Justice Department says Georgia 'deliberately indifferent' to prison abuses

ATLANTA (CN) — The Justice Department unveiled findings Tuesday that critical understaffing and enablement of gangs in Georgia prisons subjects its inmates to unconstitutional conditions including physical and sexual violence.

“The state has created a chaotic and dangerous environment,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said at a Tuesday press conference. “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."

Officials outline in the 93-page report the state’s failure to protect inmates, culminating in 142 inmate homicides from 2018 to 2023, with 94 of the deaths coming from 2021 to 2023, a trend that is likely to continue to rise, according to Clarke.

“Our findings yield a prison system in crisis," U.S. Attorney Ryan K. Buchanan for the Northern District of Georgia added.

The investigation into the state’s prison systems showed that it’s not only inmates dying in the facilities; in one incident outlined in the report, an inmate shot and killed a food service worker with a contraband gun.

The lack of supervision allows violent incidents to happen daily. Data on deaths, assaults and rapes are likely underreported, Clarke said.

A coroner estimated that a male prisoner killed by his cellmate was dead for over two days before staff noticed. Another male inmate reported being tortured for several days, where he suffered stab wounds and a pierced eye.

“It is impossible to look at these facts and not come away with a sense of shock and horror,"  Attorney Peter Leary for the Middle District of Georgia said.

Correctional officers at the Pulaski State Prison only heard of a female inmate’s stabbing by somebody outside the prison who had presumably texted the victim. The inmate later claimed ten other inmates attacked hours before the staff realized.

“When staff responded to the cell,  they found an incarcerated woman locked in her cell and slumped over the toilet. She had a gash on her head and was bleeding profusely,” officials wrote in the report." She was holding her left side, crying, and saying she could not breathe."

Investigations also showed that threats of violence are far more common for inmates in the LGBTQ community. The Justice Department said Georgia has no policies to protect this vulnerable population.

In 2022, a gay inmate’s cellmate raped and stabbed him by orders of his gang to get the man out of his cell due to his sexual identity and — despite both men telling investigators that the victim was tied up, had sexual relations and that the gang ordered the incident — the authorities deemed the matter unsubstantiated.

Gang activity runs rampant in Georgia’s prisons. Access to phones, showers, food and bed assignments are some of the luxuries afforded to the gangs. They often pressure staff into bringing in weapons and drugs while threatening other inmates’ families with harm to their relatives should they not provide payment.

“While Georgia claims to have taken steps to improve conditions, those steps have fallen woefully short,” Clarke said.

Policy Director for the Georgia Justice Project, Wade Askew, said in a phone interview that it’s hard for inmates to rehabilitate in a dangerous environment.

“It should be no surprise that their chances of success decrease,” Askew said of inmates’ life after prison. “Meanwhile, we see that when there are investments in education, the numbers are quite good."

The Justice Department started its investigation in 2016 into the 34 Georgia prisons and four private prisons, which house the country’s fourth-largest prison population of nearly 50,000 inmates. The Georgia Department of Corrections still needs to hire staff to match the population, which has more than doubled since 1990. The department had 2,800 correctional officers, short of the number required in 2023.

Jeremy Tripp, policy director of One Voice United, an organization seeking to include correctional officers in conversations on prison reform, said understaffing threatens both officers and inmates. Tripp said prisons are in a cycle where it’s hard to find recruits interested in working at a facility where they may work long hours to compensate for understaffing.

“Whether it be pay, benefits, hours all of those things that attract people to a profession, it has become less and less for folks,” Tripp said in a phone interview.

Maria Goellner, director of state policy for the Families Against Mandatory Minimums Foundation, said in a phone interview that poor prison conditions can impact those outside of prison walls.

“This is something that trickles out into society through the people that live and work in these places and also through their families,” the former trial attorney said. “Incarceration is a family issue."

Goellner said she hopes Georgia will consider the Federal Prison Oversight Act, passed on a bipartisan vote this summer, increasing independent prison oversight. The Justice Department is litigating similar violations in numerous other states, including Texas, Alabama and California.