This essay discusses sexual violence and abuse against prisoners
A literal and moral stench clings to Georgia's State Prisons. During the hot, Southern summer afternoons, a literal stench from the mini garbage dumps behind the chow halls assaults the nostrils, as inmates wait for enough guards to supervise them moving the trash outside the fences.
The moral stench comes from the conditions so inhumane, the Federal Department of Justice (DOJ) deemed they violate the Eighth Amendment about cruel and unusual punishment.
In 2025, the DOJ concluded a six-year-long investigation and published a 93-page report exposing a cocktail of violence, decay, and indifference that has led to systemic failure in Georgia's state prisons. The report exposed a hidden world in which prisoners are stabbed, raped, and tortured, and human bodies are left to rot in cells for days. Staff shortages are cited as the reason why the prisons fail to make sufficient weekly headcounts, much less the 10 counts a day designed to limit escapes.
Institutional facilities have become so decrepit that door locks no longer function throughout entire complexes. From 2018 to 2023, 142 homicides occurred inside Georgia's prisons. Between 2018 and 2022, an additional 150 inmates died by suicide.
Despite the horror of these findings, Georgia Department of Corrections Commissioner Tyrone Oliver brushed these deaths aside, commenting, "One is bad. But it's not as bad when you look at the population we're dealing with."
Worse: A growing accumulation of circumstantial evidence indicates that behind this horror is a chilling possibility: Georgia's government, led by Governor Brian Kemp, has allowed this prison crisis to fester to falsely justify to the tax-paying public that building new, harsher prisons is the only remedy. But government policies ignore all the data supporting rehabilitation and decarceration as the best methods for reducing crime.
Prison Expansion Is the State's Only Reform
Social media comments from the 2024 Senate Supporting Safety and Welfare of All Individuals in Department of Corrections Facilities Study Committee hearings attendees noted that the senators ignored public commentary that did not align with a pre-determined narrative to build new prisons, a narrative that GDC Commissioner Tyrone Oliver had begun promoting since the first year he took office. These new facilities would ensure that state politicians' allies in the construction industry would reap huge profits from new prison construction.
There have been multiple new prisons opened or mentioned in the 2023-2026 Georgia budgets and construction industry press releases.
In 2023, Balfour Beatty was awarded approximately $320 million for new prison construction in Georgia. This contract has since grown. Originally promoted as a 3,000-bed prison near Davisboro in Washington County, it is now referred to as a 1,500-cell prison after the Senate Supporting Safety and Welfare of All Individuals in Department of Corrections Facilities Study (SR 570), which concluded with the decision to pursue single occupancy cells, locked down 23/7. Construction in Davisboro is underway now, with $436.7 million allocated for the project
In 2024, $25.7 million was allocated to fund the opening of the McRae Women's Facility. The facility, which opened in 2000 in McRae, Georgia, was a low-security prison for men that also imprisoned those facing deportation. The state bought it to replace the women's prison, Arrendale State Prison. Despite that intention, the decrepit prison has remained open, still housing about one-third of its prior population.
In 2025, Governor Brian Kemp revealed in the mid-year budget proposal, $40 million to be paid for the design of yet another new prison—the location of which was not stated.
New prisons are intended for single-cell occupation to reduce or eliminate cellmate-on-cellmate violence. While working to protect the State's 51,000 prisoners is good marketing, it is a lie by omission that ignores the prison population that is expected to outpace the projected bed space by more than the current gaps.
There are over 1,000 triple high bunks in existing prison spaces originally designed for single occupancy. Building two new 1,500-bed prisons only eliminates the need for those temporary triple bunks, but does nothing towards housing the expected growth. In the next five years, the Georgia DOC expects to have at least 1,300 new prisoners entered into the system serving life without parole. Not including non-LWOP sentences, that totals approximately 3,500 persons who are expected to die of old age in prison.
Nor will 3,000 new beds reduce the thousands of current double bunks placed as temporary beds in single cells decades ago. Logic and history both support an expectation that any new single cells will also be double and triple bunked under the "temporary" status as excuses for all those present. We have to stop pretending that repeated lies are truths.
The evidence assembled from media accounts and recent legislative actions demonstrates the State's calculated strategies to further criminalize poverty and expand incarceration to continue to funnel public funds to politically connected builders—with an appreciative cut donated back to the political party that is making this happen.
Georgia's incarceration rate is 881 per 100,000 citizens (including prisons, jails, and juvenile justice facilities). On a daily average, 95,000 persons in Georgia are behind bars, including immigration detainees. Annually, at least 236,000 people are processed through local jails in Georgia. The citizenry cannot be that criminally minded. This is clearly a situation where people are being overpoliced.
The current push to incarcerate and deport so-called "illegal" immigrants en masse, combined with the repression of movements like #StopCopCity, and mass layoffs across sectors, foreshadows a future where more Georgians will be subject to criminalization. The increased homelessness and other brewing crises will further increase the number of criminalized people. By building new prisons instead of investing in affordable housing, healthcare access, and other support services, Georgia's response to this future is evident: The State is preparing to cage rather than assist its economically vulnerable citizens.
Georgia's government, led by Governor Brian Kemp, has allowed this prison crisis to fester to falsely justify to the tax-paying public that building new, harsher prisons is the only remedy.
