Deplorable Conditions at Georgia Prisons Prompt U.S. Justice Department Investigation

On September 14, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Georgia announced it was launching a civil investigation into conditions impacting inmate safety at Georgia state prisons. According to The Washington Post, the investigation will focus on prisoner-on-prisoner violence, including “targeting of LGBT inmates by prisoners and staff.”

Activists had complained that “deplorable conditions of confinement and escalating violence, including homicides and suicides, have only worsened during the coronavirus pandemic.” They claimed conditions had reached “a point of constitutional crisis.” The alarming number of fatalities — 26 deaths last year which were confirmed or suspected homicides — followed by 18 homicides so far this year, gives strong support to those allegations.

Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said the Justice Department found “significant justification” to open the investigation into the “dozens of homicides, stabbings and beatings, scores of smuggled weapons, and open gang activity inside state-run prisons, along with extreme staff shortages.”

One of the advocacy groups pushing for the investigation is the Southern Center for Human Rights (SCHR), a nonprofit law firm that focuses on prison litigation. SCHR termed the Justice Department investigation a “significant step forward in the fight for accountability for the lives that have been lost and for the people who continue to suffer in Georgia’s prisons,” in a statement released to The Washington Post.

SCHR had previously asked the Trump administration to investigate conditions at the prisons. Then, in September, SCHR sent a letter to the DOJ describing numerous violent incidents that seemed to be escalating to unprecedented levels and urging the federal government to intervene “as soon as possible.” SCHR’s letter lamented that its prior, repeated attempts to raise awareness among correctional officials had been met with “no substantive response.”

The letter alleged that “men had been left locked in their cells for weeks or months at a time without sufficient food, water, showers or medical care.” To support its allegations, SCHR cited videos that inmates had recorded depicting “injured prisoners covered in blood, prison dorms with no security supervision, and groups of men armed with machetes roaming lockdown dorms.”

Not surprisingly, inmates have rebelled against the inhumane conditions. As WaPo reported, “hundreds of prisoners” at Ware State Prison in Waycross, GA left their cells and “ran through the compound, setting a golf cart on fire and breaking several windows.” That mini rebellion resulted in injuries to three inmates and two prison guards, according to the Georgia Department of Corrections. If this were an isolated incident, authorities might have focused attention on a single facility. But “two other large-scale riots took place in two different facilities over three months.” Clearly, there is a systemic problem throughout the Georgia Department of Corrections serious enough to incite inmate rebellions.

Mahatma Gandhi famously said, “'the true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members.” Surely, incarcerated individuals stripped of most of their civil rights fit that description. If America is a caring and compassionate society, we cannot simply warehouse detainees in facilities where the strong can prey on the weak with impunity. We must uphold the human dignity of each individual and protect them from wanton violence. Even those who argue that the purpose of prison is punishment cannot rightly support what amounts to arbitrary and capricious attacks on imprisoned persons. If we want to promote respect for the rule of law in our free society, we must model that respect within the incarcerated community.

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