The Atlanta Journal-Constitution for years has tracked homicides in state prisons by relying on the Georgia Department of Corrections’ monthly reports listing by date the names of prisoners at each GDC facility who died and the suspected manner of death. To confirm that information, the AJC would check those reports against official death certificate findings once they became available. That’s how the AJC was able to determine that state prisons last year saw a record-shattering 38 homicides.
Then, earlier this year, the GDC stopped providing its assessment of how prisoners were dying. Because death certificate findings are usually not available for months, that meant the public would be cut off from important insights into Georgia prisons.
So, with the GDC’s decision to withhold the information, the AJC looked for other public records that might reveal the homicides and shed light on the circumstances. Georgia prisons are required to fill out forms to report all major incidents, so reporters requested those reports for deaths. The GDC heavily redacted the reports, but they often provided some clues, such as weapons used or the number of inmates involved in a death. The reporters also requested the GDC’s incident report database. While the database doesn’t include prisoner names, it can show that some deaths were marked as murders, and the AJC matched those entries with names from the mortality reports.
In some cases, reporters also sought other records, such as arrest warrants for those charged in prisoner deaths. Reporters also contacted family members of the deceased, coroners and prosecutors.
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