Arrendale State Prison

Lee Arrendale State Prison is located in Alto, Georgia. It became exclusively a women's prison in early 2005. A number of the juvenile male inmates were kept there until mid-2005 when they were moved to other prisons in the state. The prison has four dormitories and a medical building. The officers at Arrendale are still transitioning from one of the most violent prisons in Georgia to a general purpose women's prison. Recently, in March 2006, the prison took in 350 women prisoners from Georgia's overflowing jail system.

In 2004, the prison housed 1200 adult male inmates, mostly under the age of 25, in addition to 11 juveniles between the ages of 13 and 16. 140 of the adult inmates between the ages of 17 and 20 were declared too vulnerable to be housed with the general population.

It has come under scrutiny for failing to ensure the safety of its youth inmates. One inmate was strangled to death in February 2004. At the prison, juvenile inmates are kept separate from the adult population, but attend education classes together.

As a result of the prison's troubles, the state of Georgia has decided to make Arrendale a mostly women's prison, to improve its status as the second most violent prison in the state.

Arrendale is also home to the United States' first all-female Fire Department, and the State's first inmate Fire Department, thanks to the Georgia Dept. of Corrections' (GDC) Fire Services Division. The GDC operates many fire departments throughout the state manned solely by (supervised by a P.O.S.T. certified GDC Employee also trained as a Firefighter) inmate firefighters, in order to provide sufficient protection to the largely rural communities that exist in the area of the prisons and the entire state in times of emergency. These inmates are carefully selected for this purpose and are trained and certified in accordance with the standards set forth by Georgia law and the Georgia Firefighter Standards and Training Council, as with any regular Fire Department. In 2007 they responded to the wildfires in South Georgia, in addition to the hundreds of other alarms they received statewide.

Notable inmates

*Lynn Turner, Julia Lynn Turner aka "The Anti-freeze killer" killed her police officer husband Glenn Turner and six years later her fireman boyfriend Randy Thompson in 2001 both poisoning them with anti-freeze in their food. Her goal was to collect both their life insurance money. In 2004 she was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of her husband Glenn. In 2007 she was sentenced to another life sentence but without parole for Randy's murder.