The Georgia State Prison at Reidsville was open from 1937 until 2022. The main building, seen above, was the work of the Atlanta architectural firm of Tucker & Howell in the Stripped Classical style and was completed in late 1936 but not occupied until 1937. It cost $1.5 million and was funded by the Public Works Administration, a New Deal agency. One wall of the structure features an idealistic frieze with sculptures of various men at work by famed sculptor Julian Harris entitled “Rehabilitation”. The prison was built at a time when Southern prisons and chain gangs were coming under serious criticism in the national press and by Congress for their poor conditions. Robert Elliott Burns’s bestselling book I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang!, published in 1932, put a particularly unwelcome focus on Georgia. The reforms that followed were an ongoing process, and were fully embraced by Governor Ellis Arnall in 1942. As the state’s crime rate grew rapidly along with the population, more structures were added. The Rogers State Prison is located near the closed Georgia State Prison, as is the prison cemetery.

According to Tattnall County: “The Georgia General Assembly passed a law on August 16, 1924 that abolished hanging for all capital crimes. From that point forward, instead of being hanged by the sheriff of the county or judicial circuit where their crimes had occurred, the condemned were to be electrocuted at the Georgia State Prison at Milledgeville. During that year an electric chair was installed in the prison, and the first execution in that method occurred on September 13, 1924.“

“On January 1, 1938 the execution chamber was relocated to the new Georgia State Prison at Reidsville. In the 1940s and 1950s, volunteers were offered $25 to flip the switches which would start the flow of electricity and eventually lead to the death of the prisoner. Executions were moved to the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison near Jackson, in Butts County, in June 1980. The state’s old electric chair can still be found in the museum on the upper floors of the main building, as well as prison documents containing names, authorizations and last statements of the prisoners.“

“Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was transferred from the DeKalb County Jail in Decatur, Georgia, to Georgia State Prison in Reidsville, Georgia. He was released on October 27, 1960 on a $2,000 bond [after intervention by John F. Kennedy]. GSP also housed radical activist H. Rap Brown, now known as Jamil Al-Amin. Al-Amin was the chairman of SNCC in the late 1960s. In 2007, he was transferred to a federal facility where he now resides. The facility also housed notorious Atlanta killer Wayne Williams.”

Georgia State Prison was also the site of the execution of Lena Barker, the only woman to face the death penalty in the state in the modern era. Baker was later exonerated.

The Longest Yard, a popular movie starring Burt Reynolds and Eddie Albert, was filmed at the prison.