AUGUSTA TRANSITIONAL CENTER
Facility Information
- Current Population
- 228
- Active Lifers
- 20 (8.8% of population) · Aug 2026 GDC report
- Address
- 601 Taylor Street, Augusta, GA 30901
- Phone
- (706) 721-1650
- Fax
- (706) 721-1798
- County
- Richmond County
- Operator
- GDC (Georgia Dept. of Corrections)
Leadership & Accountability (as of 2025 records)
Officials currently holding positional authority at this facility, with deaths attributed to GPS-tracked records during their leadership tenure. Inclusion reflects role-based accountability, not legal findings of personal culpability. Death counts shown as facility / career.
| Role | Name | Since | Deaths this facility / career |
|---|---|---|---|
| CORRECTIONAL SUPERINTENDENT (facility lead) | Harrison, Eugenia Darlene | 2020-01-01 | — / — |
| DEPUTY WARDEN (facility deputy) | Mahoney, Tamikia Nicole | 2025-01-01 | — / 26 |
| Assistant Superintendent (facility deputy) | Cliett, Asia Deon | 2024-10-16 | — / — |
About
Augusta Transitional Center, a pre-release facility at Augusta State Medical Prison, houses 229 people. It operates within a GDC system plagued by understaffing, systemic food underfunding, crumbling infrastructure, and a DOJ-documented pattern of rampant sexual violence.
Mortality Statistics
1 deaths documented at this facility from 2020 to present.
Deaths by Year
- 2026: 0
- 2025: 0
- 2024: 1
- 2023: 0
- 2022: 0
- 2021: 0
- 2020: 0
County Public Health Department
Food service and sanitation at AUGUSTA TRANSITIONAL CENTER fall under the jurisdiction of the Richmond County Environmental Health Department. Incarcerated people cannot choose where they eat — public health inspectors carry an elevated responsibility to hold this kitchen to the same standards applied to any restaurant.
Contact
- Title
- EH Specialist
- Name
- Derek Buzhardt
- Address
-
1916 North Leg Road, Bldg K
Augusta, GA 30909 - Phone
- (706) 667-4234
- Derek.Buzhardt@dph.ga.gov
- Website
- Visit department website →
Why this matters
GPS has documented black mold on chow-hall ceilings, cold and contaminated trays, spoiled milk, and pest contamination at Georgia prisons. The Department of Justice's 2024 report confirmed deaths from dehydration and untreated diabetes tied to food and water deprivation. Advance-notice inspections let facilities stage temporary fixes that disappear once inspectors leave.
Unannounced inspections by the county health department are one of the few outside checks on kitchen conditions behind the fence.
How you can help
Write to the county inspector and request an unannounced inspection of the kitchen and food service operation at this facility. A short, respectful letter citing Georgia food-safety regulations is more powerful than you think — inspectors respond to public concern.
Sample Letter
This is the letter Georgia Prisoners' Speak mailed to all county environmental health inspectors responsible for GDC facilities. Feel free to adapt it.
August 5, 2026
RE: Request for Unannounced Public Health Inspection of Food Service Operations at AUGUSTA TRANSITIONAL CENTER
Dear Derek Buzhardt,
I am writing to respectfully request that your office conduct a thorough, unannounced inspection of food service and sanitation practices at AUGUSTA TRANSITIONAL CENTER, located in Richmond County.
Documented concerns
Georgia Prisoners' Speak, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit investigative newsroom, has published extensive investigative reporting on food safety and nutrition failures across Georgia's prison system, including:
- Dangerous sanitation conditions — black mold on chow hall ceilings and air vents, contaminated food trays, and spoiled milk served to inmates.
- Severe nutritional deficiency — roughly 60 cents per meal; inmates receive only 40% of required protein and less than one serving of vegetables per day.
- Preventable deaths — the U.S. Department of Justice's 2024 report confirmed deaths from dehydration, renal failure, and untreated diabetes following food and water deprivation.
- Staged compliance — advance-notice inspections allow facilities to stage temporary improvements, then revert once inspectors leave.
