I'm hanging in there. I'm still kicking. In here, that's a good thing.
JACKSON, Ga. – They arrive by the busload each Tuesday and Thursday, dozens of new inmates entering Georgia’s prison system. Most stay only a week or two. But for those sentenced to die, this is their last stop.
The Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson, the state’s biggest, houses about 2,100 male inmates on a wooded, 900-acre campus about 50 miles south of Atlanta. A warden and three deputy wardens oversee more than 600 employees.
Most inmates stay just long enough to determine which of the state’s 31 prisons is the best fit. A couple hundred are processed in or out any given Tuesday or Thursday in a hectic scene as off-white buses with red accents pack the transfer yard.
“I’m always amazed that we always seem to put the right inmate on the right bus and he ends up at the right facility,” prison warden Bruce Chatman said as he led an Associated Press reporter and photographer behind the prison walls.