On Tuesday, after a recent U.S. Department of Justice investigation into Georgia’s state prisons, U.S. Sens. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff are now urging state officials to “swiftly improve conditions in Georgia prisons,” which the DOJ deem “unconstitutional.”
The two Georgia senators also pushed for Georgia Department of Corrections Commissioner Tyrone Oliver to “address the deeply concerning findings in the DOJ’s report last month on Georgia’s state prison system.”
The report by DOJ determined that conditions in Georgia’s prisons “violate the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution” for a variety of reasons, according to officials, and found that “the state of Georgia engages in a pattern or practice of violating incarcerated persons’ constitutional rights.”
“We write to urge the state of Georgia and the Georgia Department of Corrections to promptly address the deeply concerning findings contained in the Department of Justice’s October 2024 report on its investigation of Georgia prisons,” the senators said in a letter to Oliver.
The letter goes on to say: “…DOJ’s Civil Rights Division published the findings from its investigation of Georgia prisons. Among its findings are that there is reason to believe the State of Georgia and GDC (1) fail to protect incarcerated people from violence and harm by other incarcerated people in violation of the Eighth Amendment, and (2) fail to protect incarcerated people from harm caused by sexual violence in violation of the Eighth Amendment. DOJ further found that the State and GDC are ‘deliberately indifferent’ to unsafe conditions in state prisons.”
According to the DOJ’s 93-page report, there were more than 1,400 reported incidents of violence, including fights, assaults, hostage incidents and homicides across 24 of Georgia’s prisons, including all close-security prisons and most of the medium-security prisons from January 2022 through April 2023, according to officials.
The DOJ also found that in 2022, there were 456 documented allegations of sexual abuse between incarcerated individuals, 35 of which were found to be substantiated.