Firsthand testimony
In Surviving on Scraps: Ten Years of Prison Food in Georgia, a person who has spent more than ten years in GDC custody describes no functional dishwashing sanitation, chronic mold on food trays, and roaches found on the undersides of trays at intake facilities. Full account: gps.press/surviving-on-scraps-ten-years-of-prison-food-in-georgia.
Specific requests
- Conduct an unannounced inspection of the kitchen and food service operations at this facility, with particular attention to dishwashing equipment, tray sanitation procedures, and food storage conditions.
- Evaluate compliance with applicable Georgia food safety regulations, including O.C.G.A. § 26-2-370 and the Georgia Food Service Rules and Regulations (Chapter 511-6-1).
- Verify permit status and confirm whether the facility is subject to the same inspection schedule as other institutional food service establishments in the county.
- Make inspection results available to the public, as permitted under Georgia's Open Records Act (O.C.G.A. § 50-18-70).
Incarcerated individuals cannot advocate for their own health and safety in the way a restaurant patron can — they cannot choose to eat elsewhere. This places an elevated responsibility on public health officials to ensure these facilities meet the same sanitation standards applied to any food service establishment.
Thank you for your attention to this important public health matter.
Sincerely,
[Your name]
Food Safety Inspections
No inspection records are on file with the Georgia Department of Public Health for this facility. GPS has filed an open records request asking where these records are maintained.
What the score doesn't measure. DPH grades kitchen compliance on inspection day — food storage, temperatures, pest control. It does not grade whether today's trays are clean. GPS reporting has found broken dishwashers at most Georgia state prisons we've documented; trays go out wet, stacked, and visibly moldy — including at facilities with recent scores near 100.
Who inspects. Most Georgia state prisons sit in rural counties — often with fewer than 20,000 people, several with fewer than 10,000. The environmental health inspector lives in that community and often knows the kitchen staff personally. Rural inspection regimes don't have the structural independence you'd expect in a city-sized health department. Read the scores accordingly.
Read the investigation: “Dunked, Stacked and Served: Why Georgia Prison Trays Are Making People Sick”
Analysis written on August 2, 2026.
A Reentry-Focused Facility in a Broken System
Augusta Transitional Center is a county prison operated by the Georgia Department of Corrections, located within the Augusta State Medical Prison (ASMP) complex and designated as that facility's host. It holds 229 adult men, overseen by Warden Eugenia Harrison and Assistant Superintendent Asia Deon Cliett, who began her tenure in October 2024. Transitional centers are designed to house people nearing release, provide work-release programming, and support reentry. Yet as a GDC-operated facility, it is subject to the same structural failures that have drawn federal scrutiny and independent documentation across the state.
Staffing Collapse and Its Toll on a Pre-Release Environment
Georgia's correctional officer vacancy rate has run between 49.3 and 60 percent systemwide for years, far above the national standard of no more than 10 percent. At some facilities, such as Valdosta State Prison, the rate has reached 80 percent. Georgia ranks last in the nation for officer pay, and 82.7 percent of new hires leave within their first year. Former GDC sergeant Tyler Ryals, forced out in 2024 after whistleblowing, told GPS he had been the sole security officer on the 1,250-man maximum-security Telfair compound. The Department of Justice's October 2024 findings letter concluded that "the leadership of the Georgia Department of Corrections has lost control of its facilities," faulting GDC for understaffing rather than gang activity as the root of its violence crisis.
For a transitional center that relies on structured programming and workforce readiness, this staffing vacuum is especially corrosive. GPS has documented a pattern of classification drift across GDC, where medium-security facilities effectively operate as close-security prisons because there are not enough officers to maintain order, and GDC's own data show that validated gang members make up 31 percent of the incarcerated population—more than double the national average. While Augusta Transitional Center's small population may blunt the worst gang dynamics, the systemwide staffing emergency means that even a reentry facility cannot be insulated from the violent, under-controlled environment that the DOJ has described as a loss of institutional control.
