The crisis of conditions inside the Georgia prison system continues with 13 recent incarcerated individuals’ deaths in the span of just one month now being investigated as homicides.
This follows the Department of Justice’s recent conclusion that the State of Georgia and Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC) fails to protect incarcerated people from violence and harm, violating the Eighth Amendment of the United States Constitution.
After a three-year investigation, the DOJ released a scathing report of their findings regarding conditions in Georgia’s prisons. Former Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division stated in the DOJ’s press release that accompanied its report, “Our statewide investigation exposes long-standing, systemic violations stemming from complete indifference and disregard to the safety and security of people Georgia holds in its prisons.”
The DOJ began their investigation after the Southern Center for Human Rights (SCHR) implored them to investigate the horrors that were plaguing Georgia’s prisons.
For nearly 50 years, SCHR has been uncovering and working to put an end to human rights abuses and inhumane conditions in jails and prisons across the Deep South. Since 1976, SCHR has filed and won numerous lawsuits against the GDC. As executive director, the continual violations and lack of compassion for human life are puzzling.
Thirty-five people died by homicide in Georgia prisons in 2023 alone. The stories of individuals who have died due to deliberate indifference on the part of GDC officials is shocking. The list of people who have lost their lives under inhumane conditions is growing.
Yet, when confronted with their constitutionally deficient performance, the GDC’s response is not to stand up, accept responsibility and work with stakeholders to do better. Instead, they appear to hide, obstruct, and deny. They reduce transparency in operations, refuse to provide public records, and repeatedly deny wrongdoing.
In a scathing 100+ page contempt order, the federal judge in a recent lawsuit challenging solitary confinement in Georgia’s most restrictive prison took the GDC to task for their repeated failures, blatant misrepresentations, and defiance of the Court’s orders.
That case has been ongoing for almost a decade, costing the state significant sums of money not just to pay their own lawyers but also to pay attorney’s fees when they are held in contempt.
It is arguably cheaper and more efficient to treat incarcerated people humanely than it is to pay lawyers to defend chronic constitutional violations. Yet the GDC continues to fight lawsuits that challenge their disregard for the health and safety of the people in their custody.
Governor Brian Kemp commissioned a separate study, which also found numerous human rights violations in Georgia’s prisons. As a result, and to his credit, the Governor is seeking millions of dollars from the Georgia legislature to address the harms.
However, the governor’s request for funding misses the mark. Georgia’s spending on prisons continues to rise, and all that spending has failed to stem the tide of death and abuse in those prisons.
Human rights violations happen in new prisons as well as old ones because the biggest barrier to meaningful change is a systemic culture of indifference.
Significant human rights abuses in Georgia’s prisons include the practice of allowing post-partum women to live in squalor, denying them necessary treatment, and treating them as less than human signals a lack of care and concern for human lives.
Locking people in solitary confinement for weeks, months, and years on end and responding with denial and defiance when called upon to stop this practice demonstrates a lack of interest in rehabilitation.
Activists and organizations often beg officials to focus their attention, budgets and ideas on eliminating the root causes of crime, and it often feels like screaming into a void. The persistent push for a focus on eliminating the root causes of crime remains unheard. Perhaps it is because the root cause of this injustice persists: apathy.
In 2024, the Georgia Senate formed the Senate Supporting Safety and Welfare of All Individuals in Department of Corrections Facilities Study Committee. The Study Committee held five meetings where GDC representatives, SCHR, and other stakeholders, including family members of people incarcerated in Georgia’s prisons testified about the problems in Georgia’s prisons and offered solutions.
The Study Committee issued its findings and recommendations, and while the recommendations mentioned creating consistent cultures across Georgia’s prisons, they made no reference to what that culture should be to adequately protect and support people under correctional control.
Georgians deserve a shield against the GDC’s pervasive and unchecked harm because even the shameful occurrence of dozens of bodies piling up year after year in Georgia’s prisons has done nothing to spur significant action on the part of the GDC to properly protect the approximately 47,000 people in its care.
The Department of Justice has offered solutions. The community has offered solutions. It remains to be seen whether the GDC will care enough to take any of the recommendations seriously and whether they will be held accountable for their failure to do so.
Georgia can and must do better. As leaders discuss fixes, shifting the culture from one of deliberate indifference to one of care must be at the top of the to-do list if they are serious about ending human rights abuses in Georgia’s prisons. Apathy kills.