When I began my sentence in Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC) prisons over 30 years ago, bunk beds shoved into single-occupancy cells were referred to as “temporary” beds. In the 2000s, the double bunks in those same cells started to become triple bunks. These were “temporary” beds, too.
Today, I’m housed in a 30-bed open dormitory. There are 90 of us in here.
Close quarters obviously have a lot to do with the soaring rates of murders and suicides here. More than 200 people in GDC custody have died so far in 2024. Cause of death for nearly half of them is unknown; at least 36 are being investigated as homicides. GDC Commissioner Tyrone Oliver recently stated that the solution to this is more single-occupancy cells.
Earlier in September, Oliver told a Georgia Senate committee that 50 percent of homicides GDC had investigated were “roommate on roommate” assaults. It seems it all comes back to the same contributing factors:
“Gang and criminal activity, contraband and/or cell phones—if you can stay out of those three categories, chances are you can remain safe,” Oliver explained. But if someone has to be moved to segregation, that often actually means a roommate. “They’re locked in there with someone else typically that’s violent because, again, we don’t have the bed space to house them in a single-man cell.”
“Some of them [killed their cellmate] just trying to get to a single-man cell, that was actually told to our investigators,” he continued. “He was talking on a contraband cell phone inside of his cell and he was whispering; I thought he was a snitch. Things of that nature.”
Unable to stop the flow of tens of thousands of contraband cell phones into GDC facilities, nor the resulting footage of things the public is not supposed to see being posted to social media every day, the state has wisely flipped the narrative so that, too, is now evidence of the dire need for more one-person cells. Because continuing to stack bunks into the ceiling is not the long-term plan; that’s not where the real money is. Nor is the real money in releasing those of us who are eligible for parole. The real money is in building new prisons.
“The single bunk thing …that’s the solution. Is it an expensive solution, yeah, but it’s something we should have been paying for all along.”
State Senator Randy Robertson (R), always receptive, told Oliver that there’s no reason GDC couldn’t be emulating a practice he knows of in Federal Bureau of Prisons facilities called “23 and 1.’”
“If you have an inmate that does not want to cooperate then he or she gets to live in their cell space for 23 hours a day. And then an hour a day they get some rack time. And that’s reasonable. Based on their behavior, not based on the behavior or the wishes of the Georgia Department of Corrections,” he said. “The single bunk thing that we’re going to continue to go back over and over, that’s the solution. Is it an expensive solution, yeah, but it’s something we should have been paying for all along. We’re dealing with a mistake that somebody made many years ago when it comes to prison construction and inmate management.”
In California prisons, triple bunks once “symbolized a system that was so crowded that it could not work effectively or efficiently.” In 2011, after the Supreme Court gave the California Department of Corrections two years to downsize its prisoner population by 25 percent, the state began housing people with “nonviolent” felony convictions in county jails rather than state prisons.
Why, you may ask, in all this state and federal interest in Georgia’s troubled prisons don’t you hear them suggest decarceration, of any kind? Because it is lucrative to let the crisis worsen.
Single-occupancy cells are the most expensive to build.
Give any of these bureaucrats a microphone and within a couple of minutes you’ll hear the line about how 75 percent of GDC prisoners are “violent,” and these old facilities are just not built to handle us. Taxpayers will not only accept increasingly bloated prison budgets, but actually demand them.
Single-occupancy cells are the most expensive to build. And construction of any facility associated with correctional-industry contractors represents billions of dollars that can be moved from state budgets into private pockets. Try to picture how much electrical wiring, lighting, surveillance systems etc. go into a prison. The re-enforcement wire in the concrete, the concert itself, the gravel underneath the prison—all that is locally sourced. The sources are contractors who will take those tax dollars and generously put some of them back into re-election campaign funds.
Triple bunks, contraband phones, roommates locked together in cells meant for one—these are symptoms of the Georgia prisons crisis, not the cause. The cause is too many prisoners and not enough corrections officers. Mathematically, solving this requires either bringing in more officers or letting out more prisoners, but so far they just keep stacking us on top of each other.
GDC has failed to sufficiently increase the number of people willing to work here, even with annual salaries bumped all the way up to $41,000. There are justifiable reasons for that, such as officers not wanting to get murdered in here any more than prisoners do. However, there are no justifiable reasons that the State Board of Pardons and Paroles has failed to sufficiently decrease the incarcerated population by releasing the thousands of parole-eligible people who could be home right now.
Stop the ex post facto application of sentence enhancement laws. Compel the members of the parole board to do what they’re supposed to do. Those who remain here can be warehoused one per cell and 30 per dorm, as designed. The temporary triple bunks that have been here for years can be removed.
Image (cropped) via California Office of the Attorney General
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