New Georgia legislative subcommittee to review prison safety in wake of fatal shooting
By Dave Williams
Low pay, understaffed shifts, and dangerous conditions: New data shows a worsening prison staffing shortage crisis . When Andrew Phillips took a job as a corrections officer at Georgia’s Smith State Prison in 2021, he was desperate for work. Shortly after he started, he noticed a problem. The prison housed about 1,500 men, and each shift was supposed to have 30 officers to guard them, but most days there were half that, according to Phillips. He said he and his colleagues often had to work 16-hour days, five days a week. “We just had no energy, we didn’t have the ability to care,” Phillips said. The mandatory overtime, combined with constant violence against both staff and incarcerated people, led officers to quit, he said, “The place was too brutal, too disgusting.” As prisons across the country continue to struggle with recruiting and retaining staff, The Marshall Project looks at how the most recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows the situation is particularly dire. In 2022, the number of people working for state prisons hit its lowest mark in over two decades. (Pictured above: Dade County Men’s Correctional Facility, FL, an understaffed prison in Florida) Meanwhile, state prison populations are rising. The number of people behind bars steadily declined starting in 2013 and then drastically dropped during the pandemic, when states released people to ease dangerous COVID-19 conditions, and court systems slowed. But by 2022, the number of people held in state prisons started to bounce back to over 1 million people. Some states argue they don’t need as many workers as they did, because they closed facilities or privatized services such as health care. And not all corrections staff work inside prisons; some state corrections departments include probation and parole, juvenile facilities or jails. Still, nearly every state saw a drop in the number of people working in corrections, at a time when prison populations in many places are rebounding.
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Georgia House Speaker Jon Burns Monday announced the creation of a special subcommittee to consider funding recommendations aimed at improving safety in the state’s prison system.
The panel will function as a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee.
The Georgia Department of Corrections hired a consultant last month to conduct an assessment of Georgia prisons.
Gov. Brian Kemp announced the hiring of Chicago-based Guidehouse Inc. a day after an inmate at Smith State Prison in Glennville shot and killed a food-service worker before turning the gun on himself. An investigation revealed the inmate had been involved in a “personal relationship” with the worker.
More than 3,500 assaults between inmates occurred in state prisons between 2021 and last year, according to state prison data, while 98 inmates were killed during that time.
“The General Assembly has placed significant emphasis on improving the safety, security and conditions of our state-operated corrections facilities,” Burns, R-Newington, said Monday.
“With Governor 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.”
The new subcommittee will be headed by Rep. Matt Hatchett, R-Dublin, who chairs the full House Appropriations Committee. The panel will include five Republicans and two Democrats.
