by Ross Williams, Georgia Recorder, [This article first appeared in the Georgia Recorder, republished with permission]

December 17, 2024

The Senate Supporting Safety and Welfare of All Individuals in Department of Corrections Facilities Study Committee approved a list of recommendations last week they intend to help improve conditions for people inside Georgia’s prison walls. Recommendations can be formed into legislation that the state Legislature can move forward once lawmakers reconvene in January.

The committee’s approved recommendations include increasing mental health services for incarcerated people and staff, implementing a pay study for corrections employees and advocating for the federal government to allow cellphone and drone jamming technology.

The committee also shot down several other proposals, including creating an oversight body to monitor jails, providing new de-escalation training for guards and strengthening reintegration programming, all of which committee Chair Randy Robertson characterized as redundant.

A recent U.S. Justice Department report found conditions within Georgia prisons are so bad that they violate constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment, and incarcerated people and their loved ones complain of constant violence, unhealthy conditions, sexual assault and intimidation tactics from guards and gang members alike.

“Prisons are being failed at every level,” said Tiffany Johnson, an advocate for incarcerated Georgians, at a recent meeting of a state Senate committee tasked with improving prison safety. “Basic human needs are unmet. Safety is non-existent, and access to care is severely lacking. The DOJ report also emphasized the lack of oversight, access to care, and accountability within the system, which perpetuates these abuses. For many incarcerated individuals, life behind bars is not just about serving their sentence. It becomes a daily fight for survival.”

Several formerly incarcerated people and loved ones of people still in prison told the Recorder they don’t believe the recommendations will solve the problems inside Georgia’s jails and prisons.

“I think personally that they don’t go far enough,” said Alan Wiggington, who was formerly incarcerated. “I don’t think that they are anything that is more than just kind of a high-level view of things. One of the things I read in the Justice Department report from the Civil Rights investigation is I think most of the recommendations all start with ‘follow your own policy.’”

Wiggington was formerly the chief magistrate judge in Pickens County, but he went to jail after pleading guilty to financial crimes.

“Some of the things that they’re asking them to do are simply to follow policy or to strengthen policy,” he said. “As a former inmate, I can tell you that policy doesn’t mean anything because either A, they don’t understand it or B, they don’t follow it.”

Wiggington said his advice for the Senate panel would include reducing the population by reducing sentences for first-time and non-violent offenders and following their official offender-staff communication policy to allow issues to be solved before they become too serious.

“I think the job of a prison warden is equivalent to the job of a firefighter,” he said. “They simply seem to be fighting fires all the time. If they took some recommendations on creating a culture of inmates that was more amenable and listen to what the inmates were saying and kind of follow through with that, I think that they would probably come out with a better product to protect Georgians.”

Others, like Della Newsome of Augusta, said they see no solution short of calling in the National Guard to run Georgia’s detention centers.

Newsome and other family members of Joshua Mark Holliday showed up at the state Capitol wearing shirts with Holliday’s face on them more than an hour and a half before the committee gaveled in in the hopes of signing up to speak on his behalf.

Holliday was sentenced in September on charges including reckless driving, attempting to flee law enforcement and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. In October, Newsome received a call that her fiancé had died from suicide. Family members say they do not believe his death was a suicide, but Newsome said getting any answers from investigators has been impossible.

“I’ve called the ombudsman. I’ve called everybody that I can find a phone number to,” she said. “And everybody keeps telling me that they don’t know. They’re holding on to his belongings because their investigation is not complete. They say there’s such a bad backlog on autopsies that his autopsy results won’t be back in six to nine months. That’s six to nine months that you’re going to possibly lose the Bible that he was studying and the things that mean the most to us.”

Heather Hunt is a mother whose son died in September while inside Rogers State Prison in Reidsville. She also said she faced hurdles in getting answers from the Department of Corrections and believes his death was not a suicide after a second autopsy was performed.

After the committee had discussed recommendations but before it took a vote, Republican Sen. Timothy Bearden of Carrollton suggested recommending that the Georgia Bureau of Investigations be brought in to investigate all deaths within Georgia prisons.

The GBI now performs autopsies for deaths in custody, but investigations are most often left up to GDC internal investigations, unless the death involves an officer or corrections officials request the agency’s involvement.

Bearden’s suggestion didn’t make it into the list of recommendations, but Robertson indicated he may be open to the idea.

“That would be Commissioner Oliver’s decision to do that, and I would trust, hope, that he would look at each case individually and make that decision,” Robertson said. “I’m not far from you on that, I agree, because I think one thing that does is it takes the suspicion out of the mix, and the conspiracy theories tend to go away when that happens.”

Speaking to the Recorder during a recess, GDC Commissioner Tyrone Oliver said he wouldn’t be amenable to that recommendation becoming law.

Oliver said his department’s investigators go through the same training as GBI investigators.

“I don’t think that’s gonna change anything,” he said. “I think what we’ve got to do a better job of doing is just making sure that we communicate better with the family members to ensure that they have the answers that they need,” he said. “But the exact same things that happen in the community when it comes to death investigations happen inside the prison system. I don’t think relinquishing that responsibility to the GBI is going to change anything.”

But Oliver’s words will likely do little to satisfy families of incarcerated Georgians, and state and federal officials have openly questioned the department’s commitment to truth and transparency.

In April, a federal judge held corrections officials in contempt in a case dealing with prison conditions, citing “longstanding and flagrant violations” of court orders to improve conditions, saying that defendants, including Oliver, were “figuratively thumbing their noses” at the court.

And the DOJ report accused the department of slow-rolling the production of documents for the investigation, which they said made “the process of obtaining records and information from GDC … unnecessarily contentious and lengthy.”

Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor John McCosh for questions: info@georgiarecorder.com.