Four years after the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division opened an investigation into the whether the Georgia Department of Corrections is failing to adequately protect people in its custody from violence, and eight years after it began investigating whether the GDC is failing to protect LGBTQ+ people in custody from sexual violence, the DOJ has reached its conclusion: Yes, on both counts. Obviously.
In its highly anticipated report released October 1, the DOJ found “there is reasonable cause to believe that” both the GDC and the State of Georgia violated the Eighth Amendment with “deliberate indifference” to the explosion of physical and sexual violence inside GDC prisons over the past several years.
In addition to the frequent murders and rapes, the report details incidents including but not limited to: Hostage-taking. Waterboarding. Organized torture. Severe malnourishment. Attacks with swords/machetes/hatchets. Beatings overseen by staff. Bodies in rigor mortis by the time they were noticed by staff. Holes cut into fences by prisoners trying to cart their semi-conscious peers to medical. Holes dug between cells that prisoners crawled through to sexually assault their neighbors. Gang members using transgender women as sex slaves. Rooms set on fire. People set on fire. Whole facilities with non-functional fire alarm systems. Cells padlocked due to door locks long since “inoperable or manipulable.” Repeated instances of people being restrained, raped and deprived of food by their cellmates over an extended period of time.
Investigators identified a lot of the issues that people currently in GDC custody agree are priorities, and generally described those issues accurately. They also skipped over a lot.
“We found that Georgia fails to protect incarcerated people from extreme violence inside the 34 state prisons and four private prisons that house people at the medium- and close-security levels,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke stated October 1. “We left no stone unturned during this exhaustive investigation.”
All kinds of stones were left unturned. According to the report, half the medium- and close-security facilities were never even visited. Out of the 38 described above, the DOJ only conducted walkthroughs at 17—leaving out Valdosta State Prison, which is close-security, along with all four of the private prisons. The DOJ did not respond to Filter‘s request for clarification on why some facilities weren’t visited and whether the scope of the investigation included the private facilities. A representative for the US Attorney’s Office, Southern District of Georgia, said the questions were outside his purview and best directed to the Civil Rights Division.
Despite Clarke’s statement, the report does not feature any of the four private prisons, all of which are medium-security. Two are never mentioned. The other two, Coffee State Prison and Wheeler State Prison, are named in a list where they appear to be mischaracterized as GDC-operated facilities. An additional brief reference to Coffee State Prison is the only other time any of the private facilities appear. Nowhere in the report does the DOJ address either CoreCivic and GEO Group, the private prison operators that contract with the GDC.
One would hope that at least the walkthroughs that did happen were thorough. Unfortunately, it seems the GDC “did not permit DOJ to tour spontaneously and observe normal operations in the prisons.”
Well, surely it’s more important to review records than to see the horror firsthand, right? The DOJ wrapped its years-long, GDC-wide report without multiple vital documents, including “violent incident” records, seemingly because the GDC… declined to produce them. The DOJ is even still waiting on a response to a subpoena from 2022. The GDC did not respond to Filter‘s request for comment, but has told other outlets it’s cooperated with the investigation and will continue to do so.
Between January 2022 and April 2023, GDC records show more than 1,400 reported incidents of violence. The DOJ correctly noted that this is a drastic undercount, partly because many incidents are not reported to begin with and partly because many violent incidents, including homicides, are not documented as such.
The GDC habitually reports homicide deaths as “Undetermined,” a practice which the DOJ found to be more extensive even than previously understood. According to the report, GDC mortality data stated “Undetermined” or “Unknown” as the cause for “many deaths that obviously were homicides” and “that GDC’s own incident reports categorize as homicides.” Some cases included autopsy records from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation describing the deaths as homicides, EMS records describing asphyxiation or stabbing deaths as homicides, or video footage of the person being beaten to death, and still GDC logged the death as “Undetermined.”
However, another reason the 1,400 homicides for that time period is a drastic undercount appears in the report as a footnote that really seems to warrant more than a footnote. That figure only represents 24 out of what the DOJ refers to as the “approximately 34” GDC-operated medium- and close-security facilities. Additionally, two of the 24 facilities—Coffee State Prison and Wheeler State Prison—do not seem to belong on a list of the (approximately) 34 GDC facilities. Both are privately operated by CoreCivic.
The report described deaths from dehydration. Officers without backup assigned to cover two buildings at the same time. Prisoners without beds sleeping in common areas or closets. Numerous improper housing assignments, particularly when doubled up in administrative segregation, that ended with someone being murdered by their cellmate. People in segregation going weeks without showers or sunlight because there was no staff to escort them out of their cells. Prisoners taken to segregation “being held in kiosks and shower cages for up to a week” because no cells were available. Days when segregation units had no staff present at all, even to deliver meals. Although, due to the issues with the locks, in some cases people in segregation were able to walk out and get their trays themselves.
“We uncovered long-standing, systemic violations stemming from complete indifference and disregard to the safety and security of people Georgia holds in its prisons,” stated Assistant Attorney General Clarke. “People are assaulted stabbed, raped and killed, or left to languish inside facilities that are woefully understaffed.”
The DOJ didn’t uncover that. Prisoners getting contraband cell phone footage onto social media and into the public eye uncovered that. Frustratingly, the DOJ report repeatedly frames cell phone use with the same sort of propaganda pushed out by the GDC, likening them to weapons and shoehorning them into explanations of how various homicides unfolded, despite also describing multiple incidents that plainly illustrate how contraband cell phones save lives.
When someone outside prison calls to notify staff of an assault happening in real time, someone inside prison called them first. Often the only way to get an officer to respond to an emergency-in-progress is for someone with a contraband cell phone to call an outside contact and tell that contact to call the facility. The DOJ even acknowledges this explicitly, yet doesn’t take the logical next step of suggesting that contraband cell phones are not the problem, despite observing that numerous atrocities only came to light because of cell phone footage and that many prisoners can’t even call the PREA hotline to report sexual assault because the wall phones in their unit are broken.
The DOJ issues a series of recommendations. Review this; assess that. Fix the things that are broken. The GDC is supposed to be in compliance by November 18, or face a lawsuit from the attorney general. But as the report makes its way to people currently in GDC custody, many of whom wouldn’t be able to access it if not for contraband cell phones, it’s not necessarily clear what will change. The GDC ignores recommendations and threats of legal action all the time—even from the DOJ, during this very investigation. Why start listening now?
Images (cropped) via United States Department of Justice
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