With nearly 47,000 state inmates, Georgia is among the nation’s top five states with the most prisoners.

In addition to a mushrooming prison population, Georgia’s prison system is rife with aging facilities, understaffing and criminal activities among inmates and staff.

Gov. Brian Kemp last month announced an in-depth, systemwide look at the state’s 34 prisons. The Georgia Department of Corrections then hired Chicago-based correctional facility consultant Guidehouse Inc. It was hired a day after an inmate at Smith State Prison in Glennville fatally shot a food-service worker before killing himself, adding to the deadly string of violence at Smith, which had more homicides last year than any other state prison. Six inmates died there between March and August 2023, according to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation.

This week, House Speaker Jon Burns, R-Newington, announced the creation of the Special Subcommittee of Appropriations on State Prisons.

“The General Assembly has placed significant emphasis on improving the safety, security and conditions of our state-operated corrections facilities,” Burns said in a press release announcing the subcommittee. “With Gov. Kemp’s ongoing assessment of Georgia’s prisons, we want to ensure we are prepared to take immediate action when subsequent recommendations and appropriations requests are delivered in January or during the interim. I look forward to the work of the committee and its support of efforts to restore law and order to Georgia’s prison system.”

Rep. Matt Hatchett, R-Dublin, chairman of the influential House Appropriations Committee, was tapped to head the seven-member subcommittee, which is part of Appropriations.

Hatchett and the subcommittee have their hands full.

More than 3,500 assaults between inmates have occurred in Georgia state prisons between 2021 and 2023, according to state prison records and news reports. Ninety-eight inmates were killed during that time.

As the state prison population has steadily grown over the past four years, those prisons have seen high turnover rates among corrections officers — higher than the Georgia state employee average, according to the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute. And pay increases have yet to stop the exodus. 

To ease some of the crowding, a new $436.9 million, state-of-the-art Washington State Prison is being built near the existing facility in Davisboro, 139 miles southeast of Atlanta in middle Georgia. It is expected to house up to 3,000 — double the number of beds in the current facility. The Georgia State Prison in Reidsville closed in February 2022 due to its aging infrastructure and the need for a safer facility to house violent criminals. 

State Affairs spoke with Hatchett about the committee’s work over the next few months. The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Notable Georgia state prisoners

Georgia state prisons have housed numerous notable inmates over the years, including activists and killers. Here are some who’ve spent time behind bars in Georgia:

• Martin Luther King Jr. Held at Georgia State Prison in Reidsville after a sit-in at Rich’s department store in Atlanta in 1966, King was released on a $2,000 bond.
• H. Rap Brown. Also known as Jamil Al-Amin, Brown was an activist and chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s. He was held in Georgia State Prison.
• Wayne Williams. Sentenced to life for killing two men during the time of the Atlanta Child Murders in the early 1980s, Williams is at Telfair State Prison.
• Brian Nichols. The Fulton County Courthouse shooter who killed a judge, court reporter, sheriff’s deputy and a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, Nichols is in the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison near Jackson.convicted for disobeying the state’s law restricting white missionaries from living in Cherokee territory without a state license
• Samuel Worcester and Elizur Butler. The two Northern missionaries did hard labor in the Georgia Penitentiary at Milledgeville in 1831 for refusing to leave the Cherokee Territory. The pair provided legal and political advice to the Cherokee Nation in the 1820s and 1830s as Georgia was trying to remove the Cherokees from the state. They were convicted for disobeying the state’s law restricting white missionaries from living in Cherokee territory without a state license.

Georgia’s most populated state prisons

Prison	Prisoners*	Capacity	Location
Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison	2,864	2,487	Jackson
Wilcox State Prison	1,845	1,827	Abbeville
Macon State Prison	1,768	1,762	Oglethorpe
Dooly State Prison	1,715	1,702	Unadilla
Calhoun State Prison	1,664	1,677	Morgan
Coastal State Prison	1,583	1,836	Garden City
Johnson State Prison	1,580	1,612	Wrightsville
Washington State Prison	1,557	1,548	Davisboro
Rogers State Prison	1,455	1,391	Reidsville
Ware State Prison	1,437	1,546	Waycross
*Population as of July 1, 2024

Have questions, comments or tips? Contact Tammy Joyner on X @lvjoyner or at [email protected].