Three inmates were killed on Sunday at a Georgia prison in an eruption of violence that left at least a dozen people injured, local officials said.
Law enforcement officials said a large fight broke out in the early afternoon on Sunday at Washington State Prison, a medium-security facility with capacity for roughly 1,500 inmates in Davisboro, Ga., a small city about 135 miles southeast of Atlanta.
The circumstances of the episode, including a possible cause, remain unclear. Mark W. Hodges, a coroner in Washington County, confirmed on Monday that three inmates had been killed in the fight but did not specify how. At least one guard had been injured, officials said.
State corrections officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.
The burst of unrest underscores the chronic problems with violence, disorder and severe staffing shortages that Georgia officials have struggled to handle at prisons across the state.
Last year, Georgia directed hundreds of millions of dollars toward addressing the deteriorating conditions, which include a surge in deadly violence in recent years.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported in September that 42 deaths were being treated as homicides during the first half of 2025 — a rate that was outpacing the previous year, which had been one of the deadliest on record. In 2024, there were 66 suspected homicides.
An investigation by the Justice Department found conditions across facilities that were “horrific and inhumane,” federal officials said when the findings were released in 2024. The state, with roughly 50,000 incarcerated people, has one of the largest inmate populations in the country.
The investigation found that state prison officials had failed — particularly in medium-security facilities, like Washington State Prison — to protect inmates from widespread physical violence.
Critical understaffing and aging facilities contributed to the violence and an environment where gangs could exert considerable influence, controlling entire housing units and running illegal schemes inside and outside of prison, investigators found.
“People are assaulted, stabbed, raped and killed or left to languish inside facilities that are woefully understaffed,” Kristen Clarke, an assistant attorney general who oversaw the Justice Department’s civil rights division under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., said in a statement at the time. “Inmates are maimed and tortured, relegated to an existence of fear, filth and not so benign neglect.”
Last year, state lawmakers voted to infuse more than $600 million into the prison system, responding to a special request from Gov. Brian Kemp.
The money was earmarked for hiring hundreds of additional corrections officers and increasing pay for prison workers to make it more competitive; wages for guards and other workers had lagged behind other Southern states. The state also plans to use the funds for emergency repairs and improvements to the physical conditions inside its facilities.
Rick Rojas is the Atlanta bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of the South.
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