BAINBRIDGE PROBATION SUBSTANCE ABUSE TREATMENT CENTER

Last updated October 4, 2026.(DS)

A Treatment Facility Inside a System in Crisis

Bainbridge Probation Substance Abuse Treatment Center is not a prison in the conventional sense. The facility, in Bainbridge, Decatur County, is a Residential Substance Abuse Treatment (RSAT) center — a nine-month residential program for high-risk, high-needs men on probation with histories of substance use. It holds up to 200 people and is classified as a treatment facility rather than a traditional security-level institution, with a stated focus on rehabilitation rather than punishment. Moses P. James has served as correctional superintendent since January 2025; Lachanda Shiree Roberts-MacKey has been the assistant superintendent since 2022.

That is the facility's public profile. What GPS's own records add is a mortality count: two men have died in custody at Bainbridge since 2020, and in both cases the state's records do not say why.

Two Deaths, Two Unknown Causes

GPS's mortality registry, built from state death records and GDC mortality reports, lists two deaths at the Bainbridge facility since January 1, 2020.

Milledge Robert Angel died August 6, 2023, at Bainbridge Probation Substance Abuse Treatment Center, at age 72. Timothy Keith Gray died December 6, 2024, at the same facility, at age 39. In both cases, the registry lists the cause as Unknown/Pending — meaning GPS does not yet know why either man died. GPS treats every such count as a floor: GDC reports deaths roughly two months late, so the registry lags the actual record.

The two deaths are a small number against a system that has seen 1,896 deaths in GDC custody since 2020. But they matter for what they say about a facility whose entire stated purpose is treatment. A 39-year-old and a 72-year-old died in a 200-bed drug-treatment program, and more than a year after the more recent death, the public record still carries no cause. That absence is itself the finding.

What the Systemwide Record Says About Facilities Like This One

Bainbridge does not appear in the major systemic findings GPS has documented about Georgia's prison system — the October 2024 Department of Justice findings letter, the 2024 Guidehouse assessment, or the staffing and violence reporting that followed. But the structural conditions those documents describe apply across the system, and a treatment facility is not exempt from them.

The most direct is staffing. GPS has documented officer vacancy rates between 49.3% and 60% systemwide for multiple years, against a national benchmark of no more than 10%; at Valdosta State Prison the rate reached 80% by April 2024. Georgia ranks last of 50 states for correctional-officer pay, fewer than 15% of applicants are accepted, and 82.7% of new hires leave within their first year. The DOJ's October 2024 findings letter concluded that GDC leadership "has lost control of its facilities" and faulted the Department 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.

The same findings letter concluded that sexual assault in GDC facilities is "rampant" and that the Department does not reasonably protect incarcerated people from sexual harm. Of 456 sexual-abuse allegations recorded in 2022, 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 in the law's two-decade history.

Infrastructure is the third thread. GPS has documented that most GDC facilities are 30 to 40-plus years old, with deferred maintenance producing broken cell-door locks, inoperative surveillance and fire-alarm systems, mold and water failures, and pest infestations — a pattern corroborated by the 2012 Hays audit, the 2024 Guidehouse assessment, and Commissioner Oliver's own public "end of life" statements about aging facilities. GPS treats infrastructure collapse as a force multiplier for the violence, classification, and mortality crises documented at the facility level.

Food, Sanitation, and the Limits of Inspection Scores

One systemwide pattern bears directly on a facility whose program is residential and whose residents eat every meal inside it. GDC spends approximately $1.69 per person per day on food, 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. The state spends roughly 14 times more on medical care for incarcerated people ($432 million) than on their food.

The Marshall Project corroborated the pattern on May 16, 2026, in Beth Schwartzapfel's investigation "Rats, Insects and Mold," independently 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 in October 2024.

GPS has separately documented a systemic pattern of food-service sanitation failure that DPH inspection scores systematically fail to capture: tray-sanitizing dishwashers broken for sustained periods, sustained roach and rodent infestation in kitchen and serving areas, and meals served on visibly contaminated trays. Inmate-maintenance worker accounts collected at Dooly State Prison describe thousands of roaches inside kitchen equipment; a Coastal State Prison resident's account corroborates the contaminated-tray pattern. The gap between high DPH scores and sustained witness reports of equipment failure is the analytical center of GPS's investigation "Dunked, Stacked, and Served" — and it is a gap that matters most at a facility where the entire program is residential and every meal is served on site.

What the Record Does Not Show

GPS's mortality registry is the facility's most concrete public record: two named men, Milledge Robert Angel and Timothy Keith Gray, both dead at a facility whose stated purpose is treatment, both with causes the registry still lists as Unknown/Pending. Until those causes are documented, that is what the public record holds.

Sources

This analysis draws on GPS's mortality registry, built from state death records and GDC mortality reports; GPS's systemic findings on staffing collapse, infrastructure failure, food-service sanitation, and sexual violence in GDC custody, which in turn rest on the October 2024 Department of Justice findings letter, the 2024 Guidehouse assessment, the 2012 Hays audit, and GDC's own PREA audit record; and reporting by The Marshall Project, including Beth Schwartzapfel's May 16, 2026 investigation "Rats, Insects and Mold." Facility profile details come from GPS's standing facility record and GDC personnel records.