All the New Guards Hired to Improve Security Are Making Prison Less Safe

In the wake of a Department of Justice investigation that confirmed conditions in Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC) prisons are unconstitutional, the state is throwing unprecedented amounts of money at the problem. But doesn’t seem likely to fix it.

A 2025 mid-year budget approved March 6 added $345 million for staffing and security at GDC, with $50.9 million specifically for hiring new corrections officers (COs).

In a document dated March 11, the House Appropriations Committee advanced a state-wide budget for 2026 that would increase the GDC budget by an additional $250 million. Out of that quarter-billion, $45 million would go toward hiring 700 new COs.

Most of the ones here are already new. Their effect on prison security goes something like this:

A young man is smoking marijuana in the open dorm where he’s housed when a new CO rounds the corner. The CO sees what’s clearly a joint in the young man’s hand and walks up to him.

“Give me your ID card.”

“Why?” asks the young man, exhaling a cloud of smoke.

“I’m going to have to write you a disciplinary report,” says the CO.

“I think you’d rather go home tonight.”

The CO realizes that, in the span of this brief conversation, a crowd has begun to form. They haven’t come just to watch. He wisely says nothing further, leaves the joint with the young man and walks away. The small crew, which represents a much larger gang, slaps hands and goes back to their business. 

An hour later the CO returns with a Correctional Emergency Response Team sergeant, who’s been on the job a while and knows when to use force and when not to.

“Y’all don’t be laying hands on the staff,” the sergeant tells the small crew. “You remember what happened last time—the warden called in the big squad and I had to work late. Nobody wants me working late. Right?”

“Right,” says the crew.

The young man who’d been smoking steps forward. “Big homey, you got to educate these newbies. Tell them what happened last time. We ain’t playing that bullshit DR game no more. Right?”

“Right.”

A Moderate-level violation is not making your bed one morning. But if an officer writes it up as “failure to follow instructions,” it becomes High-level.

Known in various United States prison systems as “shots,” “infractions,” “write-ups” and in GDC as “DRs,” disciplinary reports are the official records of prison rule violations. When COs are still fresh out of Officer School, they treat DRs as merely extra paperwork going into a drawer somewhere; the correctional equivalent of a traffic citation. So these newbies are often trying to do things by the book and writing up DRs for every incident that they’re supposed to, which is a problem because the actual impact of these reports is significantly greater than just paperwork. Over the years of serving a sentence those DRs add up in a prisoner’s file, and whatever story they tell is the one that gets read by the State Board of Pardons and Paroles.

Prisons generally categorize DRs in some way that separates relatively minor incidents from more serious ones. In GDC, violations can be Low, Moderate, High or Greatest; traditionally, the latter two are what call for paperwork and the resulting disciplinary hearing where you’ll make your case and inevitably be found guilty. So it’s mainly these that do damage to someone’s parole prospects, if such prospects existed in the first place.

A Moderate violation would be, for example, not making your bed one morning. If an officer writes up the DR as “failure to follow instructions,” however, it becomes High. But by the same token, if a CO catches someone with contraband in an exchange witnessed by a dozen other people, but no DR is filed, then it never happened.

Pre-COVID, a Low or Moderate DR might be worked off by mopping hallways or performing some similar cleaning duty on the compound, and the paperwork would get thrown out before it was ever filed. Sometimes an even bigger violation could disappear if a sergeant was doing you a favor, based on overall good behavior they’d seen from you over the years. The last resort to stop paperwork from getting filed was to pay the orderly assigned to the DR investigator’s office to steal it. But those orderlies tended to be too nervous—or too police, in their own minds—to be very accommodating, so this option could be prohibitively expensive. 

Newbie officers start the job writing a lot of DRs for conduct they could have overlooked. Until one day they stop for gas on the way home and are met by an acquaintance of someone they recently filed paperwork on, and encouraged to lose their pen before going back to work tomorrow. And maybe offered a business opportunity where they can make a few thousand dollars on the side.

You might have had decades of good behavior before the one morning you failed to make your bed, but that means nothing to the officer who started on Monday.

Guidehouse, the consulting firm hired by Governor Brian Kemp (R) to evaluate GDC separately from the DOJ investigation, noted that DRs were one of the factors driving staff turnover.

“Even if staff observe activity,” Guidehouse reported according to the Atlanta Constitution-Journal, “they are hesitant to hold offenders immediately accountable or write reports that could be used to support subsequent sanctions for fear of retaliation.”

According to the AJC, Guidehouse also noted that the obvious solution to the staff-to-prisoner ratio—besides funneling endless millions into hiring efforts and still operate with 70-percent staff vacancy rates at most facilities, if not higher—is for the Parole Board to lower the number of prisoners. During the pandemic the number of people in GDC custody granted parole fell by 38 percent.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic turned chronic understaffing into an acute crisis, officers were evaluated in part by the quantity and quality of DRs issued each week. They still are, but few officers stay on the job long enough for job performance evaluations to matter. You might have had decades of good behavior before the one morning you failed to make your bed, but that means nothing to the officer who started on Monday. You try to explain, they don’t like your attitude, now you’re watching your only chance at not dying in prison evaporate.

Even though most of the paperwork won’t go all the way to a hearing, there’s the threat that maybe it will, especially with so few officers who’ve been around long enough to know how to deescalate things. Apply that threat to enough people and the level of tension in the prison population goes up considerably. Meanwhile that newbie officer has already quit and been replaced by someone even newer.

Image (cropped) via Georgia Department of Corrections/YouTube