. The DOJ eventually agreed to protect personally identifiable information about prisoners and former prisoners and their relatives, and current or former GDC staff unless there is evidence of a criminal violation.
Even then, the investigative report says, the process of obtaining records was unnecessarily contentious and lengthy, and as of Tuesday, the Department of Corrections still had not provided some documents that investigators requested in a second subpoena.
Since the federal investigation began, the killings in Georgia prisons have only mounted. In 2023, the system had at least 38 homicides, a new state record and the highest number across the South, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has determined. New reporting by the AJC has found the state is on track this year to break that record, with at least 26 homicides in the first six months.
“It’s hard to capture the level of death and suffering that has plagued Georgia’s prisons since we asked for the DOJ’s intervention in 2020,” said Atteeyah Hollie, deputy director at the Southern Center for Human Rights. Hollie said the Southern Center feared conditions would get much worse and deaths would rise — and they did.
“Death should not be a routine feature of any prison system, but it has become one here in Georgia,” Hollie said. “We are hopeful that with the DOJ’s announcement, a new day will soon come for the tens of thousands of Georgians in custody and their loved ones.”
The GDC’s response Tuesday suggests Georgia is poised to push back instead of quickly working with the Justice Department to address the findings. Heath, the GDC spokesperson, said the DOJ’s findings related to staffing, violence and gang activity are challenges in prison systems everywhere, including the federal prison system. “Hence, DOJ’s findings today reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of the current challenges of operating any prison system,” she said.
Heath said the GDC fully cooperated with the investigation and that will continue in future discussions with the DOJ. But she said “DOJ’s track record in prison oversight is poor — often entangling systems in years of expensive and unproductive court monitoring.”
Tammy Price, the mother of 36-year-old Jeremy Price, stabbed to death at Hays State Prison in March, said she was cautiously optimistic that the DOJ report could bring needed change.
“They have to be willing to do something, because too many people are being killed,” she said. “I still don’t know what happened to my child.”
The Georgia findings come with the DOJ embroiled in a case of similar magnitude in Alabama that led the government to sue the state in federal court.
After a three-year investigation, the DOJ notified Alabama in April 2019 that investigators had found a culture of violence in the state’s 13 major prisons for men, resulting in frequent inmate rapes, beatings and fatal stabbings. When those issues weren’t resolved to the government’s satisfaction, it filed a lawsuit in December 2020.
As it has in Georgia, the DOJ hit Alabama with a laundry list of tough allegations, asserting that dangerously low staffing rates and overcrowded conditions have left violence unabated and conditions are so poor that they violate the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
The case is headed for trial next year.
The DOJ has also found violations in the Mississippi prison system. In that case, initiated by the government in 2020 and leading to a public report in February, the DOJ contends that Mississippi has failed to protect prisoners at three prisons from widespread physical violence.
According to the DOJ, Mississippi doesn’t adequately supervise prisons, control the flow of contraband or properly investigate incidents of serious harm. The problems have been exacerbated, the DOJ asserts, because chronic understaffing essentially has left gangs in charge. The DOJ has also found prisoners in Mississippi have been housed in unsanitary, hazardous and chaotic housing conditions that are breeding grounds for suicide, fires and assaults.
