The Department of Justice announced Tuesday. findings He said his review of prison conditions in Georgia was “inhumane” and violated the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.
“Our investigative report reveals the horrifying and inhumane conditions in which people are confined within Georgia's state prison system,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clark of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division said in a statement. said.
“Our statewide investigation has uncovered years of systemic violations stemming from complete indifference and disregard for the safety and security of the people Georgia holds in its prisons.”
Clark added that the department is “committed to using its powers to bring about humane conditions of confinement consistent with modern standards of decency and respect for fundamental human dignity.”
Georgia has the fourth-largest state prison population in the United States, according to the nearly 100-page report. reportthe state fails to protect people in medium- and maximum-security facilities from “exposing inmates to unreasonable risk of harm from widespread physical violence and sexual abuse throughout the facility.” It violates the rights of people who are incarcerated.
The report specifically notes the failure to protect lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex individuals from sexual violence and abuse.
According to the report, 142 people were murdered in the state's prisons from 2018 to 2023. According to the investigation, there were seven murders in prisons in 2018, 13 in 2019, and more than 20 each year since then.
In the first five months of this year, there were 18 confirmed or suspected homicides in state prisons, according to a Department of Justice report.
The national average homicide rate in state prisons in 2019 was 12 per 100,000 people, according to the report. The rate was more than double in Georgia's state prisons, at 34 per 100,000, according to the study.
The study also found that in nearly every interview conducted in Georgia's state prisons in 2022 and 2023 (16 of 17 total), incarcerated people “consistently reported witnessing life-threatening violence.” The report also found that weapons were “widely distributed.”
The Justice Department said it believes that “many violent incidents often go unreported when they occur in unsupervised apartment complexes and other areas with insufficient staff oversight.”
The Hill has reached out to the Georgia Department of Corrections for comment.