The Prison System Is Engineered Chaos
The Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC) incarcerates about 49,000 people in its 35 state prisons, 12 residential substance abuse treatment facilities, two integrated treatment facilities, 13 transitional centers, and seven probation detention centers.
The DOJ's 94-page report detailed these "woefully understaffed" facilities where the shortages are so drastic that some prisons operate at under 30 percent staff capacity. These shortages enable violent acts otherwise unbelievable, if not for video proof captured by inmates with contraband cell phones and uploaded for anyone to see on the GA. Prisons Exposed Facebook page. Horror stories of torture like Christian Krauch—who lost a hand and a leg to amputation to save his life from the gangrene that had beset him as he lay hidden for a week, stuffed under a bunk and left to die—are documented online in Facebook pages and e-magazines.
GDC has long been aware of these issues and stonewalled federal probes by falsifying records and ceasing to report causes of death. They need not bother. Even when the courts rule in favor of prisoners, there is no one forcing the State to comply, and no arrests are made when the DOC administrators refuse to obey federal court orders.
After a prisoner-led lawsuit over conditions of isolation housing at Georgia Diagnostics and Classification Center, U.S. District Judge Marc Treadwell's 2024 Contempt of Court ruling found GDC guilty of "false or misleading" conduct in refusing to obey court orders for six years. Federal fines for that ruling were made up for by the State through increased prisoner commissary prices. The abused pay the fines levied on their abusers. No wonder suicide rates increase; hope has been eradicated.
This behavior isn't random incompetence; it's systemic. On June 17, 2024, Governor Kemp hired Guidehouse Inc., consultants, to conduct a system-wide assessment of the State's public safety and prison system. Kemp announced this initiative on the same day as the Smith State Prison shooting, where an inmate killed a kitchen worker and then died by suicide. It was as if he were waiting for that shot. Guidehouse's report found 20 facilities at "emergency" low staffing levels, some with faulty locks allowing inmates to roam freely inside.
In January 2025, Kemp used the report's findings to recommend an additional $372 million state budget investment in prison and public safety reforms, bringing the total amount to $600 million. The corrections department followed suit, requesting $6.1 million to hire 882 correctional and security officers over the coming years and increase current staff salaries by four percent. Despite the acknowledged inability to train enough officers to meet the need, no money is earmarked to expand training facilities.
No significant measures have been taken to change the "just ignore it" culture of Georgia's prison administrators in the 10 months following the DOJ's corrective recommendations and threat of lawsuits..
Culture of Mismanagement to Increase Prison Budget
In February 2023, a Smith State Prison warden, Brian Dennis Adams, was fired and arrested on charges of conspiracy to commit murder and the Georgia RICO Act. Adams, who is allegedly connected to a contraband smuggling ring and other prison gang activities at Smith State, joins a long list of over 400 GDC administrators and staff arrested for crimes related to their jobs since 2018.
Despite this trend, no administrative personnel have been arrested or placed on trial for condoning the continuous, wanton violation of prisoners' federal civil rights. Of course, administrators view this as a silent nod from above to carry on.
The GDC's proposed $1.62 billion budget isn't intended to stem the tide of violence; it is dedicated to creating more prisons that require fewer weak-link guards to oversee the warehousing of human beings. The violence is allowed to continue as it provides the scare tactic of a public threat, excusing the growing amount of tax dollars that find their way into political party coffers.
The decay persists for the love of profit and power. Kemp, a former real estate developer with deep ties to Georgia's construction industry, is well versed in the economics of growth in all industries, especially construction. While free prison labor derives some profit from the products produced inside prison factories, the construction industry is guaranteed profits from building more facilities. Prisons are very expensive warehouses for the carceral industry's primary product: broken and enslaved citizens. It's no surprise that, during the 2022 election cycle, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp received $1,724,956 in campaign contributions from the construction industry. This is due, in large part, to the legal loophole allowing sitting governors and lieutenant governors to receive unlimited campaign contributions.
The strongest evidence of Governor Kemp's direct involvement in perpetuating this crime is his authority to appoint the five people with the power to release Georgia prisoners, or the State Board of Pardons and Paroles.
The board's authority is quasi-legislative and thus equal to that of the three elected branches of government, but without an effective means of checks and balances. It alone decides who to release to prevent overcrowding and the harms that result from that condition.
Governor Kemp has stacked the board with members whose entire careers have been in law enforcement—the group least inclined to reduce the population of prisons. The plan has worked. For the years 2020-2024, paroles have reduced by half while intake numbers have continued to climb, resulting in overcrowding exceeding any time in history.
Call to Action
Georgia's prison crisis is no accident; it's the foreseeable outcome of a system that profits from the misery of human beings. By allowing prisons to decay, Kemp's administration has created a public safety-related scare to justify the construction of new facilities to house an ever-increasing prison population. The construction industry, tied to Kemp and the GOP, reaps billions, cycling a percentage back as donations to secure more projects. The public who cheer for more prisons as the fix are unaware that fascism has marked them for the carceral system's next victims.
Aware Georgians demand transparency, decarceration, and meaningful investment in prevention of over-punishment. The DOJ's findings, AJC's reporting, and advocates' voices are a rallying cry. Redirecting billions away from the carceral industry into affordable housing and actual rehabilitation would break this cycle. Without the public's pressure, the system will continue killing citizens to increase profit for the Capitalist Carceral State.