Kemp Finally Gets the Prison Problem

Enough dead bodies have piled up on the governor's watch for him to spend money on a problem that wins no one votes for solving.

Georgia’s prison system has been getting people killed in Georgia football score numbers since the start of the pandemic. A year in, the Georgia Department of Corrections stopped making announcements when someone died. Consider the death of Alonzo Wright last week, a gang murder at Jenkins Correctional Facility that set off retaliatory violence and prompted lockdowns across at least three prisons in Georgia.

Department of Corrections: not a word until someone called the department to ask.

A murder in a Georgia prison used to be rare enough and significant enough to prompt statewide news story. Now, it’s treated as just another Sunday night.

And yet, a report by consultants from Guidehouse commissioned by state government leaders recommends among other things that the DoC “engage with media and community to help repair community perception of the facilities at the local level.”

Good luck. You can start by letting me look inside and talk to people imprisoned there.

I’ll link to the full 245-page report at the end. But the findings — plus the starkly obvious indifference of Kemp and legislative leaders to the death of hundreds of Georgia residents on their watch — prompted Kemp to ask for $372 million in additional investments into prison repairs, staff salary increases and investigative resources over the next two years.

I asked for the report referenced in the governor’s news release because I believed it might have stark details akin to what emerged from the U.S. Department of Justice report in October. That report ended with a threat by outraged feds threatening to sue the state unless Georgia cleaned its prisons up.

I may be the only news reporter who has pulled the Gatehouse report; I’m not seeing any reporting on it. The consultants’ report is more sanitized than the DoJ report, probably because the folks who commissioned it didn’t want the obvious institutional abuses published where I can see it.

But it’s still bad.

In 2014, the Department of Corrections employed 6,383 correctional officers.

In 2024, it employs 2,776.

The system contains slightly fewer prisoners now then it did in 2014, a 4 percent decrease to about 49,000 inmates. Staffing for COs is down 56 percent over the same period.

The Guidehouse team observations are tamer versions of those made by federal investigators, who detailed a litany of violence abetted by ludicrously low staffing levels. The federal report gives a sense of the scale of the dysfunction with its description of one incident:

"Shortly after DOJ’s visit to Ware, we learned that another man we had interviewed there had died days later. On June 29, 2022, in an interview at Ware State Prison, an incarcerated person reported that he had gone almost a year without a mattress. That week, he was blocked from going to the bathroom by another incarcerated person, who chased him with a broom and a rock. He defecated in his pants. He described experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder, said that GDC was worse than his time seeing combat in the military, and explained that drugs are easy to acquire in the facility. Four days after the interview, he died from a drug overdose. On July 3, 2022, incarcerated persons at Ware found him slumped over a second-floor cell block railing. He was left there for several hours because there were no officers in the control center and staff failed to come to the building. Video shot by incarcerated people on a contraband cellphone showed this man’s apparently unconscious body draped over an upper-tier railing for an extended period of time. In the video, the individual holding the camera says, “we have an inmate here that is dead … for the past two-and-a-half hours. It’s crazy. This is crazy.” The victim’s cause of death was acute methamphetamine toxicity.”

According to the Guidehouse report, the most serious staffing shortages are also at the prisons with the highest security, containing the highest proportion of inmates in “security threat groups” — a term encompassing gang members — and requiring close supervision. A higher proportion of inmates today serve time on serious charges involving violence and are not eligible for sentence reductions for good conduct or completing education and training.

Telfair State Prison, with 1,407 prisoners and in the highest security classification, is authorized 153 correctional officers. It has 33. That’s a staffing rate of of 21.6 percent. Put another way, there are 42 prisoners for every guard.