AUGUSTA TRANSITIONAL CENTER

Last updated September 13, 2026.(DS)

Augusta Transitional Center is a close-security transitional facility for men in Augusta, Richmond County, operated by the Georgia Department of Corrections as a transitional center at the ASMP complex. GPS's facility record lists a population of 227, led by Correctional Superintendent Eugenia Darlene Harrison, who has held the post since January 2020, with Deputy Warden Tamikia Nicole Mahoney (since November 2023) and Assistant Superintendent Asia Deon Cliett (since October 2024). Transitional centers are the system's designated on-ramp back to the community — work release, reintegration programming, and a gradual return of autonomy. The public record for Augusta, and the accounts GPS has collected from families, describe something closer to the opposite: escapes, deaths, and a documented pattern of residents who cannot get to work, cannot get into programming, and are told that asking why will cost them their release date.

Escapes From a Facility Built on Supervised Release

The most publicly documented incidents at Augusta Transitional Center are escapes. GDC reported that James Moses Hardy walked away from the facility on June 8, 2020, and was arrested eight days later, on June 16. Less than two months later, on August 3, 2020, 40-year-old Christopher Craig escaped from the facility at around 5 p.m. Two escapes in a single summer from a transitional center — a facility type whose entire premise is that the people held there are near release and under reduced supervision — is a specific, local instance of the structural pressures GPS has documented across the Georgia Department of Corrections.

Officer vacancies in Georgia's prisons have run between 49.3% and 60% systemwide for multiple years, against a national standard of no more than 10%; at Valdosta State Prison the rate reached 80% by April 2024. The hiring pipeline cannot close the gap — acceptance runs under 15%, and 82.7% of new hires leave within their first year — and Georgia ranks last of 50 states for correctional-officer pay. The October 2024 DOJ 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." 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. GPS treats staffing collapse and gang assumption of facility control as an integrated structural finding — the thread that runs through the per-facility violence, classification, mortality, and infrastructure-failure narratives GPS has documented.

Three Deaths in Custody

GPS's mortality records, which begin January 1, 2020 and contain nothing earlier, show three deaths at Augusta Transitional Center — a count that is a floor, since GDC reports deaths roughly two months late. Two are classified Unknown/Pending and one as an Accident.

James Nicolas Waugh died at the facility on July 5, 2026, at age 30; his cause of death remains listed as Unknown/Pending. Aaron C. Thompkins died on July 21, 2024, at age 46, also with cause listed as Unknown/Pending. Kenneth Thomas Paige died on October 13, 2022, with cause classified as Accident; a death report was filed and remains pending review. These three deaths sit inside a system where GPS has independently tracked 1,890 deaths in GDC custody since 2020.

The wider context is not abstract. In January 2026, a gang-related disturbance at Washington State Prison, roughly 150 miles away, killed three men at the scene — Teddy Dewayne Jackson, 27; Ahmod Dewayne Hatcher, 23; and Jimmy Lee Trammell, 42, who was days from release — and a fourth, Silas Westbrook, 42, died of his injuries on January 17 after being released from the hospital. Dajhmere Hall, 30, had been found dead at Washington State Prison two days before the riot. Washington State Prison was placed on lockdown after the brawl and never reopened over the following five months, and twelve incarcerated people were charged with felony murder, aggravated assault, and gang participation in connection with the disturbance. Those events belong to Washington State Prison, not Augusta — but they are the system Augusta's residents are released into and returned to.

Work Release, Retaliation, and a Culture of Fear

The most consistent theme in the accounts GPS has collected from families of men at Augusta Transitional Center concerns work — the single function a transitional center exists to perform. Multiple families describe residents who were interviewed for jobs, told they were hired, and then blocked by facility staff from actually going to work. One family reports a resident who worked exactly one day across an eight-month stay. Others describe repeated threats of disciplinary write-ups each time a resident asked about employment, and a superintendent who, in these accounts, controlled who was permitted to work and who was not. GPS has received accounts of residents transferred back to prison — one family names Wilcox State Prison as the destination — in what the family characterizes as retaliation, including a case in which a resident's release date was reportedly pushed to 2028 after a transfer.

Families also describe a broader atmosphere of verbal abuse, intimidation, and harassment by the superintendent and, in some accounts, other staff, along with a widely shared expectation that reporting it will bring write-ups or a return to prison. GPS has received accounts of a fire drill at the facility during which residents were held in formation in a downpour and a security staff member used a bullhorn to warn them they would be written up for inciting a riot; one resident who raised concerns about the drill was, according to family accounts, transferred out in the middle of the night within hours. GPS has received accounts of contraband entering the facility through staff and through residents permitted to work outside, with residents bearing the disciplinary consequences; of inmate trust account funds disappearing; and of drug-testing procedures that families describe as altered or manipulated, including the alleged use of expired testing kits. Multiple families report that a formal complaint letter about facility leadership and a named individual was submitted for investigation, and that calls to the facility requesting a return call from the superintendent went unanswered.

These are family accounts, not adjudicated findings, and GPS presents them as such. But they converge on a single structural observation: at a facility whose stated purpose is reintegration, the accounts GPS has collected describe reintegration being withheld — and describe residents' attempts to ask about it being treated as misconduct. One family's account of the facility denying a resident access to reintegration classes, and another's description of residents left largely idle without structure or meaningful preparation for release, point at the same gap. The facility's own record offers no public programming inventory to weigh against those accounts.

Sources

This analysis draws on GDC public communications documenting the 2020 escapes of James Moses Hardy and Christopher Craig; GPS's own mortality database and facility records, including leadership and population data; family accounts and formal complaints collected by GPS staff; the October 2024 DOJ findings letter; the Guidehouse 2024 assessment; and GPS's published systemic findings on staffing collapse, infrastructure failure, food-service sanitation, and sexual violence across the Georgia Department of Corrections.