Georgia preps for fight as feds expose horrific prison conditions

One by one they stepped to the podium in a spare room at the Richard Russell federal building in Atlanta, the Justice Department’s top civil rights official and all three of Georgia’s U.S. attorneys.

They used different words and offered up their own disturbing examples, but each had the same message: The Georgia prison system is a horror show that must be fixed.

The question now: Will the state of Georgia agree?

A mammoth U.S. Department of Justice report released Tuesday told appalling story after story. A prisoner tied up, beaten, waterboarded and sexually assaulted by his cellmate. Another who died of dehydration after he angered the guards, so they shut off his water and stopped his meals. Yet another assaulted and raped by a cellmate and wasting away after other prisoners stole his food. Gangs running entire units. Deadly stabbings as routine events. Homicides at record levels.

The findings are among the worst the DOJ has ever uncovered, said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, head of the DOJ’s civil rights division, and demand a response. She promised to work “urgently” and “swiftly” to bring about reform, and the DOJ report includes a lengthy list of essential remedial measures, including beefing up the woefully understaffed workforce.

But the insistence of federal officials that the situation is dire may not spur quick action. Soon after the report’s release, the Georgia Department of Corrections signaled it would push back. Through spokesperson Joan Heath, it issued a statement saying the state was “exceeding” constitutional standards for its prisons. In a statement of his own, Gov. Brian Kemp agreed.

Based on those early comments, the DOJ’s Georgia investigation could follow the same path as its probe of the Alabama prison system, which led to an equally scathing report in 2019. The DOJ filed a lawsuit a year and a half later, saying that Alabama had failed or refused to correct the problems. Four years later, the parties are still in court.

In Georgia, advocates, families and prisoners who hoped the DOJ investigation would force change now worry that it will instead result in a drawn-out legal battle, even as the system sets new records for homicides and is awash in drug overdoses, sexual assaults and suicides. The DOJ contends that conditions in Georgia prisons violate U.S. Constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment.

“The GDC is going to dig in its heels and not try to resolve anything,” said Susan Sparks Burns, an advocate for prison reform in Georgia whose Facebook page, They Have No Voice, is a popular clearinghouse of information for people with loved ones in prison. “The statement that (the GDC) made was basically a big `screw you’ in my opinion. But how do you deny all the dead people? All the money spent on emergency rooms, on lawsuits? I don’t have any belief at all that this agency is capable of responsibly managing what it’s charged to do.”

State Sen. Josh McLaurin, D-Atlanta, said Kemp, GDC officials and members of the legislature should see the DOJ report as a “wakeup call” that the prison system is in crisis and needs reform. A long-time advocate for improving the system, he said putting up a defensive front is the wrong approach to what appears to be a carefully documented report.

“We as a state have allowed these problems to fester and culminate in what the DOJ is now telling us,” he said.

Many incidents cited by the DOJ were uncovered by the Atlanta Journal Constitution as part of its ongoing investigation of the prison system. But others have not been previously revealed, adding to the litany of atrocities behind the walls.

“It is impossible to look at these facts and not come away with a sense of shock and horror,” said Peter Leary, U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Georgia, when the report was released.

The report describes the circumstances of each incident in graphic detail, although, at the GDC’s insistence, the DOJ did not identify the prisoners or officers by name.

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

It was at Smith State Prison in 2020 that a prisoner was tied up, beaten and waterboarded by his cellmate. He also had ligature marks on his neck, and most of his upper teeth had been broken. When he was hospitalized, the report says, bars of soap that had apparently been used in a sexual assault fell out of his body.

At Calhoun State Prison in 2023, a prisoner died of dehydration with renal failure. According to the DOJ, prison staff had cut off his food and water after he had thrown water through the flap in his cell door. The AJC’s records show he was 24.

A prisoner at Georgia State Prison in 2020 was found to be so malnourished that every bone in his spine was bruised. He also had a jaw fracture and human bite marks across his body. According to the report, the prisoner said his cellmate had sexually assaulted him and that people had stolen his food for months. The emergency services provider wrote: “This patient is scared. His body is wasting away and covered in signs of abuse. How this has not been noticed by prison staff and tended to before now is shameful.”

Officers and staff at Pulaski State Prison, one of the state’s four facilities for women, didn’t notice a problem until someone from the outside called to say a prisoner was being stabbed. The prisoner was then discovered slumped over a toilet wearing a medical gown and no underwear and bleeding profusely. According to the DOJ, the woman said she had been assaulted hours before by 10 people who stomped, hit and kicked her.

One incident cited prominently in the report is the 2022 murder at Hancock State Prison of 24-year-old Charles “Tristen” McKee. McKee, who identified as LGBTQ, was beaten and stabbed by multiple gang members after he jumped through stair railings trying to escape. The day before, the report says, he had repeatedly asked to be moved, stating that his life was in danger.

McKee isn’t named in the report, but the AJC has previously covered his case, and his mother, Lisa Spradlin, identified the story as her son’s in an interview.

Spradlin said she was overcome with sorrow when she read the report.

Credit: Contributed

“There are people there right now, and they’re being tied up and beaten and tortured, and it’s like nobody cares,” she said. ”Some other mother is going to get a call this weekend, and it’s like Russian roulette — who is it gonna be?”

In disclosing its findings, the DOJ revealed a multitude of ways in which it faced roadblocks to getting documents and access from the GDC.

At the start of the investigation, the GDC refused to turn over documents requested by the DOJ until the government issued a subpoena and obtained court-ordered enforcement of it. The process took a year and a half. Even after those records were produced, the GDC still balked at requests for documents, according to the report.

“Although GDC ultimately produced over 19,000 records, the process of obtaining records and information from GDC was unnecessarily contentious and lengthy,” the report states.

In addition, the report says, the GDC insisted on setting up on-site visits several weeks or months in advance and repeatedly instructed government investigators that they couldn’t split up due to the “security challenges” required by multiple escorts.

“As a result, GDC did not permit DOJ to tour spontaneously and observe normal operations in the prisons,” the report states.

The GDC said on Tuesday that it had “fully cooperated” with the DOJ during its investigation and that would continue as the state begins to discuss “next steps” with the feds.

Although the GDC has not indicated how it will respond to the DOJ, there is at least one sign that Georgia will continue to push back.

In its earlier effort to withhold records from investigators, the GDC was represented by William Lunsford, the Huntsville, Ala., attorney who is representing Alabama in its court battle with the DOJ.

Lunsford, with the firm Butler Snow, is well known for representing correctional providers and other government agencies under federal scrutiny. He also serves as a legal adviser for the Correctional Leaders Association, of which GDC Commissioner Tyrone Oliver is a member. Published reports in Alabama last year noted that the state had paid Lunsford nearly $10 million to defend it.

More recently, Lunsford has taken on the role as the GDC’s attorney in the case brought by the Southern Center for Human Rights over conditions in the Special Management Unit, the supermax prison in Jackson. In April, U.S. District Judge Marc T. Treadwell held the GDC in contempt, stating in a blistering ruling that the agency and its officials were “thumbing their noses” at the requirements of a 2019 settlement that was supposed to bring needed changes to the high-security facility.

Burns said there are several relatively painless ways the GDC could comply with the DOJ’s remedial measures. One would be offering parole to older, non-violent offenders, making the state’s grossly understaffed prisons more manageable. But, pointing to the court fight over the Special Management Unit, she said she doubts the GDC is willing to bend even slightly to the DOJ.

“How is this going to be any different?” she said. “It’s got to play out in court. And the sad thing is, people are continuing to die.”

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