Last month, the U.S. Department of Justice released its final report on the condition of the incarceration system in Georgia. The report detailed a number of deficiencies in Georgia prison facilities that systematically allow for a free-for-all violence environment between inmates and prison staff that has led to a 92.8% increase in prison homicides over the past few years. Many parts of the report are especially gruesome.
The Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC) is operating most of its medium to maximum security facilities with vacancy rates between 50% and 70%. That means that there are more vacant positions than filled ones. Still, the Justice Department found that “more than 15 state prisons housing individuals at the medium- and close-security levels saw a net loss in filled CO positions, while several others saw increases only in the single digits.” The result of this is that some prisons “have adopted a practice of assigning one CO to single-handedly supervise two buildings at a time, each comprising two or more housing units and hundreds of incarcerated people, for an entire 12-hour shift.” (Page 26).
On top of having few staff members to supervise incarcerated individuals, the prison facilities that GDC are tasked to maintain frequently are dilapidated and inadequately maintained to ensure proper security. One would assume that a prison would have, y’know, working locks — but not in Georgia. During their visit of state prison facilities, investigators were informed that “incarcerated people are able to manipulate cell-door locks, damage door hinges, and otherwise tamper with security hardware and infrastructure; incarcerated people then are able to exit cells unauthorized, and even exit housing units to go to different areas of the prison at all hours.” (Page 35). Some prisons even have holes in ceilings which allow inmates to crawl into unauthorized areas out of sight of prison officials.
When assaults happen at these facilities, GDC only conducts an investigation around 23% of the time. All other incidents are ignored and the two offenders are reintroduced into the prison population again. Instead of summarizing this part of the report, we’re just going to give you the case that the Department of Justice highlighted in their report as the worst example of ineffective investigations by the government. The case is so tragic and demonstrates exactly why GDC needs to be held accountable.
| “In March 2020, the assault of one incarcerated person by another incarcerated person at Coastal State Prison was forwarded [..] for investigation. [DOJ was] unable to locate any records that such an investigation took place. The same individual reentered the prison system in 2022 and strangled his cellmate to death at GDCP. The victim was an older man who used a wheelchair serving a sentence for a non-violent charge.” |
In another example, an inmate at Autry State Prison reported that their roommate “held a knife to his throat, told him to get undressed, and then raped him.” During their investigation, prison officials found that the knife description given by the victim matched the knife that the roommate was in possession of. Additionally, a rape test kit recovered fluids consistent with a sexual assault, as well as the presence of bruising that would match a rape. The Justice Department found the final report on that investigation which “incorrectly determined that no seminal fluid was detected, and the allegations were not substantiated.” To reiterate: GDC Investigators found evidence of a rape and just neglected to include it in their report, which resulted in an unsolved sexual assault case.
Georgia has the fourth largest prison population and has been increasing that number steadily since the 1990s. In spite of this, our legislators continue to pry themselves into our lives by unnecessarily criminalizing non-violent activities — like selling homemade consumable goods, owning livestock without local bureaucrat permission, or having a child with a serious disease. When non-violent Georgians are placed into the custody of the state, they return with serious psychological damages that would’ve been better had the state not intervened in the first place. Libertarians have emphasized this point repeatedly: the state is evil.
The law is clear on the duty that Georgia has to people it institutionalized against their will. The Government “having stripped [prisoners] of virtually every means of self-protection and foreclosed their access to outside aid, the government and its officials are not free to let the state of nature take its course.” Farmer v. Brennan, 511 U.S. 825, 833 (1994). If the state is to hold the liberties of these individuals at ransom, many of whom are destitute or accused of non-violent offenses, then it must protect them from danger. In Georgia, the state has functionally abdicated this responsibility.
