BAINBRIDGE PROBATION SUBSTANCE ABUSE TREATMENT CENTER

Analysis written on August 2, 2026.

The Bainbridge Probation Substance Abuse Treatment Center in Decatur County is a nine-month residential substance abuse treatment program for high-risk, high-needs male probationers with a history of substance use. It is not a traditional security-level prison but a focused RSAT (Residential Substance Abuse Treatment) facility with a design capacity of 200. Warden Moses James oversees the center, with Assistant Superintendent LaChanda Roberts-Mackey (in that role from 2022 to 2025) and Chief of Security William Moses on staff.

Two Deaths, Causes Unknown

GPS’s mortality database, which tracks deaths in Georgia Department of Corrections custody from 2020 onward, records two deaths at the Bainbridge center. Milledge Robert Angel died in custody on August 6, 2023. Timothy Keith Gray died on December 6, 2024. In both cases, the cause of death remains listed as unknown. These two deaths are part of the 1,859 deaths GPS has documented across the GDC system since the start of 2020 — a toll that continues to grow as GDC reports fatalities months after they occur.

No facility-specific investigative reporting or legal filings have yet emerged to clarify the circumstances of these deaths. Among the media articles and records collected by GPS, none provide coverage of conditions or incidents at Bainbridge itself. The center’s two fatalities, while small in absolute number, sit within a correctional system whose lethality has drawn repeated federal scrutiny.

A System in Crisis: Staffing Collapse, Malnutrition, and Sexual Violence

The deaths at Bainbridge occurred against a backdrop of systemic failures so severe that the U.S. Department of Justice concluded in October 2024 that “the leadership of the Georgia Department of Corrections has lost control of its facilities.” That finding, and the conditions it described, now frames any assessment of a GDC-operated facility — including a treatment center.

Staffing. Officer vacancies have consistently run between 49% and 60% across the system, against a national standard of no more than 10%. Georgia ranks last in the country for correctional-officer pay, and roughly 83% of new hires leave within their first year. At some prisons, like Valdosta State Prison, the vacancy rate hit 80% in early 2024. Two GDC commanders who left the agency — Russell Zirkle and Tyler Ryals — have publicly described a department that systematically hides the depth of its staffing crisis. Ryals told GPS that he was at times the sole security officer on a compound holding roughly 1,250 maximum-security inmates. The DOJ’s findings letter explicitly faulted GDC for placing “too much blame on gangs and insufficient emphasis on understaffing.”

Food and sanitation. GDC spends about $1.69 per incarcerated person per day on food, according to state budget documents analyzed by GPS, and has proposed cutting the allocation to $1.60 in the coming fiscal year — under 60 cents per meal, against the FDA’s Thrifty Food Plan estimate of roughly $10 per day for a man’s nutritionally adequate diet. The Marshall Project independently corroborated a pattern of rats in kitchens, insects in food, and visible malnutrition at multiple Georgia facilities in May 2026. GPS has documented systemic kitchen-sanitation failures — broken tray-sanitizing dishwashers, roach and rodent infestations, and meals served on visibly contaminated trays — that are often hidden from scheduled health inspections.

Sexual violence. The DOJ’s 2024 letter described sexual assault as “rampant” across GDC, noting that of 456 sexual-abuse allegations recorded in 2022, only 35 were substantiated and that GDC’s own auditors found not a single PREA investigation met legal standards. Georgia has never submitted a PREA certification of full compliance in the law’s two-decade history. GPS has separately documented clusters of sexual violence and staff arrests at facilities like Lee Arrendale State Prison, and the DOJ cited at-knifepoint sexual assaults at Pulaski State Prison as emblematic of the department’s failure to protect incarcerated people.

Although these systemic failures have been most visibly documented at high-security prisons, they emanate from a department-wide governance collapse that touches every GDC facility — including a probation treatment center like Bainbridge. The two deaths recorded there, with their causes still unknown, occur within a system that has been proven unable to reliably feed, staff, or protect the people it holds.

Sources

This analysis draws on GPS’s own systemic findings, federal court records and the October 2024 DOJ findings letter, the 2024 Guidehouse assessment of GDC, state budget documents, GPS’s mortality database, and corroborating reporting by The Marshall Project. The on-record accounts of former GDC commanders Russell Zirkle and Tyler Ryals, plus GPS investigative coverage of staffing, food sanitation, and sexual violence, further inform the systemic context. No public-reporting sources have yet provided facility-specific coverage of conditions at the Bainbridge center.