ATLANTA TRANSITIONAL CENTER

Last updated September 13, 2026.(DS)

Atlanta Transitional Center: A Reentry Mission Inside a Collapsing System

Atlanta Transitional Center (ATC) occupies two five-story buildings in Fulton County, with resident housing on three floors of each building in rooms that sleep from two to six. It is a close-security facility with a rated capacity of 257 that, per GPS's facility records, currently holds 273 men — 106.2 percent of capacity. Its dual mission, as GDC describes it, is to prepare adult male felons nearing the end of their incarceration to assume responsible citizenship, and to maintain an on-the-job training workforce of men with up to forty-two months left on their sentences who operate outside details for various state agencies at no cost to taxpayers. ATC is the host facility for the Metro Complex and runs nine OJT details at state agencies in custodial maintenance, food service, building maintenance, auto repair and maintenance, landscaping, and laundry services. Its programming roster includes counseling in family violence, reentry, job readiness, Matrix, Basics World of Work, Alcoholics Anonymous/Narcotics Anonymous, Motivation for Change, and Detour; vocational and on-the-job training in the same six trades; and religious offerings including various worship services, Bible study, and Muslim services and prayers. Torrenzo Brayboy has served as correctional superintendent since January 2021, with Pierre Fortune as correctional assistant superintendent since November 2023.

The public record of harm at ATC is thin, but it is not empty — and what it contains sits inside structural failures GPS has documented across the Georgia Department of Corrections.

A State Settlement and Two Deaths in Custody

The clearest documented harm at ATC is a 2019 incident that produced a State of Georgia liability payout of $10,000 to Jerry Sellers, recorded in the Georgia Department of Administrative Services Risk Management settlement ledger and obtained by GPS through open records. The settlement is court-verified in the narrow sense that the state paid it; the ledger itself does not describe the underlying incident, and GPS's records do not carry a narrative of what occurred.

GPS's mortality database, which begins January 1, 2020, records two deaths in custody at ATC since that date. Christopher Shane Green, 46, died on April 12, 2022, of an overdose. Joel Bennett, 44, died on March 22, 2023; his cause of death remains classified as unknown or pending. Both counts are floors rather than ceilings — GDC reports deaths roughly two months late, and GPS treats every mortality figure as a minimum. The facility's own death record is small in absolute terms, but it sits inside a system where GPS has independently tracked 1,894 deaths in GDC custody since 2020.

Staffing Collapse and the Loss of Institutional Control

ATC cannot be read in isolation from the structural failures GPS has documented systemwide. Officer vacancies in Georgia's prisons have run between 49.3 percent and 60 percent for multiple years, against a national standard of no more than 10 percent; at Valdosta State Prison the rate reached 80 percent by April 2024. The hiring pipeline cannot close the gap — an acceptance rate under 15 percent, with 82.7 percent of new hires leaving in their first year — and Georgia ranks last of 50 states for correctional-officer pay. The October 2024 Department of Justice findings letter concluded that "the leadership of the Georgia Department of Corrections has lost control of its facilities" and faulted GDC for placing "too much blame on gangs and insufficient emphasis on understaffing." Roughly 31 percent of the system's approximately 49,000 incarcerated people are validated members of 315 different security threat groups — more than double the national average — and both the DOJ and the Guidehouse 2024 consultant assessment independently concluded that gangs effectively run multiple facilities, controlling access to phones, showers, food, and bed assignments. Tyler Ryals, a former GDC sergeant forced out in 2024 after whistleblowing, told GPS he had personally been the only security person on the entire Telfair compound of roughly 1,250 maximum-security inmates.

That finding matters for a transitional center because ATC's model depends on supervision of men who leave the compound daily for state-agency work details. A facility whose population moves in and out of the walls on nine outside details is a facility whose safety margin is a function of staff presence — the exact resource the systemwide vacancy data says is not there.

Sexual Violence, Underfeeding, and the Conditions That Compound

The DOJ's October 2024 findings letter also concluded that sexual assault in GDC facilities is "rampant" and that the department does not reasonably protect incarcerated people, including LGBTI individuals, from sexual harm. Of 456 sexual-abuse allegations recorded in 2022, only 35 were substantiated — 7.7 percent. GDC's own consultants, PREA Auditors of America, reviewed 388 PREA investigation files in May 2022 and found that not one met the law's standards, and Georgia has never submitted a PREA certification of full compliance to the U.S. Department of Justice in the law's two-decade history. GPS treats this as the analytical center of any GDC violence or staff-misconduct narrative rather than as a set of facility-isolated incidents.

Conditions inside the facilities compound the risk. GPS has documented that most GDC facilities are 30 to 40-plus years old, with deferred maintenance producing systemwide infrastructure failures: broken cell-door locks (a 2012 Hays audit found roughly 42 percent non-functional, confirmed by Guidehouse in 2024), inoperative surveillance and fire-alarm systems, mold and water failures, broken kitchen sanitization equipment, and pest infestations — a pattern the DOJ's October 2024 findings, the Guidehouse 2024 assessment, and Commissioner Oliver's public "end of life" statements all corroborate. On food, GDC spends approximately $1.69 per person per day (2024) and has proposed $1.60 per day in FY27 — under 60 cents per meal — against the FDA Thrifty Food Plan estimate of roughly $10 per day for an adult man's nutritionally adequate diet, while the state spends approximately 14 times more on medical care for incarcerated people ($432 million) than on their food. The Marshall Project independently corroborated the pattern on May 16, 2026, reporting rats in kitchens, insects in food, moldy trays, and visible malnutrition across Georgia facilities, and quoting GPS connecting chronic underfeeding to the violence pattern the DOJ documented. GPS has separately documented a systemic pattern of food-service sanitation failure across GDC kitchens that Department of Public Health inspection scores systematically fail to capture — tray-sanitizing dishwashers broken for sustained periods, sustained roach and rodent infestation, and meals served on visibly contaminated trays — a gap GPS attributes to scheduled walkthrough inspections that do not assess equipment under load and to documented professional overlap between inspectors and facility staff in small-county settings.

Sources

This analysis draws on GPS's own investigative reporting and systemic findings on GDC staffing, violence, infrastructure, and food service; the Georgia Department of Administrative Services Risk Management settlement ledger obtained through open records; the October 2024 Department of Justice findings letter; the Guidehouse 2024 consultant assessment; The Marshall Project's May 2026 investigation of Georgia prison food; and GPS's mortality database and facility records.