BAINBRIDGE PROBATION SUBSTANCE ABUSE TREATMENT CENTER

Last updated August 23, 2026.(DS)

A Treatment Facility Inside a System in Collapse

Bainbridge Probation Substance Abuse Treatment Center sits in Decatur County, in Georgia's southwest corner, operating as a Residential Substance Abuse Treatment (RSAT) center rather than a traditional security-level prison. The facility serves male probationers — high-risk, high-needs offenders with documented substance-use histories — through a nine-month residential treatment program. Its rated capacity is 200. Moses James serves as warden, with LaChanda Roberts-Mackey as assistant superintendent and William Moses as chief of security.

The facility's treatment mandate places it in a distinct category within the Georgia Department of Corrections: it is not classified by security level in the conventional sense, and its population consists of probationers rather than sentenced prisoners serving traditional terms. But the institution does not exist outside the GDC system, and the systemic conditions GPS has documented across that system — staffing collapse, infrastructure decay, food-service failures, and violence — form the context in which even a treatment-focused facility operates.

Two Deaths, Both Unexplained

GPS's mortality database records two deaths at Bainbridge Probation Substance Abuse Treatment Center since tracking began in January 2020. Milledge Robert Angel died in custody at the facility on August 6, 2023. Timothy Keith Gray died on December 6, 2024. For both men, the cause of death remains categorized as unknown or pending in GPS's records.

That classification is itself a finding. GPS's mortality tracking treats every count as a floor, not a ceiling — GDC reports deaths roughly two months late, and cause-of-death determinations can lag far behind. Two deaths at a 200-bed treatment facility for probationers may not register against the scale of Georgia's larger prisons, but the absence of any determined cause for either death leaves open questions that the public record has not answered.

The Systemwide Context: Staffing, Food, and Infrastructure

The treatment mission at Bainbridge does not insulate it from the structural failures GPS has documented across GDC. Officer vacancies systemwide have run between 49.3% and 60% 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 rates run under 15%, and 82.7% of new hires leave within their first year. 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." 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 an entire compound of roughly 1,250 maximum-security inmates at Telfair State Prison.

Food service presents a parallel failure. GDC spends approximately $1.69 per person per day on food — under 60 cents per meal — against the FDA Thrifty Food Plan estimate of roughly $10 per day for a nutritionally adequate adult male diet. The Marshall Project independently corroborated the pattern in May 2026, reporting rats in kitchens, insects in food, moldy trays, and visible malnutrition across Georgia facilities. GPS has documented tray-sanitizing dishwashers broken for sustained periods, roach and rodent infestation in kitchen and serving areas, and meals served on visibly contaminated trays — a pattern hidden from Department of Public Health inspection scores because inspections are scheduled walkthroughs that do not assess equipment under load.

Infrastructure failures compound these conditions. Most GDC facilities are 30 to 40-plus years old, with documented patterns of deferred maintenance producing broken cell-door locks, inoperative surveillance and fire-alarm systems, mold and water failures, and pest infestations. GPS treats infrastructure collapse as a force multiplier for the violence, classification, and mortality crises documented at the facility level.

Sexual Violence and the Broader Violence Pattern

The DOJ's October 2024 findings concluded that sexual assault in Georgia prisons is "rampant" and that GDC 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%. 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. Georgia has never submitted a PREA certification of full compliance to the U.S. Department of Justice in the law's two-decade history.

Specific clusters documented by GPS include at-knifepoint sexual assaults at Pulaski State Prison, a 2020 Smith State Prison case in which an incarcerated person was waterboarded and sexually assaulted by his cellmate, and at least four staff arrests for sexual assault since 2020 at Lee Arrendale State Prison, Georgia's largest women's facility. GPS has also documented three women strangled in Lee Arrendale's A Unit between 2022 and 2024 — Sherry Joyce, Hallie Reed, and Angela Anderson — a figure exceeding the entire BJS-recorded national women-in-state-prison homicide total across 2001–2019.

None of these incidents occurred at Bainbridge. But they establish the systemic baseline against which any GDC facility — including a treatment center — must be assessed. The Ashley Diamond litigation established the constitutional baseline and launched the DOJ investigation. The pattern is systemic, not facility-isolated.

What the Record Does Not Yet Show

GPS has recorded no deaths at Bainbridge Probation Substance Abuse Treatment Center with a determined cause. The facility's two in-custody deaths since 2020 remain unexplained in the public record. No aggregate signal buckets met the minimum three-source threshold for publication on this facility, meaning GPS's intelligence system has not yet surfaced a corroborated pattern of specific incident types at Bainbridge beyond the mortality records themselves.

That absence is not evidence that nothing has happened. It reflects the limits of what has been documented and corroborated to date. For a facility whose entire purpose is treatment and rehabilitation, the two unexplained deaths — and the systemic failures that surround every GDC institution — leave the treatment mission itself an open question.

Sources

This analysis draws on GPS's own systemic findings and mortality database, the October 2024 Department of Justice findings letter, the Guidehouse 2024 consultant assessment, and independent reporting by The Marshall Project. GPS's mortality records for Bainbridge Probation Substance Abuse Treatment Center document the deaths of Milledge Robert Angel and Timothy Keith Gray. Staffing and leadership information comes from GPS's personnel records.