Hays State Prison is in Trion, Ga.A quarter of a million dollars can buy a lot of things, but for Georgians trying to get to the bottom of the troubles surrounding Hays State Prison, $250,000 isn’t even enough to get the facts.
In recent months, the Trion, Ga., prison has been plagued with security failures, scandal and deaths. Since last December, four inmates have been murdered. Last year, three guards were violently attacked. One was stabbed 22 times. Another was beaten with a cane until his face was bloodied and battered.
A Georgia state audit indicated that some of the prison’s locks and the lighting system that signals to guards when a cell was unlocked had been broken for years, allowing prisoners to leave their cells. The broken locks, according to a former Hays officer, allowed at least one of the murders to occur.
While Clay Tatum, who served as the Hays State Prison warden at the time of the prisoners’ deaths, has been replaced, many questions remain.
The Southern Center for Human Rights, an Atlanta-based nonprofit, public interest organization, sought to answer some of those questions through the Georgia Open Records Act. By using the state’s freedom of information laws, the organization hoped to determine why the prisoner deaths occurred, how long the prison had ignored the malfunctioning locks and whether current inmates and guards are any safer.