(This article first appeared in Broad + Liberty)
Assaults in the Delaware County prison last year reached a new high of 278, making it the most violent county lock-up among the ten most populous counties, according to data self-reported by the counties and compiled by the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections. But a prison expert says the data is imperfect and should be viewed cautiously.
This latest batch of numbers shows that the county may still be struggling with management and staffing issues in the three years since the government took control of the prison after being privately run for nearly 30 years. It also seems to echo many complaints from front-line correctional officers in the wake of the management transition.
A notable achievement for the county was zero deaths in 2024 at the George W. Hill Correctional Facility, though assaults remain a concern.
The 278 assaults recorded in 2024 represent a 65 percent jump from 2021 — the final full year of private management — and a 28 percent increase over 2023.
But Noah Barth, the prison monitoring director for the Pennsylvania Prison Society, says he’s usually distrustful of the “extreme occurrence” data because it’s self-reported, and is vulnerable to wide swings in interpretation depending on the management and staff of a prison.
He pointed to several years of data when the prison was under GEO Group control to make his point.
“I also see that [GEO] reported zero inmate-on-inmate assaults from 2016 through 2019, which based on my experience interviewing people and staff members in jails all across the state seems highly unlikely to the point of probably impossible,” Barth said. “I think the chances of that are nearing zero. Now why those numbers are such, I have no idea. I couldn’t say for sure, but it does make me look at all of these numbers with a grain of salt.”
Barth noted that the Department of Corrections does not verify or audit the data — it merely collects and compiles what the counties submit.
“That does not mean it’s dishonest. There may be mistakes, there may be a sloppy data entry. I mean there could be any number of reasons, but all of those low numbers [from earlier] I think would give me extreme caution about trusting these as exactly what occurred.”
The county council and warden did not respond to a request for comment. Similarly, the GEO Group did not respond to a request for comment.
At a minimum, 2023 and 2024 are the prison’s own data with the government as the manager, which could suggest those numbers, even if self-reported, are reasonably standardized from one year to the next, and as such, could reveal directional trends.
And the data reflect complaints of many of the front-line staff in the wake of the government takeover.
In December 2022 — about nine months after the management transition — guards told the five-member county council of low morale and dangerous conditions.
“We are … in fear of our safety on this job,” Albert Johnson, a security guard, said at the time. “As of yesterday — two inmates stabbed. There have been more deaths in this prison since the county has come on. We are fearful for our lives with cells that do not lock, from inmates that come out when they want. We get feces, we get urine thrown on us on a daily basis.”
Johnson was part of a union that eventually approved a no-confidence vote against Warden Laura Williams, the county’s handpicked leader.
In January 2024 — about one year after the original complaints by Johnson — Broad + Liberty reported that correctional officers and their union were still complaining to the county council about low morale.
The current increase in reported assaults also comes as the county has been successfully lowering its daily population. In 2019, the prison had an average daily population of 1,772. That number is down thirty percent since the government management takeover.
Running counter to those ideas is the Pennsylvania Prison Society’s most recent walk-through of the facility which suggested a “decrease in reports of assaults by staff,” compared to previous years.
“About 40% of [GWHCF inmates] reported witnessing assault by a staff member, a decrease from our previous walkthrough in March 2024, when more than two-thirds of interviewees reported this,” the society’s report says. The society’s interviewers spoke with 48 inmates.
But as before, Barth said even the information in the report from the prison society has to be seen as a snapshot that may not capture the complete picture.
“This is not a representative sample,” Barth noted of the persons interviewed. “Interviews are conducted at random and so I don’t want to give the impression that this — just the same as the jail-reported data only gives you one piece of the picture, I don’t want to imply that our interviews are conclusive either.”
When adjusting for daily population — assaults per 100 inmates, based on average daily population* — the data shows Delaware has surpassed the Allegheny County Jail, a county prison with a long history of troubles.
It is impossible to compare these various prisons by staffing levels given that one of the first moves Delaware County made when retaking the management was to stop reporting staffing levels.
The prison’s recidivism rate remains largely unchanged, although that, too, was one of the driving motivations for the county’s decision to cut ties with private managers.
Data from previous meetings of the county’s jail oversight board show the recidivism rate usually fluctuated between 60-65 percent. That remains the case currently according to the last published minutes of the oversight board.
Through all of this, the prison’s budget has continued to climb as well.
Budget documents from November show the prison’s annual budget going from $53.4 million in 2023, up to $56.6 million in ‘24, finally up to $59.3 million in 2025.
(*Methodology note: Calculated as total annual assaults divided by average daily inmate population, multiplied by 100.)