Food, Sanitation, and the Undernourished Transition Home
GPS has documented that GDC spends approximately $1.69 per person per day on food—under 60 cents per meal—against an FDA Thrifty Food Plan benchmark of roughly $10 per day for an adult man's nutritionally adequate diet. The state has proposed cutting that figure to $1.60 in fiscal year 2027, even as it spends fourteen times more on medical care for incarcerated people than on their food. The Marshall Project corroborated these patterns in a May 2026 investigation, independently reporting rats in kitchens, insects in food, moldy trays, and visible malnutrition across Georgia facilities.
The nutritional neglect is compounded by systemic food-service sanitation failures. GPS's investigation "Dunked, Stacked, and Served" documented broken tray-sanitizing dishwashers left unrepaired for years, roach and rodent infestations inside kitchen equipment, and meals served on visibly contaminated trays. Crucially, high Department of Public Health inspection scores at GDC facilities have coexisted with these witness-documented failures, in part because scheduled inspections do not assess equipment under load and because professional overlap between inspectors and facility staff in small counties creates regulatory blind spots. A person nearing release from Augusta Transitional Center, if they eat from the same supply chain and kitchen infrastructure that serves ASMP, is exposed to the same documented food deficits and sanitation hazards that the Marshall Project found to be pervasive.
Infrastructure Decay Within the ASMP Complex
Most GDC facilities are between 30 and 40 years old and have been starved of maintenance for decades. GPS has documented systemwide failures that include broken cell-door locks—an audit at Hays State Prison in 2012 found roughly 42 percent non-functional, a condition confirmed again in 2024 by the state-hired Guidehouse assessment—alongside inoperative surveillance and fire-alarm systems, mold and water damage, broken kitchen sanitization equipment, and pest infestations. The DOJ's October 2024 findings and Commissioner Tyrone Oliver's public "end of life" statements regarding aging prisons all corroborate the pattern. Because Augusta Transitional Center is housed within the ASMP complex, the physical plant that supports its operations is part of this same aged and deferred-maintenance infrastructure. No facility-specific inspection data are available here, but as a GDC-operated building within a broader state prison campus, it is unlikely to have escaped the deterioration that GPS's reporting and independent state consultants have found across Georgia's correctional infrastructure.
A Systemwide Culture of Sexual Violence
Sexual violence in Georgia prisons is systemic. The DOJ's October 2024 findings described it as "rampant" and concluded that GDC does not reasonably protect incarcerated people—including LGBTI individuals—from sexual harm. In 2022, of 456 sexual-abuse allegations recorded by GDC, only 35 were substantiated, a 7.7 percent rate. A May 2022 review by GDC's own consultants, PREA Auditors of America, found that not one of the 388 PREA investigation files they examined met the law's standards. Georgia has never submitted a PREA certification of full compliance to the U.S. Department of Justice in the law's twenty-year history. The Ashley Diamond litigation established the constitutional baseline and directly led to the federal investigation that produced these damning findings.
While the most concentrated public evidence of staff sexual misconduct and resident-on-resident violence has emerged from facilities like Pulaski State Prison and Lee Arrendale State Prison, the DOJ's conclusions are systemic, not facility-isolated. A man serving his final months at a transitional center under GDC control remains in the custody of an agency that the federal government has determined fails to prevent or adequately investigate sexual assault. The staffing shortages that leave facilities unsupervised are, by DOJ's own account, the same dynamic that enables widespread sexual predation.
Conclusion
Augusta Transitional Center operates as a small pre-release hub within a system that the DOJ has found to have lost control, where deeply understaffed and underfunded conditions create cascading risks of violence, malnutrition, and neglect. The systemwide patterns documented by GPS, by federal investigators, and by independent news organizations do not stop at a facility's gate just because its mission is reentry.
Sources
This analysis draws on GPS's own systemic investigations into GDC infrastructure, food, staffing, and sanitation; the October 2024 findings letter of the U.S. Department of Justice; the 2024 Guidehouse assessment; reporting by The Marshall Project; and staff and inmate accounts collected through GPS's intelligence system. Additional context comes from Georgia Department of Corrections budgetary and personnel records, official GDC standard operating procedures, and the public litigation record.