Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke Delivers Remarks Announcing Findings that Conditions at Georgia Prisons Violate the Constitution

Remarks as Prepared for Delivery

Good afternoon. Joining me are Ryan Buchanan, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia; Peter Leary, U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Georgia; and Jill Steinberg, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Georgia. Our hearts go out to those here across Georgia and other parts of the country impacted by Hurricane Helene.

We are here to announce that the Justice Department has completed a comprehensive statewide investigation of conditions in Georgia’s state prisons. The findings report we issue today lays bare the horrific and inhumane conditions that people are confined to inside Georgia’s state prison system. We uncovered long-standing, systemic violations stemming from complete indifference and disregard to the safety and security of people Georgia holds in its prisons. People are assaulted stabbed, raped and killed, or left to languish inside facilities that are woefully understaffed.

Our report outlines two central findings. First, we found that Georgia fails to protect incarcerated people from extreme violence inside the 34 state prisons and four private prisons that house people at the medium- and close-security levels. By failing to adequately supervise the people it incarcerates, to control contraband in its prisons, to conduct adequate investigations into incidents that result in serious harm or to remedy unsafe and unsecure living conditions in its facilities, the state creates a chaotic and dangerous environment.

Second, we also found that Georgia’s failures create an unconstitutional risk of harm from sexual violence at these prisons, including sexual assaults and sexual abuse of people who identify as or are perceived to be lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or intersex (LGBTI).

The department’s work to protect the rights of incarcerated people is part of its mission to uphold the civil and constitutional rights of all people in the United States. That mission is also grounded in the pursuit of racial justice; we know that, across the country, Black people are disproportionately represented in the prison population. Georgia is no exception: 59% of people in Georgia’s prisons are Black, compared to 31% of the state’s population.

I’ll note that Georgia has the 4th largest prison population in the country. The findings we announce today cover approximately 50,000 incarcerated people in the State’s care and custody.

We have documented our findings in a public report, which we have shared with Georgia officials. Our report sets forth our conclusions and rationale and identifies remedial actions that must be taken now.

The constitutional violations are not isolated incidents but long-standing, systemic violations stemming from a culture of indifference to the safety and security of people Georgia holds in its prisons.

I want to highlight a few key aspects of today’s report. We found that the violence is pervasive and endemic.

From 2018 through 2023, the Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC) reported a total of 142 homicides in its prisons. And the numbers spiked during that period. There were 48 homicides between 2018 and 2020, and 94 between 2021 and 2023 — a 95.8% increase in those latter three years.

In 2019, the most recent year for which we have national data on homicides in prisons, the rate of death-by-homicide for incarcerated people in GDC’s custody was almost three times the national average. And since then, the sheer number of homicides in GDC have increased almost threefold.

In 2023, 35 people were killed in GDC facilities, compared to at least 18 in just the first five months of 2024. These are likely underestimates, as GDC does not accurately track or report homicides within its facilities.

Violence extends to the restrictive housing units, more commonly known as “segregation” or “segregated housing.” Even though GDC segregates people who are in danger, many of those housing units are themselves unsafe. For example, in April 2023, a man incarcerated at Smith State Prison was found dead in a cell in the segregated housing unit, possibly strangled by his cellmate. The coroner found that the body was badly decomposed; the man had likely been dead for over two days before he was discovered.

Gangs control multiple aspects of day-to-day life in the prisons we investigated, including access to phones, showers, food and bed assignments. We received credible allegations of beatings, coerced sex acts and extortion by gangs. We found that gangs exert pressure on staff, and that staff have themselves trafficked contraband.

We found many cases in which LGBTI people were targeted for violence or coerced sex. In correctional settings, LGBTI people are at an increased risk of victimization, sexual abuse and physical harm. But Georgia does not have practices in place to address these heightened risks. For example, in May 2022, a gay man reported that his cellmate had sexually assaulted him. The man said his cellmate belonged to a gang that had ordered the cellmate to get the man out of his cell because he was openly gay. The cellmate allegedly injured the man in the shoulder with a shank, tied him up and raped him. Even though the alleged attacker told investigators that he had sex with the victim and that the victim had been tied up, GDC investigators still found the claims unsubstantiated.

The failure to adequately investigate incidents of violence, along with the failure to take appropriate corrective actions when deficiencies led to violence, perpetuated and even increased the dangers. For example, in January 2023, a person incarcerated at Valdosta State Prison was treated at an outside hospital following an assault in which another incarcerated person attacked him with a 10-inch knife.

We left no stone unturned during this exhaustive investigation. We consulted with experts and visited prisons across the state, observed operations, toured housing units, interviewed prison staff at every level, reviewed thousands of pages of documents and spoke with hundreds of incarcerated people and their advocates, who shared their grim experiences inside these facilities. We also reviewed information from prison medical providers, county coroners and local prosecutors.

While Georgia claims to have taken steps to improve prison conditions, those steps have fallen woefully short.

In America, time in prison should not be a sentence to death, torture or rape. We can’t turn a blind eye to the wretched conditions and wanton violence unfolding in these institutions. The people incarcerated in jails and prisons are our neighbors, siblings, children, parents, family members and friends. The Constitution requires and public safety demands that our prisons provide safe living conditions for the people incarcerated in them – free from violence and the risk of serious harm.

The Justice Department is committed to using our authority to bring about humane conditions of confinement that are consistent with contemporary standards of decency and respect for basic human dignity.

We are doing the work in Georgia but across the country. Nationwide, the Justice Department is enforcing 18 settlements and has 15 open investigations concerning conditions in adult jails, prisons, and juvenile justice facilities. We are litigating the constitutionality of conditions in Alabama’s prisons for men. In 2023, we opened new investigations into county jails in South Carolina and Georgia, and this year, we opened new investigations into prisons in Tennessee and California as well as juvenile justice facilities across Kentucky. This year we also issued findings in our investigations of Mississippi prisons and the Texas juvenile justice system’s facilities.

I also want to recognize the hundreds of families, stakeholders and incarcerated people who provided us with valuable information and whose advocacy efforts predate this investigation.

We also extend our thanks to Georgia’s Office of the Attorney General for facilitating document productions from multiple agencies. And we thank GDC employees who helped us during our investigation. We look forward to working with officials to swiftly remedy these constitutional violations.

I will now turn it over to U.S. Attorney Buchanan.