Georgia has agreed to pay the family of an inmate an undisclosed amount of money to settle a lawsuit blaming corrections officials for allowing him to be strangled and beaten to death.
The amount the state agreed to pay the family of Damion MacClain was not immediately known; state government was closed Tuesday for Veterans Day and attorneys for the family said they had agreed not to disclose that information.
MacClain’s death on Dec. 26, 2013, was one of three in five months at Hays State Prison that were becoming increasingly dangerous primarily because of faulty locks on cell doors. According to records, broken locks allowed inmates to leave their cells during the night and get to MacClain, who was in his bed.
In the suit, the Southern Center for Human Rights wrote that prison officials knew conditions at the northwest Georgia facility had deteriorated to a level that allowed stabbings, beatings, and assaults on inmates and officers.
“We can’t tolerate this level of violence and trauma in our state institutions,” said attorney Sarah Geraghty of the Southern Center for Human Rights, which brought the suit on behalf of the family.
Prison audits in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012 all reported cell door locks at Hays could easily be circumvented, allowed inmates to roam at will. Yet prison officials did not fix the locks or find a way to control the movements of the inmates at the high-security prison, according to the complaint.
Two other inmates were killed by other prisoners at Hays in the weeks before and after MacClain's death. A fourth inmate — 19-year-old Pippa Hall-Jackson — was stabbed to death by another inmate just moments after the two stepped off the bus that had transported them from Hays to the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison near Jackson on Feb. 5, 2013.
A week before MacClain was killed, Derrick Stubbs was found beaten to death in his cell. Nathaniel Reynolds was killed by other inmates at Hays on Jan. 18, 2013.
The families of Reynolds Hall-Jackson filed similar federal lawsuits in recent weeks, making the same allegations of rampant violence and chaos at Hays that MacClain’s family made in their complaint.
“Prison officials knew that 40 percent of the cell door locks at this maximum-security prison were broken, but no one fixed the problem until three people died,” Geraghty said.
Last July, the Southern Center asked the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate violence in state prisons but federal authorities have not responded to the request.
The Southern Center wrote in a letter to the Justice Department Georgia's prisons were "dangerously unsafe" for inmates, corrections officers and ultimately the public upon the release of offenders. Thousands of inmates are released annually; 21,000 of Georgia's 55,000 inmates were freed last year.
State offices were closed Tuesday for the holiday so no one could be reached for comment. But when the report was released last summer, a Department of Corrections spokeswoman said steps were being taken to “harden” high-security prisons statewide.
The Southern Center, which advocates for prisoner rights, has documented dozens of incidents since 2010, including the violence involving Hays State Prison inmates. Since 2010, a correctional officer and 33 inmates have been killed and more prisoners have been seriously injured. Gangs, the Southern Center said, operate freely inside cell blocks.
About the Author
